I Should Be So Lucky (16 page)

‘No – because
naice
middle-class
laydees
never commit crimes, do they? Well, believe you me, darlin’, they do. I blame feminism. We get some right scum posh totty in here, up to all sorts then pleading big-eyed girly innocence, thinking they can have it both ways. Well, I’ve seen it all, and they can’t.’

‘Please may I call my sister?’ Viola felt thoroughly defeated and close to tears again. She could see herself on the wrong end of a five-year sentence, picked on in prison for being a know-nothing new bug and refusing to be some killer’s girlfriend. If she called Miles she’d never hear the end of it, so it would have to be Kate.

The next couple of hours spent sitting in a bleak little cell felt more like days, and Viola had nothing to do but try to rub the fingerprint ink off her fingers. Where was Greg? She really hoped he’d been allowed to go,
because
none of this was his fault. She tried to imagine him coming up with an explanation for scary Mickey. How, at two in the morning, could you run ‘I’m so sorry, darling, I got arrested while breaking into a house with that woman I was schmoozing over lunch the other day’ past your beloved?

It was noisy and cold down in the cell area, and not knowing what would happen next was terrifying. Viola sat uncomfortably on the hard bench-like bed, hugging the one thin cellular blanket round herself, hoping it wasn’t rife with nits, lice or anything catching. It smelled clean enough, at least. And could anyone but comatose drunks ever sleep in these places? There were people shouting from behind closed doors, a woman alternately crying and shrieking, someone banging rhythmically on a door and swearing. A Friday night for the police must be like a constant A & E department: drunks throwing up and throwing punches, volatile muggers, end-of-week domestic violence, idiot pissedup drivers. Absorbed in the cacophony, she was almost shocked to have her cell door suddenly opened and then to hear the detective with the pink trainers saying, ‘OK, love, the cavalry’s here for you.’

‘Kate’s here?’

‘Your sister’s here and your boyfriend’s waiting. You can go – all cleared up now, no charges.’ It was all Viola could do not to kiss her as she left the cell.

Kate was waiting by the front desk, sitting very
gingerly
on the furthest edge of a bench away from two messily weeping, mascara-smudged teenage girls with their arms round each other and their high-heeled shoes off. Viola could just make out a third one outside beyond the sliding doors, being sick over the stair rail. Poor police, was it like this every night?

‘Oh Vee! What have you done now?’ Kate said, hugging her tightly. ‘Let’s get you out of this horrible place and home. I’ve brought spare keys for you.’

‘Hang on, what about Greg? He’s still here somewhere, I think.’

‘Greg? I thought it was just you on your own. Who’s Greg?’

‘Me,’ he said, coming in through the doors. He smelled faintly of cigarettes. ‘I haven’t smoked for four years but tonight, well …’ He looked across at the weeping girls and smiled at them. ‘Thanks for the ciggy, girls, you are lifesavers. And good luck.’

‘Do hang on here and make friends if you want,’ Kate said crossly to Greg as she bustled away from the bench. ‘But I want to get Viola home.’ And she stalked off through the sliding doors, glaring at the ill teen who was now draped over the stair rail, groaning softly.

Viola whispered, ‘Sorry,’ to Greg as they followed Kate out. He gave her hand a quick squeeze and murmured back, ‘Do you think she’ll give me a lift back to yours so I can collect my car, or is she going to make me get a bus with all the sleepy teen drunks?’

‘A lift, of course – and if not, we
both
wait for the night bus. That’ll be OK, won’t it, Kate? Greg’s car is at Mum’s.’

‘I suppose,’ Kate said as she started the car.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Viola said. ‘I really thought they were going to charge me and keep me all night. I wouldn’t have called you if I could have thought of anything else.’

‘It’s all right. It’s what family is for.’ Kate pushed her overlong hair back out of her face. She looked exhausted, as well she might, having been dragged from sleep by Viola’s call.

‘I suppose it was your idea to break in,’ Kate accused Greg by way of the rear-view mirror.

‘Um … well, er … not exactly …’

‘It’s nothing to do with Greg,’ Viola told her. ‘He was just helping me out. He had a neat trick with the glass pane.’

‘I bet he did,’ Kate snarled. ‘So where had you two been this evening?’

