Forget Me Knot (36 page)

Having become aware of Cinders’s good points, Abby did her best to like her, but it still wasn’t easy. For a start, she was forever kidnapping Martin. Cinders called it “borrowing,” as in: “Oh, Abby, you don’t mind me borrowing Martin for a few ticks, do you?” No sooner had he finished his deliveries each morning than she would send him out to collect her dry cleaning or detox herbs from her Chinese healer. “A few ticks” inevitably turned into an hour or more.

On returning from a mission—if Cinders was between takes—Martin would make them both jasmine tea and the
pair would spend a few minutes chatting in the living room. Abby could hear them from the bedroom. Cinders seemed to have a genuine affection for Martin, judging by the time she spent listening to him singing Ichiro’s praises or tearfully lamenting the loss of Debbie Harry. It turned out that she, too, owned a pooch that was the love of her life.

“You poor darling. I just don’t know what I’d do if I were separated from Princess Coco.”

“I thought about hiring a lawyer and taking Christian to court, but I can’t afford it.”

“Of course you can’t. It would cost thousands.” She paused. “There just has to be something I can do to help you get her back.”

Then one day Christian turned up—with Debbie Harry in tow—to complain that the film trucks were blocking the road and holding up the traffic. Dan was very calm and tactful and showed Christian the letters he had received from the council, giving the crew permission to park outside the shop. Christian snorted. There was clearly nothing he could do to challenge the council’s decision.

By now Martin had seen Debbie Harry and rushed outside. On seeing him, the dog strained on her lead and began to yelp in delight.

Martin cried out to her. “Hi, Debbie… how have you been? Who loves you, baby?”

“Don’t come any nearer,” Christian warned, raising an open palm.

“You can’t tell me what to do. I have every right to pet my own dog.”

Christian began pulling on Debbie’s lead, but she refused to budge. Then she began rearing up, trying desperately to get closer to Martin. Christian yanked the lead
hard. The dog began barking. He yelled at her to shut up and pulled the lead again.

“Stop it,” Martin cried. “You’re hurting her!”

Martin could contain himself no longer. He lunged forward and made a grab for Debbie Harry’s lead. But Christian was too quick for him and managed to sidestep the attempt. Martin lost his balance and fell flat on his face. Christian merely smirked, yanked Debbie Harry’s lead and led the poor yelping animal away.

By now a shaken Cinders was helping Martin up off the pavement. “My God, you OK?”

He brushed some dirt off his sweater and the knees of his jeans. “Yeah. I’m fine. It’s that poor dog I’m worried about. Christian has a vicious temper, but I’ve never seen him take it out on an animal, least of all Debbie. I’m really scared.”

“Me, too. I saw how he treated her. What a horrible, horrible man. Right, we have to do something about this. I don’t know what, but I promise, I will come up with something.”

MARTIN WAS
only too aware that by being at Cinders’s constant beck and call, he was deserting his post at Fabulous Flowers. He kept apologizing to Abby for letting her down. “I just don’t know what to do. I do try saying no to her, but then she starts looking pathetic and I give in. Plus, she’s really taken an interest in Debbie Harry and wants to help me get her back. I feel guilty refusing her when she’s been so kind.”

Abby could see he was in a quandary. She told him not
to worry and that she would have a quiet word with Cinders and sort things out.

In the end she didn’t need to. Katie Shaw, Dan’s location finder, reappeared and came to the rescue. It turned out that Katie wasn’t so much a location finder as Dan’s occasional, ad hoc girl Friday. Frantic as he was with filming, Dan had noticed what was going on between Martin and Cinders and had taken time out to deal with the situation. “She’s meant to be working at my flat doing all the paperwork on the film, but I think we really need her here to relieve Martin and nurse our star,” he told Abby.

Abby couldn’t have been more impressed or grateful. “Oh, darling, you are so totally brilliant,” she said one morning, doing a perfect impersonation of Cinders, which had Dan hooting with laughter and dragging her into the back room for a quick snog.

A jolly, easygoing soul, Katie took Cinders’s demands in stride. One morning, when she was on her way out to run some errand or other, she took Abby aside: “I just wanted to say how utterly fab it is that you and the Deejster have got it together. When his last relationship broke up, he turned into a dreadful old crosspatch, but now he’s totally transformed and back to his old self.”

