Until Death by Ali Knight Page A

won’t do any pictures.’ She picked distractedly at the fraying hem of her old sweater.
    ‘You’d get more work, you know.’ Here he was, dangling the dream of money she could earn doing what she loved. He had no idea how unachievable it was. How his castaway comments pierced her to the core.
    ‘No.’ It came out harsh and offensive.
    ‘Salvatore, what can I say?’ He looked hurt for a moment but he recovered quickly. He held up a finger and waggled it at her. ‘We’ll start to wonder what you’ve got to hide.’
    ‘Then again,’ said Salvatore, ‘you’re so much more alluring with something to hide.’
    Kelly felt the sweat spring up on her back.

13
     
    S ylvie pulled on her bikini bottoms and pinged the ties at her hips. She looked out of her changing cubicle at a slice of the Hampstead Heath Women’s Pond. The water looked murky and drab. She shook her shoulders and slapped her thighs. Not the Jersey Shore in July. She knew Kelly would be arriving soon. She knew her routines off by heart. They weren’t difficult to learn, she didn’t have the imagination to vary them. Sylvie’s disdain for her rival came back with full force. All that money and status and she still wasn’t anything more than a retiring mouse. She could mess with her mind in here today, and, really, why the hell not? Sylvie thought of all the oxygen pools and personal trainers across the capital that Kelly could have chosen to keep her tiny body in trim, and here she was, opting for a pleasureless dunk with the lesbians of north London.
    Well, anything the mouse could do, she could do better. Sylvie bent forward to stretch her hamstrings but decided against touching the floor with her hands. Too many pubes wriggling in the cracks in the tiles probably, if the women in here were anything to go by. But she would never make the mistake of underestimating Kelly. Christos chose her and married her – a woman with the baggage of grief and a kid but no money to sweeten the deal. She must have had something else. Kooky was alluring, Sylvie needed to remember that. She put her hands on her trim waist and bent sideways as an old woman emerged from the next cubicle wearing an ancient black swimsuit and a woolly hat. Sylvie was as much fascinated as she was horrified. She watched her wobble away to the dock and silently climb down the metal stairs into the water. The pond was fed by an underground stream, greeny black and kinda greasy. Sylvie didn’t care. She had undergone far greater discomforts to get where she was and to get where she was going she would endure even more. She wasn’t prissy or squeamish, she could get stuck in, make no mistake.
    She heard the door bang and stepped back into the cubicle. Kelly had arrived. The door to the next cubicle opened and closed and she heard the little sighs and rustles of a woman disrobing inches from her. Sylvie felt her heart beat slower. It was illicit and exciting, listening in on her rival’s private moments, to garments being shed from folds and crevices. She heard the door bang and knew Kelly had gone out to the pond. She pushed her shoulders back, chin forward and followed her out. It was surprisingly quiet out here in the middle of the Heath, the odd plop of hands breaking the still surface of the water or twigs falling from the trees. The lifeguard’s chair was empty.
    Kelly was in a wetsuit, standing at the end of the dock, swinging her arms around to warm them up. Her long dark hair cascaded down her back. Silhouetted against the water she was casually beautiful, like a black mermaid plucked from some watery depths. Sylvie felt a flash of hatred for her. Some people didn’t deserve the gifts they were given. Not to cultivate and protect the natural bounty that chance and a bunch of genes had given her, not to appreciate the fortune it had saved her in treatments and surgery meant Kelly was a fool and not deserving of her respect. She was also weak – the old crones in here weren’t