‘A quick getaway,’ she said, shucking off her fancy shoes into the passenger footwell. ‘They were killing me,’ she said and gave him a rueful smile because they’d cost a fortune. He knew – he’d paid for them. She had already removed her bridal veil and tossed it on to the back seat, along with her bouquet, and now she began to struggle with the thicket of grips in her hair. The delicate silk of her wedding dress was already crushed, like moth wings. She glanced at him and said, ‘As you like to say – time to get the hell out of Dodge.’
‘Okay, then. Let’s hit the highway,’ he said and started the engine.
He noticed that she was cupping the bowl of her belly where she was incubating an as yet invisible baby. Another branch to add to the family tree. A twig. A bud. The past counted for nothing, he realized. Only the present had value.
‘Wheels up, then,’ he said and put his foot down on the gas.
On the way, they made a detour up to Rosedale Chimney Bank to stretch their legs and look at the sunset that was flooding the vast sky with a glorious palette of reds and yellows, orange and even violet. It demanded poetry, a thought he voiced out loud, and she said, ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s enough in itself.’ The getting of wisdom, he thought.
There was another car parked up there, an older couple, admiring the view. ‘Magnificent, isn’t it?’ the man said. The woman smiled at them and congratulated the ‘happy couple’ on their wedding and Jackson said, ‘It’s not what it looks like.’
One Week Earlier
Anderson Price Associates
Katja scrutinized Nadja’s make-up. Nadja posed for her as if she were taking a selfie, cheeks sucked in like a corpse, mouth pouted extravagantly.
‘Yeah. Good,’ Katja pronounced finally. She was the younger of the two sisters but was by far the bossier. They could be twins, people always said. There were two years and one and a half inches between them. Katja was the smaller and the prettier of the two, although they were both petite and shared the same shade of (not entirely natural) blonde hair, as well as their mother’s eyes – green irises encircled by grey.
‘Hold still,’ Nadja said and brushed an eyelash off Katja’s cheek. Nadja had a degree in Hospitality Management and worked at the Radisson Blu, where she wore a pencil-skirted suit and two-inch heels and tidied her hair away in a tight bun while she dealt with complaining guests. People complained all the time. When she got home to her shoe-box apartment she shook her hair free and put on jeans and a big sweatshirt and walked around barefoot and no one complained because she lived on her own, which was the way she liked it.
Katja had a job in Housekeeping in the same hotel. Her English wasn’t as good as her older sister’s. She didn’t have any qualifications beyond school and even those were mediocre because she had spent her childhood and most of her teenage years ice-skating competitively, but in the end she just wasn’t good enough. It was a cruel, vicious world and she missed it every day. The ice rink had made her tough and she still had a skater’s figure, lithe and strong. It drove men a little crazy. For Nadja it had been dancing – ballet – but she had given it up when their mother couldn’t afford to pay for lessons for both of them. She had sacrificed her talent easily, or so it seemed to Katja.
Katja was twenty-one, living at home, and couldn’t wait to fly the stifling nest, even though she knew that a job in London would almost certainly be the same as the one she had here – making beds and cleaning toilets and pulling strangers’ soapy hair out of plugholes. But once she was there things would change, she knew they would.
The man was called Mr Price. Mark Price. He was a partner in a recruitment agency called Anderson Price Associates – APA – and had already interviewed Nadja over Skype. Nadja reported to Katja that he was attractive – tanned, a full head of attractively greying hair (‘like George Clooney’), a gold signet ring and a heavy Rolex on his wrist (‘like Roger Federer’). ‘He’d better look out, I might marry him,’ Katja said to her sister and they both laughed.
Nadja had emailed scans of her qualifications and references