Until Death Read Free Page B

smiled and made light of it, waving away her concern. ‘It looks bad but it’s nothing. I’ve got nasal polyps. They have to go in and dig around, it’s disgusting. The worst thing is they cut them out but they grow back in two years. Gonna have to have it done again one day.’
    ‘Is it painful?’
    Sylvie made a scoffing sound. ‘The bandages will come off in a couple of days.’
    There was an awkward pause. Here they were, the wife and the mistress, chatting away as if they were friends. Which they weren’t. They were so, so far from friends they needed to invent a new word for enemy. But that didn’t mean Kelly didn’t act nice when the interloper was in her house. She might be fearful but she wasn’t stupid.
    Sylvie’s mouth was moving and Kelly tuned back in. ‘Medea needs a pashmina. It’s freezing up in that living room.’
    Kelly watched Sylvie as she turned right at the bottom of the stairs. She was doing all the running, thinking her efforts would pay off. She obviously didn’t realise that Christos would never leave his wife. A crowd of people she didn’t know pushed past, eyes on the top of the stairs. She followed them up to find about forty people in the living room. She paused, her eyes roaming over the guests. Their home was all about views, and the large, open-plan living room that ran the width of the building. They were high above the skyline here and had no curtains or blinds because there was no need. Through a series of pointed Gothic windows on the far wall, north London was revealed, the green spaces of Primrose Hill and Hampstead Heath; if she turned around, central London was exposed. The space was too large really, living quarters fashioned from a grand municipal building that didn’t have the cosy or workable proportions of a home. The room was echoey and the acoustics bad, the floor was laid with gaudy marble tiles and the furniture had been specially commissioned to be large so that it filled the space. A grand piano no one had the skill to play stood in one corner, and part of the room was divided by a large aquarium in which brightly coloured fish swam on a never-ending loop from one end to the other. She saw Christos standing with his back to her and walked through the crowd that surrounded him. She linked arms with him and kissed him on the cheek.
    ‘There you are!’ He stood back to appreciate her fully. ‘Doesn’t my wife look beautiful?’ He introduced her to some people who worked in his office. Kelly shook a bunch of hands and fixed on a smile. Sometimes you couldn’t get away. And then it became a question of enduring. She put her arm round Christos’s waist and pushed closer to him. We do what we must to survive, she thought. She automatically began to scan the crowd, looking for her children.
    She felt a pull on her dress and turned round. ‘Mum, I need to tell you something.’ It was Florence, her pale eyes staring up at Kelly.
    ‘What’s the matter, Flo?’ She took her hand and bent down low so she could hear her quiet voice.
    ‘I’m hungry.’
    ‘Come with me.’ Kelly excused herself and they walked into the kitchen. The room was stacked with boxes of supplies for the caterers. They were in the end of the building here, windows facing full west where the stream of headlights on the raised motorway that sliced through London on its way to Oxford never ceased. Off the kitchen on the left were various storerooms and the service lift that stopped on the floor below at the far end of the corridor and then the ground floor. Caterers were loading canapés on to silver platters and uncorking champagne bottles. ‘Do you want some cocktail sausages?’
    Florence shrugged, pulling herself up to sit on a counter and swinging her legs. ‘I don’t know.’
    Kelly guessed she had used her hunger as an excuse to get her mother on her own. She opened the fridge and scanned the contents. ‘Do you want a cheese sandwich?’
    She shrugged again. Kelly took that to