Lucinda Horne couldn’t believe how many people had turned up to her latest book launch, the third in the Bottersley Dog School series. It seemed extraordinary that everyone had come to see her, not Alistair Smart, that they didn’t totally hate her after all. It had been excruciating when Alistair’s wife had gone to the press about her and Alistair’s ‘little arrangement’, as he’d liked to call it, and it had all come out as front-page news – yet another weird offshoot to the long-running saga about the woman who drowned in The Serpentine.
The bizarre thing about the whole business was that Lucinda had felt most betrayed when it turned out that Alistair had been sleeping with Stephen Forsyth’s wife at the same time as he’d been seeing her. That was when she’d realised how naive she’d been about it all, but when you’re a writer getting nowhere in your bid to be published, who knows what lengths you’d go to – and besides Alistair Smart had been such a hero to her for more than half her life she probably would have done anything for him. What an idiot she’d been! Maybe she should have taken her parents’ advice and got her head out of her books, out of either reading them or writing them, every now and again to see what real life was like. She damned well knew now though, and so far, after a somewhat bumpy start, she found she rather enjoyed it. She was so lucky the public had forgiven her, had seen her as the victim in the scandal, and she’d taken her publicist’s advice to tone down her appearance and now kept her wondrous breasts firmly under wraps. (‘You don’t want the children’s fathers lusting after you, dear,’ her publicist had said. ‘Not after that Alistair Smart business.’)
Poor Alistair though, she felt so sorry for him – career washed up, thrown out of the family home, his own children embarrassed by him at school, having to endure the other kids constantly woofing at them. His wife had been an utter bitch from what Lucinda had gathered, the last time she’d rung him, he’d sounded desolate, even though he’d just found out his publisher had decided not to sue him for breach of contract after all. And when Lucinda had read last week on the Internet that he’d checked into the Priory for sex addiction she’d felt awful. She could understand now that he might be an addict – he really had been quite obsessed with sex, rather glassy-eyed about it all in fact – but she’d thought that was quite normal behaviour at the time; after all, she’d had nothing much to compare it to.
Lucinda sighed. She did hope he’d get better. Despite his failings he was still Alistair Smart to her, her inspiration. She’d be nothing without him.
The mother of the little girl in front of her coughed self-consciously.
‘Oh, sorry, it was Amelia, wasn’t it?’ The woman and her daughter nodded, excited smiles fixed on their faces under matching brown bobs.
‘To dear Amelia,’ she wrote, ‘enjoy Wowser and the gang’s latest adventure, love Lucinda.’
Her publicist scowled. ‘You’ll have to go faster than that,’ she whispered. ‘Look at the queue.’
‘Oh, sorry,’ said Lucinda. She sat back, shook her silky blonde hair out of her face, and turned to the little boy waiting expectantly in front of her.
‘Hello!’ she said, smiling guilelessly. ‘And what’s your name, young man?’