Where Memories Lie

CHAPTER 2

First they came for the Jews.

—Attributed to German anti-Nazi activist and former U-boat captain Pastor Martin Niemöller

May 1952, Chelsea

He knew the peculiarities of the latch so well that even with his coordination slightly impaired, he could ease the key round and swing the door open without a whisper of sound. Not that his delicate entry did him any good, because there was no way he could prevent the click as the lock snicked closed behind him.

“Gavin? Is that you?” called Linda from the kitchen. His wife had ears like a bat.

Of course it bloody was, he thought, unless it was a burglar with a key, but he merely sighed and said, “Sorry I’m late. Had some things to wind up.”

“You and the rest of the station.” Linda came into the hall, wiping her hands on her pink-flowered pinny, her nose wrinkling in the way that meant she could pick up the scent of beer or tobacco from twenty feet. Bloodhound, maybe, not bat, he mused, and his mouth must have twitched involuntarily because she said, “What’s so funny? You’ve been down the pub with your mates, and your dinner’s burned again.”

He caught the sickly sweet smell of charred shepherd’s pie, and felt his stomach give an uneasy flip-flop. “I ate something at the station—” he began, and saw her lips compress into the thin line that meant she was going to tell him he’d wasted his ration of mince.

“I know,” he interrupted, “the children could have had it.” He noticed, then, that the flat was quiet except for the faint mutter of the wireless that Linda kept in the kitchen for company. The children must be out. His instant’s relief was followed by a flush of shame.

In the course of his job, he visited homes where children clustered round their parents, hugging their legs and clamoring for attention, but he couldn’t remember his ever behaving that way, and the older they got, the less he seemed to have to say to them, or they to him.

Stuart was twelve, conceived in the first flush of his courtship with Linda, when the threat of war lent an urgency to lovemaking that had long since vanished. Susan was a product of a brief leave from the front two years later, procreation fueled this time by a desperate need to leave something of himself behind if he did not come back.

But he had survived, and if the truth be told, he found his children a disappointment. The son he had imagined as his companion, the boy he would teach to play football and take for long afternoons of idling along the Thames, was thin and serious, his nose always in a book, and didn’t seem to know the difference between rugger and cricket.

And Susan, the princess he had longed to hold and tickle, was a solid, stodgy girl who giggled like a hyena with her girlfriends but only gave him a blank stare from her mother’s opaque brown eyes.

He felt the weight of it all then, so suddenly that his body sagged and he touched his shoulder to the wall for support. It had been a bad day—they’d followed up on a report of an unpleasant smell from a neighboring flat, and on forcing entry had found a man sitting in a chair in the dingy bed-sitter, looking quite relaxed except for the fact that his brains were splattered in an arc on the wall behind him, and his service revolver lay where it had fallen in his lap.

The neighbors, now thronging round with interest, told Gavin the man had been a decorated war hero, but had returned to find his family gone and no jobs available for a man partially crippled at D-Day. Since then the man, one Terence Billings, had kept himself to himself, getting by, they supposed, on his pension.

“What was it?” Gavin had asked his team when they’d finished their report and retired to the pub nearest the station, squeezing into the corner table with foaming pints. “What do you suppose was the final straw?”

“Probably couldn’t get fags at the corner shop,” said PC Will Collins, shaking his head.

“Maybe his cat died,” offered Gavin’s sergeant, John Rogers, only half in jest. All of them had seen the most trivial things push people over the edge into despair. And all of them had served on the front—all knew the man in the chair could just as easily have been them, and it was this bond, shared but unspoken, that kept them there, smoking and drinking too much beer, until long after they should have been home.

“What is it, Gav? Are you all right?” Linda’s voice hovered between censure and concern.

He thought of her as he’d first met her, how he’d loved her for her piss-and-vinegar pluck. He’d thought she could take on anything, but she hadn’t signed on to be a policeman’s wife, and it had brought her to this—a sharp-faced shadow of that long-ago girl.

And the children—was he the one at fault? Had he failed them all? And if so, what had he accomplished by it? He’d certainly done nothing to make life better for the man in the chair today, or others like him.

“Gav? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” His wife came to him and lifted her hand, brushing the backs of her fingers against his cheek.

The gesture was so unexpected, the gentleness of it so long forgotten, that he felt tears spring to his eyes. He closed his hand over hers. The pressure of his grip brought her body lightly against his, her weight delicate and warm. Swallowing, he whispered, “I’m sorry—I’ve made a mess of things—I—”

The clang of the phone made them jerk apart, like guilty teenagers. Their eyes met for a moment, then, unable to resist, he glanced towards the telephone. It sat like a black beast on the table at the end of the hall, pulsing with insistent sound.

