Josette was a little slower than most girls, probably as a result of her upbringing. Unlike other girls of fifteen, she was something of an innocent who’d never even been out on a date-“Mum and Dad say not yet”-and therefore she didn’t pick up on the signs as well as she might have done. But he was patient, and when at last she was pressing against him of her own volition and clearly wanting more of his kisses and at greater length, he suggested they get off the path and “see if there’s somewhere…you know what I mean” with a wink.
Who would have bloody thought that the hollow, his own particular Site of Seduction, would be flaming occupied? It was an outrage, it was, but there you have it. Dave heard the moaning and groaning as he and Josette approached and there was no mistaking the arms and legs all a’tangle in the undergrowth, especially since there were four of each and none of them had a stitch of clothing on. There was also the naked arse of the bloke pumping madly away, his head turned toward them and a grimace on his face…Cor, do we all look like that? Dave wondered.
Josette giggled when she saw, and this was a good thing. Anything else would have suggested either fear or prurience, and while Dave certainly didn’t expect her to be some sort of shrinking Puritan in this day and age, one never knew. He backed away from the hollow, Josette’s hand in his, and he gave some thought to where he might take her. There were nooks and hollows aplenty, to be sure, but he wanted a location close to this one, Josette being on the boil.
And then he thought, Of course. They were not far from the chapel at the centre of the cemetery. They couldn’t get inside the building, but right next to it-indeed, built into it-was a shelter that they could easily use. It offered a roof and walls and that was better than the hollow, come to think of it.
He inclined his head in the direction of the coupling couple in the bushes and winked at Josette. “Mmmm, not bad, eh?” he said.
“Dave!” She gave a little gasp of faux horror. How could you mention such a thing!
“Well?” he said. “You saying you don’t…?”
“Didn’t say that,” was how she replied.
As good as an invitation, that was. It was off to the chapel they went. Hand in hand and in a bit of a hurry. Josette, Dave decided, was definitely a flower ready to be plucked.
They reached the grassy clearing where the chapel stood. “Just round here, luv,” Dave murmured.
He took her beyond the chapel entrance and around its far corner. And there his plans ground themselves to a sudden halt.
For a teenage boy with a barrel for a bum was stumbling out of Dave’s trysting place. He had such a look on his face that one almost didn’t notice he was holding up his obviously unzipped trousers. He dashed across the clearing and then was gone.
All this at first caused David Emery to think the boy had relieved himself inside the trysting place. This cheesed Dave off, as he could hardly expect Josette to want to roll round in a spot reeking of piss. But as she was ready and as he was ready and as there was the slightest possibility that the boy had not used the shelter as a public convenience, Dave shrugged and urged Josette forward, saying, “Just in there, luv,” as he followed her.
He was so much thinking of Just One Thing that he nearly jumped out of his skin, he did, when Josette went into the shelter and started screaming.
“NO, NO, NO, Barbara,” Hadiyyah said. “We can’t just go shopping. Not without a plan. That would be far too overwhelming. First we got to make a list, but before we do that we got to consider what we want. And to do that we got to decide on the type of body you have. It’s how these things are done. One sees it on telly all the time.”
Barbara Havers eyed her companion doubtfully. She wondered whether she should be seeking sartorial advice from a nine-year-old girl. But aside from Hadiyyah, there was only Dorothea Harriman to turn to if she was to take Isabelle Ardery’s “advice” to heart, and Barbara wasn’t about to throw herself upon the mercy of Scotland Yard’s foremost style icon. With Dorothea at the helm, the ship of shopping was likely to sail straight down the King’s Road or-worse-into Knightsbridge, where in a boutique operated by rail-thin shop assistants with sculptured hair and similar fingernails, she would be forced to lay out a week’s pay on a pair of knickers. At least with Hadiyyah there was a slight chance that what had to be done could be done in Marks & Spencer.
But Hadiyyah was having none of that. “Topshop,” she said. “We got to go to Topshop, Barbara. Or Jigsaw. Or maybe H and M but just maybe.”
“I don’t want to look trendy,” Barbara told her. “It’s got to be professional. Nothing with ruffles. Or spikes sprouting from it. Nothing with chains.”
Hadiyyah rolled her eyes. “Barbara,” she said. “Really. Do you think I’d wear spikes and chains?”
Her father would have had something to say about that, Barbara thought. Taymullah Azhar kept his daughter on what had to be called a very short lead. Even now in her summer holidays she wasn’t allowed to run about with other children her age. Instead, she was studying Urdu and cookery and when she wasn’t studying Urdu or cookery, she was being minded by Sheila Silver, an elderly pensioner whose brief period of glory-endlessly recounted-had occurred singing backup for a Cliff Richard wannabe on the Isle of Wight. Mrs. Silver lived in a flat in the Big House, as they called it, an elaborate yellow Edwardian structure in Eton Villas; Barbara lived behind this building on the same property in a hobbit-size bungalow. Hadiyyah and her father were neighbours, domiciled in the ground-floor flat of the Big House with an area in front of it that served as its terrace. This was where Barbara and Hadiyyah were conferring, each with a Ribena in front of her, both of them bent over a wrinkled section of the Daily Mail, which Hadiyyah had apparently been saving for an occasion precisely like this one.
She’d fetched the newspaper from her bedroom once Barbara had explained her wardrobe quest. “I have just the thing,” she’d announced happily and, her long plaits flying, she’d disappeared into the flat and returned with the article in question. She laid this open on the wicker table to reveal a story about clothing and body types. Spread across two pages were models who supposedly demonstrated all possibilities of build, excluding anorexia and obesity, of course, as the Daily Mail did not wish to encourage extremes.
Hadiyyah had informed Barbara that they had to begin with body type and they couldn’t exactly work out Barbara’s body type if she didn’t change into something…well, something that would allow them to see what they were working with? She dismissed Barbara back to her bungalow to change her clothes-“It’s awfully hot for corduroy and wool jumpers anyway,” she noted helpfully-and she bent over the paper to scrutinize the models. Barbara did her bidding and returned, although Hadiyyah sighed when she saw the drawstring trousers and T-shirt.
“What?” Barbara said.
“Oh, well. Never mind,” Hadiyyah told her airily. “We’ll do our best.”
Their best consisted of Barbara standing on a chair-feeling like a perfect fool-while Hadiyyah crossed the grass “to get a bit of distance so I c’n compare you to the ladies in the pictures.” This she did by holding up the newspaper and crinkling her nose as she switched her gaze from it to Barbara to it to Barbara before announcing, “Pear, I think. Short waisted as well. C’n you lift your trousers?…Barbara, you have lovely ankles! Whyever don’t you show them? Girls should always emphasise their best features, you know.”
“And I’d do that by…?”
Hadiyyah considered this. “High heels. You have to wear high heels. Do you have high heels, Barbara?”
“Oh yeah,” Barbara said. “I find them just the thing for my line of work, crime scenes being otherwise rather grim.”