especially about the lips and eyelids. For the
first time in her life she wore lipstick, bright red, until her father asked
her if she'd been kissing a fire engine.
Dr. Reeves never came back.
Chapter 4
For the third time in a week, Mix sat in his car on Campden Hill Square
with the windows shut and the engine running to keep the airconditioning on. It was a hot day and getting hotter every minute. He felt
like a stalker and didn't much like it, partly because it reminded him of
Javy. When he was twelve Javy had caught him looking through a pair of
binoculars that belonged to his elder brother and beaten him for being a
peeping Tom. Useless to say he hadn't been looking at the woman next
door but at someone's new motorbike parked by the curb.
Forget it, he said to himself, put it out of your mind. He always said
that when he started thinking of his mother and Javy and life at home
but he never really forgot it. Reading Christie's Victims would have passed
the time while he waited, but he might get immersed in it and miss her.
It must be half an hour he'd been there, waiting for her to come out,
keeping his eyeon her front door or shifting it to the golden Jaguar
parked on her drive. Of course he'd seen her on previous visits butit had
always been with some man escorting her or she'dbeen dressed in one of
those semitransparent shifts she liked so much, under a fur wrap or
sequin-embroidered denim jacket,or else in skin-tight jeans and stilt
heels that permitted only small mincing steps. On those occasions she
got into the chauffeur-driven limo.
It wouldn't be long before a traffic warden appeared and moved him on.
Having a client in Campden Hill Square would have been a help but he
didn't. Judging by the bronzed, taut muscled young men who called at
several of these houses, the residents mostly had personal trainers. He
was wondering if there was any point in staying, he had several calls to
make before lunchtime, when a woman out walking a dog banged on the
car window. She had a cigarette in her hand and the dog, not much
bigger than a Beanie Baby, was wearing a redcollar with a diamante tag
hanging from it. They were all richround here.
"You know," she said in a voice like Colette Gilbert-Bamber's, "it's very
wrong of you to sit there with your engine on like that. You're polluting
the environment."
"How about you with your smoke?" The combination of waiting about
and her voice made him angry. "Why don't you get lost and take that toy
on a lead with you?"
She said something about how dared he and marched off , dropping
ash. He was on the point of giving up when Nerissa came out of her front
door and got into her own car. She wore a rose-pink sleeveles stop and
white jeans, her hair tied on the top of her head with a pink silk ribbon.
Mix thought she looked lovelier than ever, even in the big black shades
that half covered her face. Casual suited her. But what kind of fashion
didn't?
To follow her was essential, even if it made him late for the appointment
he had at twelve in Addison Road. He'd give the woman there a call and
say he'd been held up. Nerissa drove into Notting Hill Gate and turned
up toward the Portobello Road but avoided it and went on to Westbourne
Grove. For once, there was very little traffic, nothing to separate his car
from her car or hold them up. Roadworks at the top slowed them both
and he saw her put her head out of the window in an attempt to see what
was going on. But finally they were through the barriers and past the
cones. More suddenly than he expected--she didn't signal--she swung
the car into a meteredspace in a side street, dropped in her coins and
ran up to a door with the number 13 Charing Terrace on it and
"Shoshana's Spa and Health Club" in big chrome letters. By then, staring
after her, he was holding up a stream of traffic. A chorus of hooting and
yells of rage from other drivers at last forced him to move.
He was ten minutes