nine

I got up the next morning, fragments of the previous evening charging through my mind with the velocity of a runaway train. To be sure I hadn’t dreamt it, I shot downstairs to the sitting room to check on Stannard’s extravagant gift. The painting stared back at me, as if challenging my existence. I briefly wondered where to display it. Until I had a better idea, it would hang in the bedroom.

I ate breakfast, poured myself a glass of water and downed 20mg of Fluoxetine, a drug with which I was already familiar because it was sometimes proscribed for bulimics. Aside from lifting the serotonin levels in my brain, it had a zingy awakening effect. By the time I downed my first and only mid-morning cup of coffee, I’d be flying.

Intending to get to work early, I set off. It was one of those inert days when the weather, damp and grey-faced, looks as if it’s got a hangover and the sun, in sympathy, refuses to crawl out of bed. Determined it wouldn’t stall my mood, I told myself that my job was what I got paid for, that work was knowable and quantifiable, that I was pretty damn good at it. Every time the Vellender problem popped into my head, I swatted it. Nothing you can do till later, maybe in your lunch break, I told myself, intending to pop around to the restaurant and seek an audience with Otto Vellender, a man I’d never met.

“Hey,” I heard from the other side of the street.

I glanced across and spotted Troy Martell jogging on the spot, eyeing the traffic. He waved a raised hand that clutched a plastic bottle of water. Seconds later, he dodged between two cars. His chest, pressed into a white T-shirt, looked even wider than it had the day before. Running shorts revealed tanned legs, the muscles in his meaty thighs rippling with oil or sweat or both. It felt as if the street had filled up with neat testosterone.

“Hello,” I said. “You look hot.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I wanted to grab them back. As a conversation opener, at best it was bereft of originality; at worst, easily misconstrued.

“Not nearly hot enough,” he said, failing to spot my verbal gaffe. Before I sank any deeper with do you run here often? Troy said what he’d come to say and nearly punched the air out of me.

“For what it’s worth, Paris is lying.”

“That’s a strong statement.”

“For a heavy situation.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“For Mimi.” Perhaps it was my suspicious mind, but I had the odd instinct that Troy Martell cared more for Mimi than he did for the woman with whom he slept. Troubling.

“Where’s your proof ?”

An explosion of car horns blasted his words across the road and into the next street. I caught the last bit: “… she wasn’t mad or losing it, is all.”

It wasn’t what I’d call compelling evidence. I glanced at my watch. My early start sabotaged, I suggested we find somewhere to grab a coffee.

“Can’t,” he said, dancing from one foot to the other. “On my way to train a personal client.”

I took out my phone. “Give me your mobile number. Can we meet later?”

Troy gave a furtive look both sides of the pavement, as if he expected Paris Vellender to materialise from behind a tree. “Paris has an aerobics class at one. I could get away then.”

“That would work for me.” We exchanged contacts. My visit to the restaurant could go on hold.

“It will have to be somewhere out of the way, where we won’t be seen.”

Had Paris Vellender’s theatrical side brushed off on her lover, or did Troy Martell also have something to hide? I looked up into his eyes but couldn’t read him. Disorientated, I complied and suggested that we met in a less affluent part of town. I didn’t think a café serving all day breakfasts would be Paris Vellender’s favourite haunt. I had her down for an egg white–only omelette, and lactose-free soya milk type of diner.

Troy agreed, jinked sideways, and jogged off back towards town. I, meanwhile, headed into work and saw my first client in several months, a bright seventeen-year-old in danger of flunking her A levels. Before her admission, she’d lost thirty-five pounds from her nine stone five-seven frame and existed on 300 calories a day for the past three months in spite of putting herself on a punishing exercise schedule. Her name was Eleanor, or Ellie, as she preferred. On a first meeting clients can often be defensive and hostile, but Ellie was neither. Straightaway, I had every hope that I could get her through this difficult stretch in her life. I fleetingly wondered whether Jim and Cathy, the practice manager, had engineered my safe and easy passage back into the world of work by putting softly smiling Ellie at the top of my list.

My next client was similarly well disposed to treatment. I’d finished the session when my phone rang. It was Georgia. I recognised in an instant that something was wrong from the sound of her voice, which was thick and nasal, as if she’d been crying.

“Mimi died half an hour ago.”

I did the mental equivalent of screeching to a halt. “What? How?”

“Heart attack.”

“But you said she was stable, that her heart rate had settled.”

“That was last night.”

What occurred this morning? “Did something happen?”

“What do you mean?”

“Something upset her?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” I bluffed, “a wrong word, a …”

“Things like this crop up, Kim. You know they do.”

Well, yes, but this was different, I wanted to say. Circumstances made it unusual. “Did anyone visit her?”

“Only the doctors, why?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Think? “Did her mother visit?”

“Kim, what the hell are you driving at?”

Questions. Mine. Had I stirred the bottom of a dank and muddy pool? Had my enquiry about Paris Vellender’s son the previous afternoon set off a train of events? Had Paris Vellender followed it up and spoken to Mimi? I lowered my voice and denied driving at anything.

“Is this connected to what Mimi told you?” Georgia didn’t sound like Georgia. Her voice was nervy. It rattled with alarm.

“Of course not, I’m simply trying to get it straight in my head.” Thank goodness I was on the other end of a phone line and not on Skype. If Georgia could have seen my face, she would have spotted the visual sidestep. “It’s such a shock, like it came out of nowhere.”

“There’s nothing to understand.” She was tense and terse. “You know how these things can pan out. There was too much strain on the girl’s heart. It could have happened at any time.”

But it didn’t and Georgia couldn’t be sure that Mrs. Vellender hadn’t visited that morning. I wondered whether Troy Martell was better informed.