Not Dead Enough

20

Sophie’s ciabatta sat on her desk, going cold and making its paper wrapper soggy. She had no appetite. The copy of Harpers & Queen lay on her desk unopened.

She liked to ogle the dreamy clothes on the almost insanely beautiful models, the pictures of stunning resorts she sometimes dreamed that Brian might whisk her off to, and she loved to trawl through the diary photographs of the rich and famous, some of whom she recognized from film premieres she had attended for her company, or from a distance when she had walked along the Croisette or crashed parties at the Cannes Film Festival. It was a lifestyle so far from her own modest, rural upbringing.

She had never particularly sought glamour when she came to London to do a secretarial course – and she certainly had not found it when she’d got her first job with a firm of bailiffs, carrying out work seizing goods from the homes of people who had run into debt. She found the company cruel and much of its work heartbreaking. When she had decided to make a change, and began trawling the ads in the Evening Standard newspaper, she had never imagined that she would land up in quite such a different world as she was in now.

But at this moment her world had, suddenly, gone completely out of kilter. She was trying to get her head around the totally bizarre conversation she had just had with Brian on her mobile a short while ago, outside the café, when he’d told her his wife was dead and had denied that he had come over to her last night – or rather, early this morning – and made love to her.

The office phone rang.

‘Blinding Light Productions,’ she answered, half hoping it was Brian, her voice devoid of its usual enthusiasm.

But it was someone wanting to speak to the Head of Business and Legal Affairs, Adam Davies. She put them through. Then she returned to her thoughts.

OK, Brian was strange. In the six months since she had met him, when they had sat next to each other at a conference on tax incentives for investors in film financing, which she had been asked to attend by her bosses, she still felt she only knew just a very small part of him. He was an intensely private person and she found it hard to get him to talk about himself. She didn’t really understand what he did, or, more importantly, what it was he wanted from life – and from her.

He was kind and generous, and great company. And, she had only very recently discovered, the most amazing lover! Yet there was a part of him that he kept in a compartment from which she was excluded.

A part of him that could deny, absolutely, that he had come to her flat in the early hours of today.

She was desperate to know what had happened to his wife. The poor, darling man must be distraught. Deranged with grief. Denial. Was the answer as simple as that?

She wanted to hold him, to comfort him, to let him pour it all out to her. In her mind a plan was forming. It was vague – she was so shaken up she could not think it through properly – but it was better than just sitting here, not knowing, helpless.

Both the owners of the company, Tony Watts and James Samson, were away on their summer holidays. The office was quiet, no one would be that bothered if she left early today. At three o’clock she told Cristian and Adam that she wasn’t feeling that good, and they both suggested she went home.

Thanking them, she left the building, took the tube to Victoria, and made straight for the platform for Brighton.

As she boarded the train and settled into a seat in the stiflingly hot compartment, she was unaware of the shell-suited man, in the hoodie and dark glasses, who was entering the carriage directly behind hers. He gripped the red plastic bag containing his purchase from the Private Shop, and was quietly mouthing to himself the words of an old Louis Armstrong song, ‘We Have All the Time in the World’, which were being fed into his ears by his iPod.