Deep and Silent Waters Read Free

street far below. Then he would give her a violent shove, and she would fall backwards, out of the window, down, down, through empty air, screaming. She always woke up before she hit the ground. For hours afterwards she would sit up in bed, shivering and icy cold.
    It had never happened, of course, not to Laura. It had been his wife who had fallen out of a window. Why did she always dream it had happened to her?
    Guilt, Laura thought bleakly, because she had been jealous of his wife. She had bought every newspaper that covered the inquest and read every word over and over again. Witnesses had talked of his wife under pressure on her most recent film, arriving late on set, losing her temper, turning nasty when she forgot her lines, or stumbling around so drunk that she kept banging into scenery. A post-mortem had shown that she had been drunk the day she died. She could easily have lost her balance and fallen out of the open window which had a waist-high sill – a dangerous window, the coroner said, and added that her husband should have kept her away from it. His criticisms were mild, though, because another witness had been present, Sebastian’s assistant, Valerie Hyde, who claimed that he had been nowhere near his wife when she fell. Rachel Lear had opened the window and leaned out too far.
    A thin, brisk, down-to-earth woman, with a direct way of looking at anyone she spoke to, Valerie made a convincing witness. But Laura knew something that the coroner could not have known: Valerie Hyde would go to the stake for Sebastian; would cheat or steal for him. She might have been telling the truth, of course, but she would not have hesitated to lie.
    Melanie said abruptly, ‘You
must
go to Venice, Laura – this is your first nomination, you
have
to be there.’
    Laura shook her head. ‘Who am I up against?’
    Reluctantly Melanie told her the names, and Laura threw up her hands. ‘Well, there you are! They’re all better actresses than me, and better known, too. I don’t have a chance.’
    Furious, Melanie said, ‘Well, if you don’t go, I can’t. I’ve never been to the Venice Film Festival and I’m dying to. It’s a great excuse to buy a really stunning new frock on expenses. It’s not often I can do that. And you can’t wear just anything to Venice – it’s supposed to be even more glamorous than Cannes.’
    Melanie loved clothes, far more even than films or plays. Her whole face lit up when she talked about them. She should have become a dress designer, but she had missed her chance, early on, by getting a job as a secretary to a theatrical agent instead of going to college to study art and textiles. Her Russian-Jewish father had been in the rag trade in the East End, and as a child, Melanie had been dressed like a little princess. It had left her with a passion for style and cut, and a taste for the exotic, which perfectly suited her long, straight black hair and huge leonine gold eyes.
    Her skin was either olive or golden, depending on her health and mood, and Melanie needed colour to bring to life the beauty buried in her generously endowed flesh. She was larger than life, in every sense of the word, lion-hearted, a fighter, voluble and open-handed. She fell in and out of love with the same fierce concentration.
    Over the last three years, she had built up Laura’s career with that same intense commitment, but it had been Sebastian who had made Laura an actress. Indeed, it had been Sebastian who had told her she needed an agent, when he first offered her a contract, and who has suggested Melanie, saying he had heard she was good. She didn’t have many clients yet, but would work harder for Laura than someone whose books were already full of stars. Some actors might have suspected a secret deal between Sebastian and Melanie, but they would have been wrong. Far from conspiring with him, Melanie couldn’t wait to get Laura more money from someone else. She had never had much time for Sebastian, and he knew