“I suppose I should get that,” he said.

“You always do,” answered his wife, slipping her hand from his.

Gavin walked down Tite Street towards the river from the flat in Tedworth Square, angling into Royal Hospital Road, stopping for a moment as he reached the Embankment to glance west at the sparkling outline of the Albert Bridge framed against an orange-and-purple-streaked sky. A year ago the bridge had been draped with electric lights for the Festival of Britain, and the sight still made his breath catch in his throat. Airy and insubstantial, it added to the odd sense of disconnectedness he’d felt since leaving the flat.

He’d protested, of course, but the duty sergeant at Chelsea Station had insisted he was the nearest ranking CID officer available, and Gavin had sighed and acquiesced.

Now he wondered if he had left a part of himself behind, the self that might have stayed and caressed his wife. Had he seen a glimmer of understanding in her eyes as she watched him go? Or had he taken the wrong turning at an irrevocable fork?

Nonsense, that was; utter rubbish. He had a job to do. He shook himself and, turning away, headed east into the gathering darkness.

The constable, a dark-uniformed silhouette, was waiting near the gate that led into a heavily wooded garden at the end of Cheyne Walk. “Inspector Hoxley.”

Gavin recognized him as he spoke, a young constable named Simms, and the tightness in the man’s voice made the hair rise on Gavin’s neck. This was more than a wino sleeping it off in the park. “Anyone else here yet?” he asked.

“No, sir. I didn’t like to leave it—him—sir, but I was afraid you wouldn’t see me if I didn’t wait near the gates.”

“All right, then, Simms, let’s see what you’ve found.”

He followed the flickering light of Simms’s torch as the constable picked his way through the gate and along a gravel path that shone faintly. Around a curve, the outline of a bench loomed out of the dimness, and beneath that, another form, dark with a glint of white.

There was no mistaking the shape of a human body, or the awkwardness of death. “Hold the light, man,” said Gavin as the torch wavered. As he glanced back, the light bobbed upwards, and he saw that the constable looked dangerously corpselike himself.

Too young to have been in the war, Gavin reminded himself—this might even be the man’s first body. “If you’re going to be sick, get right away,” he cautioned, but his tone was gentle.

“No, sir, I’ll be all right.” Simms straightened and steadied the torch.

Pushing back his hat, Gavin thought that if this were the young man’s first death, he’d got off easy. More than likely one of the pensioners had sat on the bench for a smoke and a view of the river, and his heart had clapped out.

But as he looked more closely, he saw that the figure was not clothed in the traditional navy uniform of the Chelsea pensioner, but in a black suit. Frowning, he knelt, and the smell of blood hit him in a foul wave.

“Christ,” he muttered, swallowing, then barked at Simms, “Give me the torch.” He held it closer, the light illuminating a slender man, his body twisted so that his chest and face were turned upwards. One arm was flung out, as if he had reached for something—the bench, perhaps, to stop himself falling. His thick, wavy hair was streaked with gray, but his clean-shaven face took a few years from his age—he might, Gavin thought, have been in his late forties or early fifties. Where his dark coat fell open, great gouts of blood stained the white of his shirt.

“Any identification?” Gavin asked, glancing at Simms.

“No, sir. I just had a quick look in his pockets for a wallet, but there was nothing, not even coins.”

“You didn’t move him?”

“No, sir.” Simms sounded affronted. “I did find an old briefcase, a soft one, like a satchel, by the side of the bench, but there was nothing in that, either.”

“Odd,” Gavin said aloud, turning back to the corpse. An odd place for a robbery, and although the man’s clothes were of good quality, they were worn. The edges of his shirt collar had been darned with careful stitches.

What could this man of obviously reduced means have been carrying that was worth this sort of violence? And why would a common thief remove all traces of identification from his victim?

Then a glint at the man’s throat caught his eye and he held the torch nearer. It was a thin gold chain, half hidden by the neck of the white shirt. Taking his handkerchief from his pocket, Gavin carefully turned back the shirt collar. A small pendant, no bigger than his fingernail, lay against the white skin of the man’s exposed clavicle. He lifted it as delicately as he could with his handkerchief-shrouded fingers and the chain came free, broken near the clasp.

Gavin sat back on his heels, frowning as he studied the pendant.

