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.At seven thirty he said quietly to Maeve, “Now I have to go out for a while, just an hour or so.But you’ll have to promise me you’ll eat something while I’m gone.Will you? Otherwise I’ll worry about you the whole time I’m away.”She turned her face to him and fixing him with a beseeching gaze asked, “You’ll make sure Catherine’s all right, won’t you, Dadda?”“Why, yes.” He hardly knew what to say.“Of course I will.”The light in her eyes faded as quickly as it had come.Terry bent down to embrace her and felt the chill breath of uncertainty and doubt on his cheek.Before leaving he turned the television on for her and commanded Conn to stay beside her chair.When he paused at the door to say goodbye Maeve was already staring dully at the screen.Chapter Three“IF YOU wouldn’t mind.” Simon indicated the unlit cigarette poised between Emma Russell’s fingers.“Oh.” She looked around her with a show of exaggerated puzzlement as if a car was a perfectly natural receptacle for cigarette fumes.Then, in a tone of sudden understanding: “Oh, it’s new, is it?”“No, I just don’t want it smelling of cigarettes.”She made a face and, closing her lighter with a snap, dropped the cigarette back into the packet.“You must work incredibly hard to keep it this way.”“I’m sorry?” They were crawling through the unlovely end of Earl’s Court in a slow line of early-morning traffic that promised to last all the way to Notting Hill.The rain had stopped in the night but the sky was still heavy, and a dankness hung in the air.“I’m sorry?” he said again.“Do you ban feet?”He glanced across at her, not quite sure of the spirit in which this remark was intended.“I get it vale ted every week.”Her mouth twitched in a small knowing smile, as if he had just confirmed an accurate and rather unflattering picture of himself.Irritated by this, and by the fact that he’d put himself to considerable inconvenience by offering to pick her up and drive her to the police station on what was going to be an extremely busy morning, he said, “I get a man to look after it for me, if you really want to know.I have to.I simply don’t have the time for that sort of thing.I run three companies.Three very demanding companies.”“Aha.” She was in the midst of an enormous yawn.“And while we’re on the subject of getting things straight,” he said in the slow steady voice he used to explain things to people who weren’t too quick on the uptake, “I don’t work for Ben the two of us are partners in a company that trades with Eastern Europe.We set up the company together.As partners.”“Oh.right.”He wanted to add crossly: And moreover there is no ballerina gear in my flat, there is nothing faintly outrageous in my closet, only the costume my mother once wore when she danced with the Rambert, which Ben just happened to see hanging in the spare room when he invited himself to stay three years ago, when, having been kicked out by his then girlfriend at two in the morning, he was partaking of my hospitality, the shit.He wanted to say all this and more, but he’d learnt from bitter experience that it would do him no good.If you tried to explain something like that, something that had grown into a huge joke, people weren’t interested in the truth, they only wanted to roar with laughter and say how brilliant it was to be a cross-dresser, particularly such a cultured one ah, the quips came thick and fast when people were having fun and that he wasn’t to be ashamed, not for a moment, not when it was so fantastically amusing to picture him in pink tulle.These people were shits as well, just like Ben.The secret was not to let it rankle, not to give anything away, but to rise effortlessly above it.He did this now, saying smoothly, “I know DS Wilson will appreciate this very much.”“I still don’t see why it can’t wait,” Emma said peevishly, stifling another enormous yawn.“I’m desperately jet lagged My body’s screaming: Three in the morning!”Simon felt no remorse for having dragged her out.It served her right.She had started grousing as soon as he’d called and told her the police wanted to see her, had griped about having only just got to sleep a few hours before, had demanded to know why they couldn’t come to her later in the day, for Christ’s sake.Simon had bitten back the impulse to say that nobody was getting much sleep at the moment certainly not him: four hours last night? five? and that when it came to Catherine surely nothing could be too much trouble
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