Grumpiness began to cool the lovely warm gratitude Viola had been feeling. This was definitely more like a cross-examination of a naughty fourteen-year-old than a general social question. ‘Nowhere; well, not together. I’d been out to see a band in Fulham with Amanda and Leo. Greg had been … out somewhere else.’

‘Just doing a spot of gardening,’ Greg said. He and Viola exchanged a look and she wanted to giggle. Somehow she felt this wouldn’t have gone down well with Kate. They’d reached the house now and Kate
stopped
the car in the driveway, behind Greg’s grubby Land Rover.

‘This yours?’ she asked, looking unimpressed. Viola wondered if Kate would have perked up a bit if the car had been something a tad smarter. Probably. She’d been very impressed by Rhys’s Porsche the first time she’d seen it, giggling flirtily and making him take her for a run round the block in it.

‘It is. I’d better see if it starts. Sometimes it doesn’t like damp nights. Also, cross your fingers I don’t get arrested all over again for a dodgy tail light or something. I don’t much want to go back to my cell, cosy and supremely luxurious as it was. Kate, thanks so much for the lift and, Viola, may I call you in the morning? Just to see if you’re OK? I can come and do the glass for you if you like.’

‘I’ll get my husband to sort the glass,’ Kate told him briskly. ‘No need for you to put yourself out.’

‘Kate, please don’t be like that!’ Viola protested. ‘Tonight
wasn’t
Greg’s fault! And yes, please do call, Greg. If only to reassure me that Mickey hasn’t thrown you out on the street for this. I don’t think I’d like to be a fly on the wall when you tell her.’

‘Mickey?’ He looked puzzled. ‘Oh, she doesn’t need to know any of this.’ He gave Viola a hug and surprised her with a brief kiss on the cheek, then said, ‘Goodnight, both of you. Kate – good to meet you. And thanks for the lift.’ Then the wolfish grin was flashed quickly at Viola. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

‘How did you persuade them to let me go?’ Viola had to ask as soon as they were inside the house and in the warmth of the flat’s little kitchen. She filled the kettle and took mugs and tea bags out of the cupboard. Kate slumped into a chair and rested her chin on her hands, still looking doomy and somehow old, as Viola had noticed the other day. It was a reasonable question, although Kate was taking her time about answering it. After all, she wouldn’t have had any more ID-proving documents than Viola herself. Eventually, she pulled her bag up on to the table and took out the framed wedding photo of Rhys, Viola and herself that Viola had seen beside Kate’s bed.

‘Easy. I took this along. They knew all about Rhys, from the night of … of the accident. So I showed the horrible detective this photo and they looked up something on the computer and found you, and some press stuff and other photographs too. Really, all they had to do was Google in the first place and I’d said so on the phone, but the sergeant said you seemed “upset”. Think it’s a euphemism for rabidly unbalanced. You could have told them you were his … widow.’

‘It never crossed my mind. And if they thought I was a bit loopy they’d probably not have believed me anyway.’

Kate was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘You never did bother to change your name to his, did you? I always wondered about that.’

‘I wanted to keep my name the same as Rachel’s, that’s all.’ Viola wrapped her hands round her mug of tea, absorbing all the warmth she could. Three thirty in the morning wasn’t a time she’d have chosen to be talking about this. In fact, no time was.

‘Is it? Are you sure you didn’t always kind of half wonder if you and Rhys would really stay the distance? I … used to wonder about it.’

Viola’s hands were trembling as she lifted the mug to sip the tea. Any more left-field questions and it would be all over the table. ‘Did you? Why?’

Kate shrugged and got up, fetching milk from the fridge and adding more to her tea. ‘No real reason. I … you … well, you didn’t seem his type, somehow.’

‘He didn’t have a type,’ Viola said grimly. ‘Unless you count female.
Any
type in fact, really. He wasn’t fussy.’

‘He was, you know. Deep down. I always felt there was a side of him that longed for something, I don’t know,
more
…’

‘Oh, you knew that, did you?’ Viola snapped. ‘Thanks for that, Kate, but you couldn’t possibly know, not really. You hardly knew him.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, of course I did. You’d never have met him yourself if I hadn’t.’ Kate gnawed a thumbnail, worrying at it hard between her canine teeth.

‘Well, OK, but if you’re going to tell me he only married me to look a bit less bad-boy, as a career move, then please don’t. I think I’d already worked that out by
the
end of the honeymoon. And no, I didn’t wonder about the “distance”. Though I probably should have. Enough people warned me, and we did get married ridiculously soon after we’d met. And come on, even you didn’t try to persuade me not to, did you?’

