What They Do in the Dark - By Amanda Coe Page 0,83

all. The surprise of this suited Pauline. Maybe most people weren’t real, just pretending to be. It helped when you knew that, that they might be ghosts, like you. Unless that meant the people you only had a chance of meeting as ghosts, like Joanne, were less likely to be ghosts themselves.

She and Gemma ambled to the road, almost friends.

‘I’ll get done,’ Gemma said. ‘I was supposed to come straight back, me mum’ll be really worried about me.’

And then she looked down at herself. She saw the grass juice staining her knees and hem, which led to her discovering a tear under the sleeve of her bright dress.

‘Oh, God,’ she said, and this time she wasn’t playing. ‘She’ll kill me.’ Pauline could see she meant it. She was terrified. She definitely couldn’t go home.

FRANK DIDN’T TAKE a holiday, as a rule. In his opinion, holidays were overrated, unless you could afford to stay somewhere in the lap of luxury, which was beyond his means. The crotch of luxury, as Lol called it. Fortunately he did quite well with invitations to the country, weekend jollies which made a nice change, although there was still so much talking to do to earn his keep, and after a week of yapping, what Frank craved was peace and quiet, emphasis on the quiet. Sometimes he thought that was why he and Lol rubbed along so well, because God knows it hadn’t been for the sex since nineteen ought dumpty. Lol knew when to be quiet. If he didn’t actually soothe, he certainly didn’t agitate.

The one concession Frank made during the August exodus was to work the odd day from home, since Veronica insisted on her two weeks, and he couldn’t get on with breaking in temps, except for typing letters. Inducting an eighteen-year-old into the arcana of which clients to put through to him and under what circumstances, let alone in a fortnight, was plain impossible. So Frank resigned himself to the modest difficulties of a stretch of doing his own phone work, which was lighter in any case because most people were away. And on the days he was at home, he knew that only the chosen few had the number to the hotline in the study.

Which is how Katrina got him, on an afternoon when he was putting his house in order, appraising the contents of his sock drawer. He didn’t even hear the phone. As usual, it was the boys – as Lol said, Jack Russells were traditionally agents’ dogs, bred to alert you to the phone ringing even through walls. They trotted in to find him, then both accompanied him, weaving eagerly through his short stride, to the study.

‘Have you spoken to her?’

It was left to Frank to work out who was on the line. Quite a few of his clients did this, as though the unique umbilical connection meant it could be only one person. But Katrina had been phoning a lot recently, so he had no difficulty.

‘We’ve left messages,’ he soothed. ‘The Yanks say they don’t know anything about it, and the Italian lot don’t seem to know where she’s got to.’

‘Never mind that, she’s supposed to be coming to the party. What about the plane fares?’

Frank put the unpaired socks he was holding down on the arm of a desk chair. He never sat during calls, but paced, as far as the telephone cord would allow, which was almost as far along the corridor as the bedroom, the boys running shotgun all the while. Lol was out, and he was their best chance for a doubleyew ay ell kay. These bloody plane fares. Katrina really didn’t seem to care any more about the kid’s screen test, or the film, so long as she got the money back, which you might reasonably say was holiday money, which the family could in any case well afford from what he happened to know Lallie had earned last year, however much they claimed it was all salted away for her until she was eighteen.

‘I’ll talk to the studio direct, my love, go over the producer’s head. She’s not really the producer anyway, it’s the way they are over there, all chiefs and no ruddy Indians.’

It might be worth a try. He knew that girl had been off-kilter when she’d rung him to ask which team Hugh played for. Although evading her financial responsibilities was pure producer. Professional enough really, if a bit on the cheap side for a studio boss. At