Holly Lester by Andrew Rosenheim Page B

forgot. Oh, by the way,’ she said, and her tone suddenly seemed artificially light, ‘the other day, when I’d left, did you stay on for a while?’
    â€˜In the flat, you mean?’ She nodded, watching him carefully. ‘Only for a minute or two. Why?’
    â€˜Nothing. It’s just the owner had some papers there, and he can’t find some of them. I thought maybe you’d picked them up by mistake.’
    Careful, he told himself, for her reasoning was so transparently preposterous – ‘picked them up by mistake’ – that she might as well have asked him outright if he’d gone through Trachtenberg’s papers. He felt it very important now to lie well. So he opened his eyes a little more than usual, adopted an ‘aw shucks’ look of innocence learned from Marla, and put both hands up in mock-protestation. ‘Not me, guv. Honest. I didn’t hang about – the last thing I wanted was to meet the landlord.’
    She nodded again. ‘I’d better be off. Are you about on Sunday afternoon?’
    About? Looking at her now, Billings thought he would manacle himself to the phone if there were any chance of meeting up with her again. ‘I think so,’ he said.
    â€˜You could come up.’
    â€˜To Primrose Hill?’
    She laughed again. ‘Don’t look so alarmed. No, not Primrose Hill – not yet anyway. But look, I’ll ring you.’
    â€˜Do,’ he said, trying to keep the pleading note out of his voice. As she walked out of the gallery and down the street, she waved through the front window. He waved back, then turned around with a grin that was only slightly tempered by the gloomy look on Tara’s face. He felt elated by Holly’s brief visit, but nervous, too. He thought of the document he had taken from the Wimpole Street flat. He still didn’t understand what had led him to pinch it, but he certainly understood it was an important piece of paper, and that same instinct had led him to hide it carefully in his own flat. Not in a locked drawer, not in a safe (he didn’t have one), but inside one of his many large illustrated books, in this case an edition of Andrew Wyeth (Houghton Mifflin, 1972). Not many burglars looking for a one-page document would have the nous or patience to shake out the pages of every book in his flat’s library, which despite Marla’s retention of his best books, was not inconsiderable.
    What had Holly said about Primrose Hill? ‘Not yet.’ What did that mean? He had a wonderful feeling that he would be seeing much more of Holly Lester, and a less pleasing intimation that this meant he would soon be meeting Harry Lester, too.

Chapter 6
    Billings was beginning to understand why single people dreaded weekends, for his were now long and dull.
    Time was he and Marla went for walks, haunted bookshops and museums, and saw the latest flick; now he stayed in by himself, eating cold food and working on exhibition brochures. Even television was no solace; Saturday night’s viewing provided nothing to watch for anyone with more than three hours’ education.
    He was not friendless; from school, university, and his early days in the London art world, he had any number of friends, many by definition long-standing. But whilst happy to have lunch with them in the West End, he was reluctant to see them at the weekends, since all but a few had families: in his reduced bachelor circumstance this made things difficult – he hated being the single man at dinner, and as a hopeless cook, he could not readily reciprocate hospitality.
    In bridging the gap created by his years in New York, moreover, when he had seen English friends at most once or twice a year, Marla had not helped things. He thought, for example, of ringing the Anderson-Russells, once his closest friends in London. But a certain
froideur
lay over their friendship, ever since a dinner party given after Helen