Keith’s horse whickered, shook its mane, took a few steps sideways into a gorse bush. Was it Annie’s imagination, or was a waft of whisky coming from him? She felt tears prickle in the corners of her eyes and blinked them back.
‘I might as well fucking kill myself,’ Freddie said. ‘I’d rather fucking kill myself than live the rest of my life like that.’
‘I can think of a much better plan than that,’ said Annie, jaw setting, resolve stiffening.
Keith narrowed his eyes at her. Freddie looked up, expectantly.
‘This better not be a joke,’ Keith said.
No joke, promised Annie. No trick. Instead, she had come to make them a proposal.
The look of forlorn hope on Freddie’s face was almost heartbreaking.
‘Which benefits you how?’ asked Keith, still frowning.
‘Let’s just say I’ve also found myself in a bit of a dilemma.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
Keith sniffed, scratched at the inside of his nose, inspected the end of his thumb.
‘Go on then, let’s hear it.’
‘You two,’ said Annie, ‘are going to kill Ned Groom tonight. And I’m going to tell you how to get away with it.’
Nikki
When she had met him, Ron Cox would have been within a decade of the age Nikki was now. He had seemed not just older, back then, but someone from another era. She would never have encountered a man like that, were it not for Home.
Nikki had not quite been able to believe her luck when she landed the job there.
It used to impress people when she told them she was a model – it had been a plus for her in her interview with Ned, she was sure – but despite what the scout had said, what the agency had promised her, even after wearing out the soles of her Converse traipsing across London to castings, she was still no closer to making any actual money from it. Quite the reverse, in fact: she was still in debt to the agency for her portfolio and test shots, sleeping on the sofas of friends of friends, borrowing money here and there, asking the agency to sub her travelcard. And she certainly wasn’t going to skulk home and ask her mother for money – not that there ever was any anyway.
Then she had seen the job at Home advertised in the back of the Evening Standard, a dog-eared copy she’d picked up and flicked through on the tube – a few shifts a week on the coat check, two pounds an hour plus tips; no minimum wage in those days, of course – phoned up about it and been asked in for a chat that afternoon. It hadn’t been a long one. Ned had sized her up, decided she looked the part and told her to start at 5 p.m.
That very first night she made about seventy pounds in tips. Someone left a fiver. Someone left a tenner. The second night she worked there a man left a twenty, with his phone number scribbled on the back. She used it to buy some flowers and a packet of Marlboro Lights for the person whose couch she was crashing on. That Saturday night someone left a fifty, and it was the most money she’d ever had in her purse at any one time.
‘Anyone gets a bit handsy, anyone creeps you out, it’s important you let me know,’ Ned had told her. ‘I’ll watch them for you.’
For the most part, what had surprised her was how nice everyone was. How patient members seemed those first few nights when she was finding her feet, as she asked them to describe for the second or third time their coat, their bag. And it was exciting. To see a band whose music you liked all come bounding up the stairs in their pork-pie hats, their parkas, their V-neck T-shirts. To see an actor from TV. To be talked to and smiled at by people at all, as opposed to being a model and just standing there in the corner of the room in your knickers and no bra while people talked about you at full volume.
Nikki had been working at Home for a fortnight, the first time Ron came in. She’d already heard from the girls she worked with that he was a regular, staying in a Home suite whenever he was in town alone （his wife preferred Claridge’s when they travelled together）。 He was . . . unexpected. Charming. ‘Twinkly’ is probably the word she’d use now. She had remarked on his Yankees baseball cap as he stuffed it into his coat pocket before handing it over. Said she’d like to go to New York one day, hoped she might get booked for a shoot or a show there, laughed that she’d have to ask Ned for time off. He told her that he’d been out for dinner at The Ivy with his wife, Marianne, that she’d gone back to the hotel and left him to the nightcap that Ned had invited him out for.