I have work to do here. So now that you’ve had your little say, could you go and leave us in peace?’
Hey? What? What about me?
There was a long silence. Finally, Roo heard Niall’s exhalation of defeat. Then footsteps as he made his way out of the salon. The door opened, then closed.
Everyone waited.
At last Jackie announced, ‘He’s back in his car. Driving off. Gone.’
And the towel was lifted away from Roo’s face.
Yasmin gazed down at her. ‘Oops.’
Roo’s mouth was as dry as the Sahara. She unstuck her tongue. ‘How did you know?’
‘OK,’ Jackie broke in. ‘For a start, you’re Daisy Deeva.’
‘What?’ Roo’s head whipped round; Jackie was standing behind the reception desk with her arms crossed beneath her jacked-up bosom. ‘You mean all of you know about this?’
‘Of course we do.’ Jackie’s tone was cool. She glanced out of the window again. ‘Yaz, Mrs Simpson’s here for her appointment. She’s just paying the taxi.’
‘Right.’ Yasmin indicated Roo’s unpainted toes. ‘Shall we clean you up and give these a miss for today? After this next appointment it’s my lunch break. How about if you wait in the café up the road and I’ll join you in twenty minutes?’
She was giving nothing away. Roo swallowed and said, ‘Right.’ What other choice did she have?
***
It wasn’t twenty minutes. More like forty. It felt like forty hours. Roo couldn’t stop shaking. Her stomach was all churned up. Was she sitting in the wrong café? How could she possibly have known?
Finally the door opened and Yasmin came in. She chatted to the waitress at the counter, ordered herself a latte, then made her way over to the table in the corner where Roo was sitting.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Roo blurted out. ‘Really I am. I hate myself. And I know it should never have happened in the first place, but it’s all over now, I promise.’
‘I know it is,’ said Yasmin.
Roo’s palms were damp; she surreptitiously wiped them on her jeans. ‘How did you find out?’
‘OK, from the beginning? Over the years I’ve got to know my husband pretty well. And I know he’s a good liar. Apart from one thing. The lying might be good, but he can’t control his neck.’ Yasmin patted her own neck. ‘Maybe you noticed it yourself. It goes kind of blotchy. Dead giveaway. Anyhow, the first time you came into the salon we thought you were Daisy Deeva but you said you weren’t. So that night I was telling Niall about you and the weirdest thing happened. His neck went blotchy!’
For heaven’s sake, was she serious? ‘That was it? Just his neck?’
‘Well, I wasn’t sure. But you’d lied,’ Yasmin pointed out. ‘So that made two things to be suspicious about. Then there was the evening we were out and we bumped into your friend Ellie. It did seem slightly strange that she couldn’t remember the name of her own child.’
Roo licked her lips, she still had no idea where this was heading. ‘So then you knew.’
‘Well, the neck thing happened again. Worse this time. It was pretty obvious that Niall was wondering what the hell was going on!’
‘It was all over by then. I’d finished with him.’
‘OK.’ Yasmin nodded, mentally piecing events together. ‘So was he also seeing Vivica then?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s why you stopped seeing him?’
Roo flushed and nodded, awash with shame.
‘Out of interest, did Niall tell you where I worked?’
‘No. I found a list of things you’d asked him to buy. Written on salon paper.’
‘Ah. That makes more sense.’ Yasmin leaned forward and took a sip of her latte.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you knew?’
‘Honestly? I’ve no idea. I was just so curious. You kept coming back to the salon. And you seemed really nice, which was confusing. I had no idea what you were up to. None of us could work out what was going on. But I didn’t want to confront you, because then you’d disappear.’ The corners of Yasmin’s mouth lifted. ‘And this might sound mercenary, but you’re the best tipper I ever had.’
Roo was busy pleating the edges of the blue and white tablecloth. ‘You must hate me so much.’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? That’s the weird thing, though. I don’t. I never have.’
‘The first time we came, it was to find out what you were like.’
‘To see if I was as awful as Niall said I was, you mean? Nagging, moaning, bad-tempered, and always shattered? I can imagine what he told you. And sometimes it was true.’ Wryly, Yasmin went on, ‘Having to