‘Donna Doyle.’
‘That’s a beautiful name,’ he said softly. The smile he won in response was as brilliant as his own. Sometimes, it all felt too easy. People heard what they wanted to hear, especially when what they were hearing sounded like their dream come true. Total suspension of disbelief, that’s what he achieved every time. They came to these events expecting Jacko Vance and everyone connected to the great man to be exactly what was projected on TV. By association, anyone who was part of the celebrity’s entourage was gilded with the same brush. People were so accustomed to Vance’s open sincerity, so familiar with his very public probity, it never crossed their minds to look for the catch. Why should it, when Vance had a popular image that made Good King Wenceslas look like Scrooge? The punters listened to the words and they heard Jack and the Beanstalk – from the little seed Vance or his minions planted, they pictured the burgeoning flower of a life at the top of the tree right alongside his.
In that respect, Donna Doyle was just like all the others. She could have been working from a script he’d written for her. Having moved her strategically into a corner, he made as if to hand her a signed photograph of Vance the megastar. Then he did a double take so exquisitely natural it could have been part of De Niro’s repertoire. ‘My God,’ he breathed. ‘Of course. Of course!’ The exclamation was the verbal equivalent of smiting himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand.
Caught with her fingers inches from his as she reached out to take what had been so nearly offered, she frowned, not understanding. ‘What?’
He made a twisted little moue of self-disparagement. ‘Ignore me. I’m sorry, I’m sure you’ve got much more interesting plans for your future than anything we superficial programme makers could come up with.’ The first time he’d tried the line, hands sweating, blood thudding in his ears, he’d thought it was so corny it couldn’t fool a drunk one sip from catatonia. But he had been right to go with his instincts, even when they had led him down the path of the criminally naff. That first one, just like this next one, had grasped instantly that something was being offered to her that hadn’t been on the agenda for the insignificant others he’d been talking to earlier.
‘What do you mean?’ Breathless, tentative, not wanting to admit she already believed in case she’d misunderstood and left herself open to the hot shaming flush of her misapprehension.
He gave the faintest of shrugs, one that hardly disturbed the smooth fall of his immaculate suiting. ‘Forget it,’ he said with a slight, almost imperceptible shake of the head, disappointment in the sad cast of his eye, the absence of his gleaming smile.
‘No, tell me.’ Now there was an edge of desperation, because everybody wanted to be a star, no matter what they said. Was he really going to snatch away that half-glimpsed magic carpet ride that could lift her out of her despised life into his world?
A quick glance to either side, making sure he wasn’t overheard, then his voice was both soft and intense. ‘A new project we’re working on. You’ve got the look. You’d be perfect. As soon as I looked at you properly, I knew you were the one.’ A regretful smile. ‘Now, at least I have your image to carry in my head while we interview the hundreds of hopefuls the agents send along to us. Maybe we’ll get lucky …’ His voice trailed off, his eyes liquid and bereft as the puppy left behind in the holiday kennels.
‘Couldn’t I … I mean, well …’ Donna’s face lit up with hope, then amazement at her forwardness, then disappointment as she talked herself out of it without saying another word.
His smile grew indulgent. An adult would have identified it as condescending, but she was too young to recognize when she was being patronized. ‘I don’t think so. It would be taking an enormous risk. A project like this, at so delicate a stage … Just a word in the wrong ear could wreck it commercially. And you’ve no professional experience, have you?’
That tantalizing peep at what could have been her possible future uncapped a volcano of turbulent hope, words tumbling over each other like rocks in the lava flow. Prizes for karaoke at the youth club, a great dancer according to everybody, the Nurse in her form’s reading of Romeo and Juliet. He’d imagined schools would have had more sense than to stir the tumultuous waters of adolescent desire with inflammatory drama like that, but he’d been wrong. They’d never learned, teachers. Just like their charges. The kids might assimilate the causes of the First World War but they never grasped that clichés got that way because they reflected reality. Better the devil you know. Don’t take sweets from strangers.
Those warnings might never have set Donna Doyle’s eardrum vibrating if her present expression of urgent eagerness was anything to go by. He grinned and said, ‘All right! You’ve convinced me!’ He lowered his head and held her gaze. Now his voice was conspiratorial. ‘But can you keep a secret?’
She nodded as if her life depended on it. She couldn’t have known that it did. ‘Oh, yes,’ Donna said, dark blue eyes sparkling, lips apart, little pink tongue flickering between them. He knew her mouth was growing dry. He also knew that she possessed other orifices where the opposite phenomenon was happening.
He gave her a considering, calculated stare, an obvious appraisal that she met with apprehension and desire mingling like Scotch and water. ‘I wonder …’ he said, his voice almost a sigh. ‘Can you meet me tomorrow morning? Nine o’clock?’
A momentary frown, then her face cleared, determination in her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said, school dismissed as irrelevant. ‘Yes, I can. Whereabout?’
‘Do you know the Plaza Hotel?’ He had to hurry now. People were starting to move towards him, desperate to recruit his influence to their cause.
She nodded.
‘They have an underground car park. You get into it from Beamish Street. I’ll be waiting there on level two. And not a word to anyone, is that clear? Not your mum, not your dad, not your best friend, not even the family dog.’ She giggled. ‘Can you do that?’ He gave her the curiously intimate look of the television professional, the one that convinces the mentally troubled that newsreaders are in love with them.
‘Level two? Nine o’clock?’ Donna checked, determined not to screw up her one chance of escape from the humdrum. She could never have realized that by the end of the week she’d be weeping and screaming and begging for humdrum. She’d be willing to sell what remained of her immortal soul for humdrum. But even if someone had told her that then, she would not have comprehended. Right then, the dazzle and the dream of what he could offer was her complete universe. What could be a finer prospect?
‘And not a word, promise?’
‘I promise,’ she said solemnly. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’
Tony Hill lay in bed and watched a long strip of cloud slide across a sky the colour of duck eggs. If anything had sold him on this narrow back-to-back terraced house, it was the attic bedroom with its strange angles and the pair of skylights that gave him something to look at when sleep was elusive. A new house, a new city, a new start, but still it was hard to lose consciousness for eight hours at a stretch.
It wasn’t surprising that he hadn’t slept well. Today was the first day of the rest of his life, he reminded himself with a wry smile that scrunched the skin round his deep-set blue eyes into a nest of wrinkles that not even his best friend could call laughter lines. He’d never laughed enough for that. And making murder his business had made sure he never would.
Work was always the perfect excuse, of course. For two years, he’d been toiling on behalf of the Home Office on a feasibility study to see whether it would be useful or possible to create a national task force of trained psychological profilers, a hit squad capable of moving in on complex cases and working with the investigative teams to improve the rate and speed of clean-up. It had been a job that had required all the clinical and diplomatic