‘No, I didn’t.’ Kate sounded bitter, full of regret, and Viola felt softer towards her.

‘Hey, you mustn’t even slightly blame yourself. I made my own stupid mistake there, all by myself.’

‘I only blame myself for introducing you to him in the first place. It seemed a good idea at the time.’ She smiled.

‘But honestly, Kate, if I
did
wonder if it would go the distance, which I didn’t – because even though it was all too rushed and stupid and completely mad, if I’d had any doubts I’m sure I wouldn’t have married him – I certainly wouldn’t for a minute have imagined that distance would be so short or so abrupt.’

‘No. Well. None of us did, did we?’

FOURTEEN

FOUR HOURS OF
restless sleep were nowhere near enough, but Viola needed to join every weekend DIY enthusiast on a trek to Homebase to find a tin, tube or jar, whatever it came in, of putty before Naomi got home from Monica’s and started asking questions. She really didn’t want to explain the events of last night, not yet anyway. That day would come – Kate would make sure Naomi and Miles knew all about it as soon as she got a chance. Just, not yet, preferably only when she was settled back in Bell Cottage and out of range of being fussed over.

Her text alert beeped as she was climbing out of bed: Greg.
This
early? In fact, at all? After last night she was very surprised he even thought of contacting her, ever, ever again. What was his excuse for being awake and texting before 8 a.m., given the hour he must have got to sleep? Ah –
if
he’d got to sleep. She imagined Mickey furiously refusing to let him in after double-locking all
the
doors, swearing robustly as she flung his possessions out of an upstairs window and forced him to sleep in the office or the Land Rover under a heap of old compost sacks and fake banana leaves.

‘On way with putty in about half hour,’ she read. ‘Request payment in coffee, also bacon sandwich.’

She couldn’t help smiling. She was about to reply when it beeped again.

‘You do have bacon? Or are you a veggie?’

‘Not a veggie,’ she texted back. ‘Coffee on, also bacon.’

Rachel’s room in James and Marco’s big, light apartment off Lansdowne Road was a blissful place to wake up. The flat was on two levels of one of the huge white houses in the road, and her little bedroom and shower room were downstairs at the front of the building, with a door leading out to the porch steps. Marco kept that door firmly locked and had made her promise that even when she hit the most delinquent and sneaky part of teenagehood, she would never creep out and up these steps in the night. He said he’d always rather know where she was, even if she was sliding out to devil-worship classes. Behind her personal territory, the sitting room and kitchen at the back opened on to a bright sunny terrace which James had planted with lush clumps of agapanthus, and where he waged war on fat aphids that sneaked up every evening and attacked his favourite white lupins in their black granite pots. A gate
led
through to the communal private garden shared by the houses around the square, and when she took James and Marco’s little spaniel Cyndi for a walk in there she always hoped to see somebody phenomenally famous playing with their small children. How cool would it be to drop into a school conversation over a copy of
Heat
magazine that (really nonchalant voice here), ‘Oh, yeah,
him
. Saw him on Sunday, pushing his baby on a swing, and y’know, he’s quite short in real life.’

Rachel was awake early, watching the passing silhouetted shape of a woman with a big dog breaking up the stripes on the wall where the sun sneaked in through the quarter-open plantation blinds. She was supposed to keep them completely shut overnight: Marco said the thought of some creepy snooper being able to catch even the smallest glimpse of her while she slept was just too horrific, and the scene in
Twilight
where the vampire boy had crept in to watch Bella sleeping had given him the shivers. (She had argued that this was
teen
fiction and not aimed at people’s dads and their hang-ups, but all he’d said to that was she would get it, that and the not-sneaking-out thing, once she was a parent.) All the same, Rachel hated complete, disorientating darkness and needed a sliver of streetlight to give her a sense of life still going on outside overnight.

One of Oliver Stonebridge’s paintings, like the ones at home and at Gran’s, a scene of stormy sea and
exaggeratedly
angular pier at Brighton, was on the wall opposite her bed. It made, for her, a link between home with her mum and this other home here with Marco and James. There were other links too – the chrome Anglepoise lamp by her bed was the same as at home (
real
home, not Gran’s), and her duvet covers were the same white waffly ones too.