“What is it, sir?” asked Simms, breathing heavily over Gavin’s shoulder. “Looks like a miniature dumbbell.”

“No.” Gavin’s thoughts went back to his childhood neighbors, the Kaplans, and the games of tag he and the Kaplan boys had played on fine days, racing in and out of the front door. He held the object up, so that it spun and glittered in the torchlight.

“If I’m not mistaken, it’s a mezuzah, a Jewish symbol of protection.”

Even over the hum of conversation at the table, Kincaid heard the slight rise of alarm in Gemma’s voice. Excusing himself with a smile at the other guests and a quick look at Cullen, who gave him a small nod, he slipped from his chair and threaded his way round the table and into the kitchen.

“We’re in the midst of a dinner party, but I could come in the morning,” he overheard as he came in. When he raised a brow in question, she covered the phone with her hand. “It’s Erika. She says there’s something she needs to talk to me about. But I—” She looked back at the dining room and shrugged.

Kincaid was surprised. He couldn’t imagine the independent and elegantly mannered Erika Rosenthal calling so late with such a request unless something was wrong.

“Go,” he said. “You’ve pulled the party off with flying colors, and things are winding down.” He gestured towards the guests assembled in the dining room. “We’ll tell them your friend’s ill. And you’ll get out of the washing-up.”

“Lucky you.” Gemma shot him a quick smile, then uncovered the phone. “Erika, I’ll be there in a quarter of an hour.”

The rain had stopped sometime during dinner, leaving the air fresh and cool. Realizing her head was a bit fuzzy from the wine she’d drunk, Gemma decided to walk the short distance to Arundel Gardens. It would give her a chance to clear out the high-energy chatter of the dinner party.

Just as a precaution, she took a brolly from the stand in the hall, and as she walked she swung it, tapping the end on the pavement. The leafy avenue of Lansdowne Road soon gave way to the terraces of Arundel Gardens, and light shone like a beacon from the lower windows of Erika’s house.

It occurred to Gemma that she had never been to Erika’s house in the evening, always for lunch or tea. She had always assumed Erika was early to bed and early to rise. She glanced at her watch as she rang the bell; it was half eleven.

Erika came quickly, however, and grasped Gemma’s hands in an unexpectedly physical gesture. As she led Gemma into the sitting room, she said, “I shouldn’t have got you out so late. You’ll think I’m taking advantage of our friendship.”

Gemma looked round with the pleasure she always felt. She had loved this room since the first time she had seen it, when, as a newly promoted inspector posted to Notting Hill, she had personally taken a burglary call, just to get the feel of the streets again. She had found Dr. Erika Rosenthal, a delicate white-haired woman with a fierce sparkle to her dark eyes, fuming over the theft of her television and some trinkets. It had been the invasion that had upset her more than the loss, and Gemma, worried about the older woman’s vulnerability on her own, had suggested she improve her security. She had known that the recovery of the woman’s possessions was highly unlikely.

She had stayed to chat a bit, she remembered, admiring the room with its deep red walls, expensive but comfortably worn furniture, shelves of books, and glowing landscape paintings. And then there had been Erika’s grand piano, an object much envied by Gemma before Duncan had given her one of her own.

A few weeks later, embroiled in an odd case involving Duncan’s family in Glastonbury, Gemma had been researching goddess worship and had pulled up a monograph by Dr. Erika Rosenthal. Recognizing the name from their previous meeting, she had called on Erika for advice, and so had begun a rather unusual friendship.

They differed widely in age, education, and background, and yet Erika had given Gemma support and advice, and had taken a keen interest in the boys, particularly Kit, encouraging him to pursue his dream of becoming a biologist.

Now, Gemma wondered if she had given half as much to the relationship as she had taken. “Of course you’re not taking advantage of me,” she said crisply, glancing at the open book by Erika’s chair, and a half-empty tumbler of what looked like whisky. She felt a frisson of unease—she’d never seen her friend drink anything stronger than the occasional sherry or glass of wine.

“Do let me get you something,” Erika was saying, “for coming out at this hour. I’ve sherry or whisky, or I could make you tea.”

“No, I’m fine, really.” Gemma sat in her usual spot, the chair nearest Erika’s, and studied her friend. “Just tell me what’s wrong.”

