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.
CHAPTER 3
Notting Hill Gate is a superstitious place because it seems to exceed rational prescriptions and explanations. On the Portobello Road, one feels oneself growing more insubstantial, less and less able to keep a sense of personal proportion in the crowd of people who all look so much poorer, or richer, or wilder, or more conventional than one is oneself.
– Jonathan Raban,
Soft Cities
"Mr. Walters?" Kincaid caught his slip as soon as the words left his mouth. "Ern?" he corrected himself. "Is everything all right?" He'd never got comfortable with calling Gemma's dad by his first name.
"Gemma here?" Ern Walters asked it so tersely that it might have been a statement. A small, wiry man, he was dressed in his usual outfit of tweed jacket and tie, with a weathered flat wool cap covering what remained of his thinning hair.
"No, no, actually she's not. But come in, please." His sense of apprehension growing, Kincaid held the door wide and gestured him in. Gemma's parents had visited them only once since they'd moved into the Notting Hill house, for Toby's birthday party.
Walters followed, but once in the hall, he planted his feet and, taking off his cap, crumpled it in his hands as he spoke. "Work, is it?" From the disapproval in his tone, Gemma might have been soliciting.
Kincaid frowned but said merely, "No. She's gone to see a friend who rang up. Some sort of problem."
"Always has time for her friends, does she?"
Bewildered by the other man's belligerent tone, Kincaid wondered if he had been drinking. But there was no smell of alcohol on Walters's breath or any wavering in his stance, and Kincaid felt a greater prickling of alarm. "Come into the kitchen and sit down, Mr. Walters," he said, reverting instinctively to the more formal address. "Let me fix you a drink or a cup of tea, and you can tell me what's wrong."
"I'll not be stopping." Ern Walters set his chin in a stubborn line that suddenly reminded Kincaid of Gemma. "It's just I thought she should know. Gemma. It's her mum. She's been taken ill. Collapsed."
"What?" Kincaid stared at him in shock. Whatever he'd expected, it hadn't been this. Vi Walters was one of the toughest women he'd ever met, an indomitable life force. "When? Where? Is she all right? Why didn't you ring us?" The questions tumbled out, too fast, he knew, for coherent answers. He stopped himself, giving Ern Walters time to speak.
"Right in the middle of Saturday-afternoon rush. Said she didn't feel well. Then she went down like a felled tree. I couldn't get her up."