“You really think that’s due to me?”

“Of course. Who else?”

If Abby had known Katie better, she would have taken the woman into her confidence and admitted that she wasn’t convinced. For a few days after her “big” conversation with Dan, during which he had reassured her that Cinders’s absurd, overly demonstrative behavior toward him and all the other men on the set was nothing more than
luvvie insecurity, she felt as if a massive weight had lifted from her. Then the doubts had started to creep back.

Try as she might, Abby couldn’t get over the fact that whenever she saw Dan and Cinders together, the woman’s hands were all over him. If she wasn’t straightening his shirt collar, then she was smoothing his hair or resting her hand on his knee. Despite what Dan had said about her draping herself over all the men on set, Abby was in no doubt that Cinders was far more touchy-feely with him than she was with the other men, whose clothes and hair she tended to leave alone.

Cinders also continued to make claims on Dan’s time. Since he was now spending most evenings with his film editor, this was usually in the afternoons, when they had finished filming. Abby knew there were justifiable and often urgent script-related reasons for them to spend time together, but she couldn’t prevent her mind from filling with fantasies—involving silk negligees, champagne and chocolate-dipped strawberries—in which Cinders finally managed to seduce Dan.

One morning, she was working in her bedroom and thinking about going for a walk and picking up a lunchtime sandwich when Martin came bursting in.

“Hey, ever thought of knocking before you enter a lady’s boudoir? I could have been naked.”

Ignoring Abby’s protest, he perched himself on the edge of her bed. “I have news,” he cried, clapping his hands in glee. “And I got this straight from the horse’s mouth. Our Cinders has a secret boyfriend back in L.A. Some mega movie star, apparently. That was all she’d tell me.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. And he sounds gorgeous. Tall, dark, fabulous
body… By the time she’d finished describing him, I was getting quite hot under the collar, I can tell you.”

“I’m gobsmacked. I don’t know what to say.”

“Oh, it was OK. I managed to control myself—”

“Not about you getting turned on, you dope—about Cinders having a boyfriend. It never occurred to me.”

“So now will you stop fretting? Dan, Soph and I have been right all along. Cinders wants Dan’s attention, not his body.”

The relief Abby felt at the news was instantaneous. It shot through her and warmed her like malt whiskey on a freezing day.

She soon found herself mellowing toward Cinders. Not only did the woman appear to be no threat, but she had also kept her promise to help Martin get custody of Debbie Harry. It turned out that Cinders had a TV-producer friend who had just received a commission to make an English version of
Judge Judy
, which would be given the tacky imitative title
Judge Trudy
. The producer was on the lookout for suitable cases that Judge Trudy could preside over.

“Anyway, when Rollo—that’s the producer—heard about my dispute with Christian, he said it would be perfect for the show,” Martin told Abby.

“And Christian’s agreed to this? I don’t believe it. Why on earth would he risk losing Debbie Harry? It makes no sense.”

“Au contraire. It makes perfect sense. Christian is so arrogant and deluded that it won’t have occurred to him for a second he could lose.”

“And you’ve both agreed to abide by the judge’s decision?”

“Absolutely,” Martin said. “That’s the deal.”

“But has it occurred to you that you could lose?”

“Of course it has, but since I can’t afford to hire a lawyer and take Christian to proper court, what choice do I have?”

Abby was quick to thank Cinders for helping Martin.

“My pleasure,” Cinders said. “That awful Christian creature needs to be taught a lesson.”

Abby had warmed to Cinders so much now that once or twice, when Katie wasn’t around to run errands, she even offered to go out and fetch her an herb tea. When Cinders took to watching films on her iPhone between takes, Abby found herself saying that Cinders was more than welcome to watch movies on her big-screen TV. Cinders seemed genuinely touched by the offer but insisted she was fine with her iPhone. She gave every impression of thoroughly enjoying being curled up in one of Abby’s armchairs with her headphones on, lost in her own world. Afterward, she never volunteered the name of the movie she had been watching. Stranger still, if anybody inquired, she would pretend not to have heard and change the subject.