Erika subsided into her own seat and, after her burst of welcoming energy, seemed to shrink into herself. She looked frail and tired, and unnatural spots of color bloomed in her cheeks. Fingering the open book on her reading table, she said, “I feel foolish now, ringing you, when there’s nothing…But it was such a shock, and I couldn’t—”

The book slipped from her hands and landed, open, crumpled pages down, on the floor near Gemma’s foot. Lifting it, she saw that it was not a book but an elegantly produced soft-cover catalog from the auction house Harrowby’s. “‘Art Deco Jewelry’?” she said aloud, reading the cover. “I don’t understand.”

“No, of course not.” Erika shook her head, but made no attempt to retrieve the book. “And I hardly know where to begin.”

Gemma sat quietly, making of her listening an almost physical thing, as she had learned to do in interviews.

After a few moments, Erika sighed and met her eyes briefly. “I don’t often speak of these things. There are a few friends who know a little, because we share some experiences…but even so, after all these years, it is not easy.” Her language began to slip into a more formal cadence, as if her native German were closer to the surface of her mind.

“You know I came here to London from Berlin, at the beginning of the war?”

“With your husband. Yes, you’ve told me that,” agreed Gemma, realizing that she knew very little more.

“It sounds so simple, yes?” Erika’s smile didn’t reach her eyes, and her hands seemed to twist together of their own accord. “My father came to Germany from Russia,” she continued, “after the Great War, thinking to make a new future for himself and his bride. So we are, you see, refugees by tradition, as are almost all Jews. His name was Jakob Goldshtein, and he was a tradesman with some skill in metalwork. He apprenticed himself to a jewelry maker, and by the beginning of the 1930s he had surpassed his late master and made a reputation for himself.

“He loved the new Art Deco styles, the influence of Egyptian and African art—he said it made him think of all the places he would never see. He loved the contrast of silver and platinum against the brightly colored stones, but above all, he loved diamonds. He was a jolly man, my father, who liked to make jokes about his name. It amused him that he only worked in silver metals.

“By the time the Nazis began their rise to power, my mother had died, and my father had acquired wealth as well as reputation. He took commissions from the new German elite, even if it meant adding hooks to his beautiful necklaces and brooches so that they could attach their swastikas.” Erika’s face had softened as she talked about her father, and there was no censure in her voice.

“He thought, of course, that it would pass, the new regime, as such things usually did. And so it was that he sent his spoiled only daughter to university, and there she fell in love with her tutor, and married.”

Erika stopped, her hands still now, and silence descended upon the room. There were no muffled voices from the houses on either side, no footsteps from the street, and Gemma hesitated on the precipice of speech, not sure whether she might extend the spell or break it. At last she said, very softly, “This was your husband?” and as she spoke she realized how seldom she had heard Erika speak of her marriage.

“David, yes. He was fifteen years older than I, a philosopher, and a pacifist, quite well known in intellectual circles. There was even talk that he might be nominated for the Nobel Prize. But in 1938, Carl von Ossietzky died in police custody, and my father knew what David refused to see, that neither David nor his ideas would be tolerated.

“We had little money, but my father had funds and connections. He arranged for us to leave the country, quietly, anonymously, and David was forced to agree.”

The tension in the air grew palpable, and Gemma saw the movement of Erika’s throat as she swallowed. She found herself holding her breath, this time not daring to interrupt.

“My father gave me a parting gift, the most beautiful of all the things he had created. It was to be my inheritance, and my bulwark against the future, if things did not go as we planned.”

Just as Gemma began to guess the import of the book she held, Erika reached for it. Slowly, deliberately, she smoothed the pages, then let it fall open of its own accord. As Erika gazed down, transfixed, Gemma got up and looked over her shoulder.

She gave a gasp of surprise and pleasure. The photo was full page, the background black, and against the velvety darkness the diamonds fell in a double cascade. The caption on the right-hand page read, Jakob Goldshtein, a diamond cascade double-clip brooch, 1938. “It’s lovely,” breathed Gemma.

“Yes. My father’s masterpiece.” Erika looked up and met her eyes. “I last saw it in Germany, more than fifty years ago. I want you to help me find out how it came to be in an English auction.”

“So how did you get on with Melody?” Kincaid handed Doug Cullen a dripping saucepan, glancing over as his friend was applying a tea towel industriously.

He and Doug had seen off the rest of the well-fed and well-lubricated guests, and now, with Kit and Toby home and the dogs having given up any hope of scraps, they’d loaded the dishwasher and begun on the pots and pans.

Doug Cullen’s blond schoolboy good looks and expressive face made him usually easy to read, but for once the glance he gave Kincaid was inscrutable. “No joy, there, I think,” he said, reaching for another pan.

