Until Death Read Free Page A

covering every angle. Now she was never more than seven steps from a camera. Christos said it was for her safety and protection, for the sake of the children, but he never explained why it was necessary or who she was to be protected from. She knew it was to keep tabs on her, and her alone.
    She leaned over the dressing table and stared in the mirror, smearing foundation across her cheeks with jabbing little strokes. She paused and assessed. The coverage wasn’t thick enough. She put on another layer then picked up an eye pencil and got to work. She could hear Florence and Yannis playing in the corridor outside the bedroom. They were racing scooters, scraping the small protruding bit of wall outside her studio and slamming into the entrance lift doors. Her mother-in-law, Medea, ordered them to put the scooters away. The cloakroom door banged open and shut and the padding little steps of seven-year-old Yannis faded. He had been dressed in a sailor suit by Medea, even though he’d wailed and protested at such a sartorial insult. But Christos wanted to parade their children in front of their guests and what Christos wanted, he got.
    The doorbell rang, a harsh, penetrating sound. There would be a waitress waiting with a tray of drinks by the doors that were painted to look like the moulded oak of a grand country house but slid apart to reveal the lift. That was their lives all over, Kelly thought. Pretending to be something they’re not, painted to give the illusion of something else entirely. Her hand shook as she brushed eyeshadow across one of her lids.
    The flat was filling with chatter and laughter, the doorbell buzzing over and over. Undulating tones of excitement and admiration, the clack-clack of stilettos ascending the curving staircase. A small party for eighty, Christos had said. There would be champagne and canapés and staff.
    A low, coarse laugh penetrated the bedroom door and Kelly scowled. Sylvie had arrived and was being greeted by Medea. Sylvie managed to bring out a warmth, a joy, even, in her mother-in-law that was beyond Kelly’s talents. Kelly applied lipstick, decided on another layer and then brushed her hair. Sylvie was now chatting to Florence, bombarding her with questions. Florence’s answers were inaudible. Her shy and quiet eleven-year-old daughter would be wilting under the scrutiny of adults she didn’t know.
    She took off her bathrobe and put on a plain black dress. She glanced out of the bedroom window, the skyline of Bloomsbury and central London laid out before her, the entrance to the hotel at St Pancras directly beneath them, the Euston Road far below, only the faintest hum of traffic audible through the double-glazed windows. A pigeon came to rest on one of the eleven black metal spikes that decorated the windowsill. Even this high up the Victorians hadn’t scrimped on the Gothic splendour of the building. One of the bird’s feet was contorted into a stump, lending it an awkward hobble. It looked too tired to bother to fly away. Kelly knew just how it felt.
    Kelly caught Christos’s voice from somewhere deep in the flat and she froze. She slipped on her black shoes and turned this way and that in front of the mirror, checking. The dress with its three-quarter-length sleeves and high neckline was a good choice. With her heavy make-up she could obliterate all traces of her former self – the person she had understood. For she had become one of those women whom no one understands unless they’ve been in the same situation – the ones who stay with brutal, controlling men because the fear of going is greater than the pain of staying.
    She came out of her bedroom and closed the door, took a deep breath. She met Sylvie on the stairs coming down and was shocked to see that her nose was covered with a thick layer of bandage and gauze and there was bruising under her eyes. Despite her dislike of her rival, she needed to find out if she was all right. ‘What happened to you?’
    Sylvie