(1998) Denial by Peter James Page B

apartment. She was surprised when the door opened on the first turn of her Banham key: she always double-locked it. Must have forgotten today, she thought, painfully aware that her memory was becoming increasingly erratic.
    There were several new congratulatory cards lying on the floor, and she was greeted by the scents of the dozens of fresh flowers that had been arriving all morning.
    ‘Cora Burstridge!’
    The joy at hearing the sound of her own name, and uttered in such a very charming way, was somewhat reduced by the fact that it came from inside her flat, and some moments after she had locked the door from the inside, and secured it with the safety chain.
    She turned and saw a tall, fine-looking man with his hand outstretched in greeting. He looked so charming, so at ease, that in spite of all her anxieties, she meekly held out her hand and shook it.
    Through her glove she felt a tiny prick in her palm.
    The man kept hold of her hand, kept smiling. She began to feel a little dizzy. She heard him say, ‘My name’s Thomas Lamark. I wanted to have a chat with you about a film role you stole from my mother.’
    He kept hold of her hand as she sank, gently, to the floor.
    Then, from his pocket, Thomas produced a small tin that he had bought an hour earlier from a fishing-tackle shop near Brighton seafront. He opened it and peered in, wrinkling his nose against the sour smell and the solid mass of small, white, writhing maggots.
    He blew them a kiss, then closed the lid.

Chapter Twenty
    ‘So?’
    ‘So?’
    ‘Come on! How was it?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Your date. Your
second
date!’
    The Orange signal died. Amanda, in a yellow satin jacket and black T-shirt, heard a couple of shrill beeps, then her cellular phone was silent. She hit the SEND button and, almost instantly, her assistant, Lulu, answered.
    The traffic inched forward, stopped. She wasn’t going to make the next green light. A lorry halted alongside her, the thunking of its engine making it hard to hear Lulu’s voice. Diesel exhaust billowed in her face. She raised her voice. ‘I’ll be there in about ten minutes, Lulu. Anyone show up yet?’
    ‘No.’
    Relief!
    ‘Apologise to them when they do.’
    ‘Want me to explain you had a heavy date which is why –’
    ‘I did
not
have a heavy date, OK?’
    ‘OK, OK! Relax! Chill out! This is not a good way to start your day, Amanda. You do not want to start off stressed. Stress will find you, you don’t have to go looking for it.’
    ‘Jesus, Lulu, what the hell have you been reading now?’
    ‘George Jean Nathan. He said, “no man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.” Are your fists clenched, Amanda?’
    ‘They’re going to be in a minute,’ she said.
    Again, the connection failed. And Amanda’s tempernearly did too. Lulu was small, bug-eyed, big-hearted, but she could be dementing too. The lights changed.
    She drove on in silence. Nine twenty-five a.m. was a bad time to be in a hurry across London. Superbad. She had wanted to be in early today: she needed to get prepared for a pitch meeting at Anglia Television with two writers whose series idea she had optioned. Instead she was embarrassingly late.
    It was Michael Tennent’s fault.
    Fifteen minutes later, puffed and flustered after running a good half-mile from the Poland Street multi-storey where she had parked her car, she let herself in through the front door of the building in Maddox Street, a few yards up from New Bond Street, and stepped into the narrow entranceway where the sign, 20–20 Vision Productions (black on clear Perspex, hip, high-tech lettering), was squeezed into a row containing several others that looked distinctly less smart. One was for a recruitment agency, one for a firm that imported Italian belts, and one, in Arabic, for an outfit run by a plump, rather shabby-looking Middle Eastern man out of a tiny office on the attic floor.
    The door swung shut behind her, closing out the fumes of the cars, taxis and vans