“She doesn’t fancy you, or vice versa?” asked Kincaid, thinking that Gemma would be disappointed by the failure of her matchmaking scheme.

Shrugging, Cullen pushed his glasses up on his nose with the damp edge of the tea towel. “It might just be my bruised ego, but I don’t think PC Talbot fancies blokes much, full stop.”

Kincaid glanced at him in surprise. “Seriously?”

“There’s definitely a Let’s all be blokes together vibe.”

“Might be armor. That’s common enough.” Melody Talbot was attractive, dark haired, dark eyed, and cheerfully efficient, and Gemma had come to depend on her a good deal at work. If Melody was gay and had chosen not to make her sexual orientation public, then that was her business. It was tough enough for women officers as it was—his thought stopped suddenly short as he remembered Melody’s solicitousness towards Gemma, all the little thoughtful gestures that Gemma often repeated to him at day’s end.

“What about the prickly Maura Bell, then?” Kincaid asked.

They had worked a case in Southwark with the Scottish Inspector Bell, and although she and Cullen seemed as mismatched as chalk and cheese, there had been an attraction between them. Doug had even broken it off with his longtime girlfriend, Stella Fairchild-Priestly, but then gradually any mentions of Maura had disappeared.

This time Cullen’s feelings were all too apparent, as he flushed to the roots of his fair hair. “I couldn’t say,” he answered tersely, and Kincaid knew he’d overstepped the mark. It occurred to him that he was as clueless about Cullen’s personal life as Gemma apparently was about Melody Talbot’s.

It was not something he was going to be given a chance to remedy that night, however, as Cullen quickly finished his drying and took himself off with a muttered excuse.

“You bloody sad wanker!” Cullen said aloud as he settled into a seat on the night bus that trundled its way down Bishop’s Bridge Road, earning him a look from an old lady bundled in too many coats for the May night. He’d contemplated the tube, certainly a quicker alternative, but had found himself unable to cope with the thought of sharing a carriage with drunken Saturday-night revelers and snogging couples.

But the brisk walk and the wait at the bus stop hadn’t made it any easier to put Maura Bell out of his mind, and his face burned with shame again as he remembered his reaction to Kincaid’s question. Why couldn’t he have just shrugged and offered some manly and macho platitude. Easy come, easy go. You know women.

But no, he had to make an utter fool of himself in front of his boss.

The truth was that he’d taken Maura Bell out a number of times, for drinks, for dinner, to the cinema. He had thought she liked him, but a public school education combined with a deep and fundamental shyness had handicapped his nerve severely. When he finally got up the courage to make a serious advance, she’d drawn away from him as if stung.

He’d stammered out apologies; she’d made excuses and left him standing in the middle of the Millennium Bridge, so humiliated that for a moment he’d contemplated jumping in. But good sense had prevailed. Perhaps even that was sad—that he was incapable of making a grand romantic gesture.

He’d gone home to his gray flat in the Euston Road, and when Maura had rung him repeatedly over the next few days, he’d refused to take her calls. After a bit the calls stopped, and in the months since, he’d devoted himself to work with excessive zeal, becoming the best researcher in the department, and limited his social life to an occasional after-work drink with Kincaid, and a monthly visit home to his parents in Saint Albans, during which he told them exaggerated stories of his importance at work.

The bus slowed for Great Portland Street, and for an instant Cullen had a wild thought. He could still take the Circle Line. Then the Docklands Light Railway to the Isle of Dogs. He could stand outside Maura Bell’s flat, waiting for a glimpse of her, just to see if she was still as he remembered.

Then he snorted in disgust. Stalking, that’s what he was contemplating, and he wasn’t that far gone—at least not yet. But the woman in the multiple coats seemed to disagree. She glared at him, chins quivering, making it clear she thought he was a nutter, then got up and waddled her way to the very back of the bus.

After Cullen had left, Kincaid gave the worktops one last wipe, turned out all but the small lamp in the kitchen, then stood and listened. Wesley had brought the boys home wired on pizza and lemonade, but now the giggles had faded upstairs. Even the dogs had disappeared; Tess, thirteen-year-old Kit’s little terrier, would be with him, while Geordie, Gemma’s cocker spaniel, would be curled on the foot of their bed, accompanied like sticking plaster by their black cat, Sid, who had developed a perversely unfeline passion for the little dog.

The house seemed to exhale, settling into the profound silence of night inching towards morning, and Kincaid gave a worried glance at the clock above the cooker. It was half-past twelve—surely Gemma would be home soon.

