Holly Lester by Andrew Rosenheim

know you can be trusted? How does she know you aren’t friends with a tabloid hack? Like me?’
    â€˜You wouldn’t,’ said Billings with false confidence. Looking at the gleeful expression on his friend’s face, he added more urgently, ‘I’m counting on you. Tell me I can count on you.’
    â€˜I missed my calling. I should have been a door-stepping gossip columnist, a William Hickey
de nos jours
. Here you are, one minute denying everything, the next practically on your knees, begging me not to sell it to the
News of the World
.’
    â€˜You can keep secrets,’ Billings pleaded, thinking of the only occasion when he had been forced to rely on McBain’s discretion overcoming his nose for a scoop. A stolen Francis Bacon, missing for some twelve years, had been offered to Billings, who had promptly contacted the police. McBain had kept it out of his column until an arrest had been made.
    â€˜Calm down. I can keep secrets.’ McBain took a gulp from his coffee. ‘Most of the time anyway, and certainly for a friend. Though I think you ought to know that Marla’s been to see Jackie.’
    â€˜Oh good.’ He was glad Marla and McBain’s wife kept in touch; Marla had always liked her.
    â€˜I mean professionally – Marla’s been to see her
professionally
.’
    â€˜What? As a patient?’
    â€˜It was just a consultation. Jackie can’t take her on, of course. She’s referred her to someone else.’
    Billings felt a mix of emotions he could not sort out. ‘You shouldn’t be telling me this. It’s meant to be confidential.’
    McBain shrugged. ‘Listen, James. I may be a journalist, but my ethical code doesn’t come from some twat on the Press Council reprimanding me for crossing a line of taste only he can see. I makes my ethics as I finds them; all I can do is try and keep them human.’
    McBain swallowed the rest of his coffee and put down his mug. ‘So yes, I suppose I shouldn’t have said a dickie bird about it, but I thought you’d want to know. I’m sure Marla’s not the easiest person in the world, but at least it looks like she’s trying to do something about it. Who knows? People do change; maybe Marla will.’
    Billings had once thought the same thing. Returning to England he had tried to keep an open mind, hoping Marla could begin afresh. That was before the milkman, the grocer, the postman, the candlestick maker, the pissed-off pugilist of Kensington Place. Wearily he shook his head. ‘Of course Marla may change. And pigs might fly.’
    â€˜And you might sleep with the wife of the future Prime Minister.’
    Billings ignored this and took the mugs to the galley, with McBain following behind. Back in New York Billings had been friends for a while with a man who, thirty years before, had enjoyed a single night of passion with a movie star – had it been Julie Christie? Faye Dunaway? Billings could not remember. Virtually every time they met, this fact would emerge, usually after two or three drinks, and it would be invoked so artlessly that it seemed to be the sole distinctive accomplishment of the man. True, he was otherwise utterly unremarkable; perhaps it was his very greyness which accounted for the relentless mentions of his celebrity one-night stand. Would Billings’s own one-off rendezvous with Holly Lester grow to assume the same importance for him? God, he hoped not; he would do better to forget the whole business.
    And already his meeting with her in the Wimpole Street flat was assuming the hazy status of a dream. Primrose Hill seemed real enough, but the madcap drive to doctor land, and the weird anonymity of the apartment were growing murky. He had made love to Holly Lester; he tried hard to remember the specifics, but the vivid sensations of his time in bed with her were beginning to fade, perhaps because he had unwittingly pushed that most