Girl Seven Read Free

when it would all come out, having been given time to rot.
    I shut my eyes and tried to steady my breathing. The sharp edges of the business card were hurting my palm.
    You will not cry.
    You will not cry.
    You will not cry.
    After a while, when I’d forced myself to meditate for a moment and clear my head, I left the stairwell and asked around to see if Noel was at the club tonight. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t going to be there until early the next morning.
    Without anyone to vent my fury on, I told them all I was feeling ill and went home early. I avoided looking back in the direction of Mark Chester’s table, but I took the professional killer’s business card with the number and no name.
    I didn’t sleep that night, which allowed plenty of time for the rage to build by the time I left for the Underground again at ten in the morning. The air had a bite to it: cold and bitter for this time of year. Some skinhead was already shouting at his young girlfriend outside a Starbucks. I fantasized about putting him in an armlock and breaking his wrist.
    I let myself into the club through the staff entrance and found Daisy, the bleached-blonde barmaid, already counting the float into the till.
    ‘All right, Bitch-face,’ I called. ‘You’re early. Is Noel upstairs?’
    Daisy looked up at me and smiled. ‘Hey, Fuck-rabbit.’ Even in the colder days of summer she didn’t wear much. In fact, even during winter I couldn’t recall seeing her wearing any­thing that covered her legs, nipples and midriff simultaneously. ‘So are you. Yeah, he’s upstairs. Do I need to put on the old head­phones and whack-up some Tool?’
    ‘Maybe, but not for the reason you’re thinking.’
    ‘Yeah, whatever.’ She gave me an animated thumbs-up.
    Daisy was the only one here whom I distinguished from the other girls. In a way, she was distinguished from the other girls. She didn’t entertain and perform and fuck and get fucked like the rest of us. Rumour was, her boyfriend had got her the bar job to stop her from getting bored. Her boyfriend was a hitman called Nic Caruana.
    A professional killer, I thought, like Mark.
    I left her and headed upstairs to Noel’s office.
    It was silent on the second floor. He never worked to music. He was remarkably sensitive to sound and couldn’t sleep with the slightest background noise. Even when he had the TV on it was at a volume almost no one else could hear.
    I let myself into his office without knocking.
    Noel looked up from his laptop, affronted, but then he smiled. Unlike most men, he became more handsome when he smiled. It showed his age; the late-thirties lines around his blue eyes stood out and his face became more weathered. But he wore middle age well, like an expensive luxury accessory, like the suit jackets he wore over his jeans.
    ‘Hey you,’ he said, beginning to stand. ‘What are you doing here?’
    I shut the door, pulled out the second wheeled chair with some commotion and sat down. The office was psychotically tidy, with papers and folders stacked in size order and every­thing arranged at right angles.
    He stared at me, and slowly lowered himself back into his chair.
    I raised my eyebrows, damned if I was going to speak first.
    ‘Am I about to be told off?’ he ventured.
    ‘Well, I’ll give you some credit for realizing you’ve done some­thing wrong.’
    A couple more seconds.
    ‘Ah,’ he said, chewing his lip a little. ‘Ah. I... didn’t think he’d speak to you.’
    ‘What kind of excuse is that?’ I snapped, reciting a mantra in my head to stay calm, stay calm, stay calm... ‘So it’s OK for you to share my private business about my family with a stranger as long as it doesn’t get back to me? Is that your logic here? If Noel Braben shoots his mouth off to a random guy in the forest and Seven doesn’t hear, does it make a sound?’
    ‘Well, you once shared your private business with a stranger the first time you met them. You had no issue with telling