"Murder Club" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pearson Mark)

2

EARLIER

THE WOMAN PULLED her coat around her and folded her arms.

She looked up at the monitor and again at her watch. It was ten o’clock. The sound of the train still rattled in the tunnel ahead. Normally she would have caught an earlier train. But the blind date she had met at Kettner’s of Soho had ordered a bottle of Veuve Clicquot for them both after they had had a glass of unoaked Chardonnay, and it seemed rude to hurry it. It was Christmas after all. The season to be jolly and he had been easy company. She hadn’t been on a date with a man since she had split up with her fiancé, some six months earlier.

She had returned from a business trip to Paris to discover her lover in bed with her best friend. It was hardly an original situation, but certainly never one she had had to deal with before. She was used to getting the man she chose, and, when things ended, she was the one ending it. True, she had done so with her fiancé but it wasn’t quite the same thing. To come home and find him with her chief bridesmaid in her own bed was more than just a slap to her face; it was a complete blow to her self-esteem. She was a beautiful, confident, intelligent woman and she knew it. She attracted men as naturally as a magnet attracted iron filings, but all that had changed. At least her self-confidence had, or her tolerance for men. For sure they still approached her but they were met with a frosty reception. Worst of all she realised she hadn’t really loved her fiancé in the first place. She had decided to marry him for all the wrong reasons, and realising that had made her doubt herself and her judgement even more.

But six months was long enough. Her female friends had been very supportive at first, but had now — almost as one — decided that it was time for her to get back in the dating game, as the Americans called it. She had looked at singles sites, even went on a speed-dating evening once, but that was a disaster and she had walked out on it after the second ‘date’.

That was a month ago but, undaunted, her married and partnered friends had been relentless. For her own good, they called it, putting candidate after candidate before her. A brother, a husband’s best friend, a really ‘nice guy’ from work, an ex-lover! In the end she had given in under the tsunami of pressure from them and agreed to meet the guy tonight. His name was John Smith. He was dressed in a dark two-piece suit with a white shirt and a blue tie. He might have been dressed for an interview. Maybe he had been. She smiled at the thought. John Smith looked like a salesman in the suit, but was in fact an opera singer. Only background character and chorus, he modestly pointed out. He was thirty-eight years old, had been divorced for four years (an amicable split apparently), was five foot eleven inches tall with sandy blond hair and really blue eyes. He reminded her of the younger Robert Redford maybe, or Heath Ledger. But if he was aware of his good looks, he certainly wasn’t arrogant with it, as a lot of men were.

‘You remind me of someone …’ she had said.

‘Do I?’

‘Yes, can’t put my finger on it. You probably get that a lot, do you?’

He had smiled. ‘As long as it’s not Brad Pitt.’

She had laughed, genuinely. The first time in a long while a man had made her do that.

‘No. You’re all right. It’s not him.’

The conversation had flowed pretty smoothly after that. He was an entertainer, she knew, probably trained in breaking the ice. But there seemed nothing disingenuous in the way he held her gaze when talking, and his flirtatious comments were flattering and on the right side of fun. He didn’t take himself too seriously and she liked that in a man. Her ex-fiancé, come to think of it, had been a bit of a stuffed shirt. In fact the more she did think about it, the more she realised how little there was that she really liked about the man.

So when her date had offered champagne, not only did it seem churlish to refuse, but it seemed somehow appropriate that a bottle of the Widow Ponsardin’s finest drop, Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame at £175 a pop, should signal the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. A baptism in wine: out with the old, in with the new. And the thing was, John wasn’t being flash in ordering it, showing off. He had explained that he had just finished a good run with a show in the West End. Judging by his clothes, she reckoned it was not an uncommon occurrence. He explained that in truth he only did the singing part-time, couldn’t afford to go full-time. When he was resting he did freelance sales work and that paid pretty well.

Stephanie had laughed, telling him that she had pegged him for it when she first saw him. She wasn’t surprised he was good at his job: he had something about him — charisma, she supposed, or empathy; either way, he was certainly comfortable to talk with. To trust. She guessed that went with his job too, but suspected it was something innate rather than a learned skill. God knows she had been sold to (or they had attempted to) by enough salesmen and women to appreciate the difference. She reckoned John should be getting lead parts, and he had confessed that his telephone voice was better than his singing!

She looked up at the monitor again: four minutes to go. She had made a decision. John had said he would call her in a couple of days and, when he did, she would agree to see him again. She smiled to herself and felt the warmth of it spread through her body. And it wasn’t just the champagne working.

Two minutes to go. Not only had she stayed later than she planned at Kettner’s, but the automatic ticket gates hadn’t been working at Piccadilly, wouldn’t recognise her Oyster card, and she had had to wait for a guard to let her through.

She’d arrived on the platform just as the doors of her train closed and it had started to move away. She hated missing her train. Another eight minutes to the next one. She’d have to run to make the connection at Marylebone to catch the fast overland. If she missed it, it was another half-hour wait.

She shivered and turned around, suddenly getting the feeling she was being watched. There were a few other people on the platform: a group of young women in their twenties, giggling and dressed more for summer than winter! A girls’ night out, by the look of it, and quite a drunken one. An office party or a hen-night. An older man further along the platform was pretending to read a poster on the wall, but she could see he kept flicking sideways glances at the group of laughing women. He caught her eye and looked away. More people piled onto the platform and a short while later the train arrived.

At Marylebone she ran as fast as she could; she wasn’t exactly wearing high-heeled shoes, but she wasn’t wearing flats either. People with the same idea flew past her, men mainly, who weren’t hampered by their footwear.

She hurried up the stairs leading from the Underground, up and onto the concourse, and then ran up to the barrier connecting to the overland Chiltern Railways; she had to run up almost one entire platform and then sideways to another platform — the train was still there, and she made it inside with seconds to spare.

She smiled apologetically to the man sitting opposite her as she drew in deep breaths and ran her hand across her forehead. He nodded almost dismissively and returned to the crossword he was studying. She looked at the paper, the Saturday Telegraph, and raised an eyebrow; he’d had long enough to complete it.

She looked at her reflection in the mirrored effect of the windows and smiled. She did look flushed, but happily flushed. She was pleased with what she saw. Today drew a line under everything. Today was going to change things. And so it would.

Just not in the way she imagined it.

Not in her worst nightmares.