WHEN THE
final day of filming arrived, Abby felt quite sad. She was going to miss the film crew and their banter. Even though they hadn’t spent much quality time together, she was going to miss having Dan around. It occurred to her that she might even miss Cinders. Getting back to “normal” seemed a rather dull prospect.

She’d told Dan that she was going to cook a celebratory end-of-filming dinner. She promised candles, champagne and tiramisu, and he promised to stay the night.

At lunchtime she popped into S&M to pick up a couple of individual racks of lamb.

No sooner had the store’s automatic doors parted than she noticed a crowd of women gathered round one of the long checkout counters. An S&M assistant was handing out leaflets. Assuming she was promoting some kind of special offer, Abby went over to investigate.

A middle-aged woman in a business suit finished scanning her leaflet and looked up at Abby. “About time, too,” she said. “I’ve been saying for years that the customers are the best people to canvass about what’s going wrong at S&M.”

“I wrote to them ages ago,” another woman was saying, “with a list of complaints and suggestions of ways they could turn the store around, but I didn’t even get a reply. Now they actually want to know what I think. Can you believe it?”

Abby blinked. What? The powers that be at S&M were actively seeking customer opinion—just as she’d suggested to Dan? She took a leaflet from the assistant and began reading. Customers were being asked to give their views on the cut, color, quality and style of clothes.
Would you say S&M garments are a) enhanced by the occasional motif or b) spoiled by the look of the motifs?

Would you say that S&M a) always keeps up with fashion trends, b) usually keeps up, c) rarely keeps up and needs to improve?

She read to the end. Every subject raised by the questionnaire was one she had previously discussed with Dan.

What was more, it turned out that as part of a general modernization scheme, the company was about to revamp every one of its eight hundred stores. They were taking on
Trevor Monk, the award-winning designer who had just “interiored” the Hotel Bristol in Park Lane.

Abby put the leaflet in her bag and carried on toward the food hall. How weird was this? She had suggested every one of these changes to Dan. What had he been doing— passing them on to the powers that be at the company without telling her? She laughed at the ridiculousness of the idea. He had no “in” at S&M—at least none he’d mentioned. Then suddenly her mind flew back to when she’d found the S&M in-house magazine in Dan’s flat. Maybe he did have some connection with the company. And if he did, why hadn’t he said something? What could he possibly have to hide?

When she got back to Fabulous Flowers, she was still puzzling and fretting. She went up to the flat to put her shopping in the fridge. Cinders was curled up in an armchair, glued to the screen of her iPhone. She was moving her head in time to whatever music she was listening to. Abby watched her for a second or two. Eventually Cinders started singing. At first Abby couldn’t make out the words, but as she got more carried away, her singing got louder and Abby finally realized that she was singing along to Hank Reno’s “Cherokee Lou, Don’t Let Me Die in the Jailhouse.”

Abby went over and waved her hand in front of Cinders’s face, just to let her know she was there. Cinders looked up, took the white buds out of her ears and said hi.

“I thought you went to the pub with Dan and the crew,” Abby said.

“I did, but then I realized that I’d left my iPhone here. I just came back to get it. I guess I started watching a movie.”

“
Tumble Down
?”

“Yes.” She reddened, clearly embarrassed at being found out.

“Biopics can be a bit so-so,” Abby said, “but this has to be one of my top films. Liam Heggarty and Geneva Raine couldn’t have been better cast—and I just adore the music, don’t you?”

“God, yes,” Cinders said. A wistful look came over her. “‘Cheatin’ Woman, Gonna Drive My Truck Right over You’ is my all-time favorite.”

“In fact—and don’t say I said this, because it’s absolute heresy, but sometimes I think Liam Heggarty does Hank Reno’s songs better than he did. The man is an absolute genius.”

Cinders’s face broke into a smile. “I think so, too,” she said.

“And the onscreen chemistry between him and Geneva Raine was amazing.”

“I guess so.” Cinders seemed less taken with this remark.

Abby began loading the fridge.

“So, you’re serious about Dan, then?” Cinders said, putting her phone in her handbag.

The out-of-the-blueness not to say the intimacy of the question threw Abby. Until now their conversations had been fairly superficial. Maybe Cinders had detected that Abby was warming toward her, and asking about Dan was her way of reaching out.