Lizzie’s mouth dropped open in shock. She knew it was unlikely that Anna would be her biggest fan, but the naked hostility took her aback.
‘I was only trying to help,’ she said.
‘Well, don’t.’ Anna had an arm about her brother and was steering him towards the exit now. ‘Arthur—’ She jerked her head towards the door. ‘We’re leaving.’
Arthur, who had been talking swiftly and quietly to Jason, broke off with a nod and followed his siblings out of the wide plate glass doors of the lobby and down the steps to a waiting taxi. Kat waited a discreet interval and then came steaming across to Lizzie’s side, all outraged indignation now that Anna had gone.
‘How dare she speak to you like that?’ Kat fumed. ‘She’s bloody rude!’
‘She’s upset,’ Lizzie said mechanically. She was staring after the family and caught one last glance of Johnny’s pinched, unhappy face and those haunted blue eyes before he disappeared into the car. ‘Her sister’s just died,’ she said. ‘Cut her some slack.’
Kat shrugged, clearly unsympathetic. ‘I don’t see why she’s trying to blame you,’ she said. ‘That was totally uncalled for.’
‘Everyone is blaming me,’ Lizzie said tiredly. ‘It helps to have a target at a time like this.’
‘Then let them blame Dudley,’ Kat said. ‘It’s his fault not yours.’
Lizzie pulled a face. The trouble was that she knew there had been some truth in Anna’s words. She could shrug it off – if Dudley had preferred to spend time with her rather than with his wife, was that her fault? – but a small, nagging voice at the back of her mind said she could have behaved differently. She hadn’t cared about Amelia’s feelings. And now Amelia was dead.
‘I didn’t know Arthur was in London,’ Kat said, as though her celebrity radar had failed her badly. ‘He’s practically a hermit these days.’ She opened her eyes wide. ‘He’s a farmer, of all things. Can you believe it?’
‘Sure,’ Lizzie said. ‘There are a lot of very good-looking farmers around.’
‘But he used to present all those nature and wildlife programmes with cute ducklings and baby birds,’ Kat protested. ‘He was on the TV, and he did some modelling, and then he gave it all up to go back to university. Beggars belief, doesn’t it?’ Her expression registered blank incomprehension. ‘One minute he’s a celeb, and coining it in with sponsorship deals, and the next he’s mucking out cows? Please! In what universe does that make any sense?’
‘In one you don’t inhabit,’ Lizzie said. She shrugged. ‘Not everyone wants to be a celebrity, Kat.’
Kat was scrolling through her Facebook feed, talking at the same time as she tapped out messages. ‘Did you see that the press are linking all the recent deaths in Amelia’s family?’ she asked. ‘They’ve raked up the story of Amelia’s mother and Arthur’s fiancée. They’re calling them the cursed celebrity family.’
‘That’s not very catchy,’ Lizzie said. Even so, she shuddered. Press stories could be crass and intrusive at the best of times; introducing some sort of horror story element into a tragedy was unpleasantly sensationalist. Kat, however, seemed hooked. ‘Oh. My. God,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten how terrible Jenna looked by the end.’ She glanced at Lizzie. ‘Did you ever meet her? Jenna Gascoyne? She was in a few high-profile films but her career tanked when she started to suffer from anorexia.’ Kat paused. ‘Poor Jenna, she looks like a ghost in this photo. They say she was living on tissues and laxatives. Arthur did his best but she was beyond help. He—’
‘—is coming back inside,’ Lizzie said. ‘So you’d better stop talking about him.’ Her chest tightened with something akin to panic. There was no chance of getting into the car and heading to the studio until the scrum of reporters had eased a little and the last thing she wanted was Arthur coming in and taking up where Anna had left off. He was crossing the foyer towards them now. Kat smoothed her skirt and stood up a little straighter, smiling as he approached. ‘Wow,’ she breathed in Lizzie’s ear. ‘He is so hot.’
Lizzie didn’t reply. She would have categorised Arthur as very hot indeed were it not for the fact that he was looking at her with absolute disdain which prejudiced her against him quite strongly. The scar on her palm where the crystal had cut her tingled suddenly. She pressed her hands together.