Read Losing Nicola for Free Online

slanting green eyes and small pointed teeth. Her red hair was cut short, like a boy’s, and curled thickly over her head. Freckles covered her nose and in her bathing costume you could see that she had breasts. Apart from Orlando, all of us fell completely under her spell.
    Her mother was something to do with fashion, and had bought a smuggler’s cottage in the oldest part of the town, long before it became chic. She painted the walls in bright colours, had a wooden upright beam supporting the low ceiling of her sitting-room, drank cocktails from V-shaped glasses of the kind we had only seen in films, smoked cigarettes in a long black holder. Nicola had many more clothes than I did, and boxes of jewellery that had me gaping. Dozens of earrings, long ropes of artificial pearls and blue glass beads, red stones set in gold, chunks of turquoise on silver chains. On top of that, the lobes of her ears were pierced, and she wore tiny gold studs in them. I couldn’t imagine having my ears pierced, or even wanting to. Nicola said she’d done it herself with a hot darning needle and a cork. ‘Once I’d made the hole, Mum had to get the studs,’ she said. ‘I could do your ears if you like.’
    I could clearly imagine what my mother would say, how vulgar she would consider it, how incredibly unlikely she would be to buy gold studs for me if I let Nicola pierce my ears.
    â€˜No,’ I said. ‘Thanks, but my mother would kill me.’ Nonetheless, I was thrilled that Nicola considered me ear-piercing-worthy, that she let me wear her clip-on earrings sometimes, or the feather boa she had hanging on the back of her bedroom door, or try the scent she had in a cut-glass bottle on her dressing-table, though I was only able to do that once as Fiona wrinkled her nose in disgust when she smelled me, and Bertram Yelland made some remark about pox-doctor’s clerks.
    Something else distinguished Louise Stone from the other mothers.
    â€˜Apparently she’s a Bit Fast,’ whispered Ava, checking that the drawing-room door was firmly shut.
    â€˜Do you mean speed-of-light sort of thing?’ asked Orlando.
    Ava bent closer. ‘She’s
divorced
,’ she mouthed.
    I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure what being divorced entailed, but it sounded exotic.
    Ava’s face twitched as she glanced again at the door. She motioned us towards her and we obediently bent our heads nearer until we could smell her face powder and the scent of
Soir de Paris
. ‘What’s more, her husband’s . . .’ She paused thrillingly.
    â€˜What, Ava?’
    â€˜Where?’
    â€˜. . . in jail!’
    Orlando and I stared at each other and then at Ava. ‘Jail? You mean . . . in
prison
?’
    Ava nodded.
    â€˜What
for
?’
    â€˜Manslaughter!’ The word had an ominous pregnant sound.
    â€˜Nicola’s father
killed
someone?’ Even the urbane Orlando was taken aback.
    â€˜Isn’t that the same as . . . murder?’ I asked. My mouth felt dry, as the enormity of the concept of violent death settled inside me. This was way outside our experience. Murder was the stuff of the green Penguin paperbacks that filled my parents’ bookshelves, or occasional headlines in newspapers, not something that peoples’ fathers committed.
    â€˜Yes,’ breathed Ava. ‘It was a notorious case a couple of years ago, in all the papers for days. I really thought his wife was going to Stand By Her Man, but as soon as he was sentenced, she divorced him and disappeared. And now she’s come down here, where nobody will find out who she is.’
    â€˜
You
did.’
    â€˜Only because I recognized that green costume she was wearing the other day.’
    â€˜Maybe you’ve got it all wrong.’ I didn’t want Nicola tainted. ‘Maybe Mrs Stone just happened to buy her costume at the same shop as this . . . manslaughter person’s wife.’
    â€˜No. She