He felt a niggle of worry about Erika’s phone call. It seemed so out of character, but then he found Gemma’s relationship with Erika rather odd as well. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the older woman, but when she studied him with her keen glance he felt like a suitor sized up and found wanting, an uncomfortable sensation for a man unused to feeling intimidated.

Did she disapprove of the fact that they weren’t married? he wondered. But surely she knew Gemma well enough to know that was her choice, rather than his.

Kincaid shrugged, irritated with himself for letting his thoughts go down that path, but he found he couldn’t contemplate going to bed or settling down with a book while Gemma was still out. He’d decided he might turn on the telly when the doorbell rang. The sound was shockingly loud in the quiet house, and upstairs one of the dogs gave a single yip of surprise.

Hurrying towards the front door, he was spurred by an instant, clutching panic. Gemma was out—had something happened to her?

He was telling himself not to be daft, that one of the guests had forgotten something, when he swung open the door and found Gemma’s father standing on the doorstep.

The restaurant and club on All Saints Road was one of the latest ventures meant to upgrade the still dubious nether regions of Notting Hill. But on this Saturday night, the veterinary clinic across the street and the barred shop fronts seemed only to add to the ambience, and inside the restaurant, the aura of cool could have cut glass. No patron was much over thirty; all were rich, or pretending to be rich.

Kristin Cahill was one of those pretending to a status as yet unachieved. She stood at the bar in a little black dress, a designer copy that made up in élan what it lacked in label, and that set off her milky-white skin. Her dark hair was feather cut, flattering her gamine features and long neck, and her full lips were carefully outlined in deep pink.

She checked her lipstick for the hundredth time, then snapped her compact closed, satisfied. She could pass for French—a Leslie Caron, even an Edith Piaf—but there was no one to appreciate her efforts except the bartender, and she was tired of fielding his too-interested glances.

Lifting her martini, she turned her back and sipped, gazing with growing irritation at the door. Where the hell was Dominic? The DJ had started in the club downstairs; she could hear a blare of sound when the stairway door swung open, feel the vibration through the soles of her feet. Dom always had an excuse, more often than not having to do with his mother, the controlling bitch from hell. But then what had she expected when she started going out with an almost thirty-year-old man who lived with his mum?

Of course, she’d thought that both Dom and his mum had money, then, and the house, bloody hell, the house had reduced her to openmouthed goggling. That had been a mistake. Dom’s mum had given her a knowing little smile that had put her in her place quickly enough.

Grasping middle class, the look had said. Grasping middle class with a comprehensive education, an art history degree from a middlebrow university, and aspirations that would never amount to anything her son would fancy. And maybe, Kristin thought as she looked at her watch, Mummy had been right.

A girl waiting alone at the bar for half an hour might have a date who was unavoidably detained; a girl waiting alone for more than half an hour shouted stood up. Some of the other customers were beginning to eye her, too, and she could imagine the whispers, more malicious than sympathetic. She knocked back what was left of her drink with an unladylike gulp, set her glass on the bar, and flashed the bartender a dazzling smile as she stalked towards the stairs.

She hadn’t come out—not to mention spending half her pay on the dress—to stand about like a stupid cow. If Dom didn’t have the decency to show up, she was going to have a good time without him.

Still, as she negotiated the steep stairs to the club rather gingerly in her four-inch heels, she felt an unwelcome jab of worry. Dominic, for all his faults, had always been kind, and she’d seen some things lately that made her suspect he was in real trouble. There had been whispered conversations in the corners of pubs with men whose reputations frightened her, and there were other signs: even his rich-boy good looks were becoming a little worn around the edges, and yesterday she had noticed his hands shaking, although he’d tried to hide it by lighting cigarette after cigarette.

And then there was the business with Harry, which made her profoundly uneasy. She didn’t want to get involved with anything dodgy, but on the other hand, it just might give her the step-up she needed, and then she could tell Dominic Scott to go to hell.

There were other men who would appreciate what she had to offer. Men who were going someplace with their lives—men who were free of Dominic’s baggage, and whose families wouldn’t sneer at her background.

Before her, a sea of people moved in the eerie blue light, swaying like sea anemones in an underwater current. The beat of the house music was mesmerizing, vibrating nerve and bone, and she wanted to dance. A tall man with skin the color of espresso smiled at her across the floor. Before she lost her resolution, she eased into the flow of bodies and met him halfway.