Caro’s spirits crashed. She really felt she’d got close and now she was back at square one.
‘But you should pop in next door,’ Suze said, while organising the receipt.
‘Why?’ Caro asked, then realised that next door must have some significance and if her story that she was Lila’s friend had any truth, she should probably know what it was. She decided to bluster her way through it. ‘I haven’t seen Lila for a while so I’m a bit out of touch with things.’
Please don’t call the police. Please don’t.How did undercover investigators pull this sort of stuff off? One small lie and she was already in danger of sweating off Kylie’s finest work.
Thankfully, Suze didn’t seem suspicious. Or if she was, she didn’t care. ‘Well, the menswear shop next door – CAMDEN – is owned by Lila’s boyfriend Cammy.’
Caro felt her knees weaken as she took in this information. Next door. Right next door. Lila could be there right now and if she wasn’t, then there was a man who could tell her where she was.
Oh crap, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t just walk in there and ask for her.
Could she?
14
Cammy
The potato tortillas, chicken croquettes, albondigas, pintxos and large carafe of sangria had barely hit the table when Josie morphed into Agatha Christie on an inquisitive day.
‘So what do we really know about her though?’ she pondered, doing her best Poirot.
Val laughed and Cammy tried not to. ‘Christ Almighty, Josie, you need to give it a rest.’
‘I can’t,’ she wittered, digging a fork into one of the meatballs. ‘Since they banned smoking in public places, and I cut down to one pack a day, I need to keep my mind distracted and my mouth busy. Anyway, Cameron…’ she sometimes liked to use his full name when she was attempting to take the moral high ground, ‘all this comes from a place of love. And a burning desire to keep you out of the divorce courts in a year’s time.’
‘Josie, she’s great. Her mum and dad are nice.’
‘What about her friends? Who are they? Do we know any of them?’
It wasn’t such an outlandish question. Josie had worked in La Femme, L’Homme for over a decade and built up relationships with just about everyone who shopped there and in the beauty salon next door. Val worked part time in Sun, Sea, Ski, the shop on the other side of CAMDEN, and struck up friendships with loads of the regulars. In the grand scheme of city centre life, it wouldn’t have been particularly unusual forthem to know someone, who knew someone, who knew someone, who knew Lila. In fact, given their interrogation skills and a gossip database that rivalled the amount of information held by Interpol, it was pretty surprising that they didn’t.
Cammy shrugged. ‘She doesn’t actually have a lot of mates…’
Josie’s head flew up like a meerkat in heat. ‘What? Why? What’s wrong with her?’
Cammy had refused the sangria – determined to keep a clear mind for the day ahead, but he lifted Val’s glass and took one sip, for medicinal purposes. As much as he adored her, Josie was giving him a headache and a growing pain in the arse.
‘Nothing. You know what it’s like. Her mum says girls have always been jealous of her, so she’s never really built up a big circle of pals.’
He saw Josie and Val ponder that one for a minute, but he refused to admit that it was strange. No girlfriends popping in for a cuppa, no late night calls to a pal to chat about her day, no group outings or weekend trips. Okay maybe it was a tad… unusual, and even before she spoke, he knew Val, a woman who constantly surrounded herself with friends and family, would pick up on it.
‘That might be the case, my love,’ Val said, always a bit more reasonable than Special Agent Josie, ‘but to be honest, it’s a bit strange. No pals at all?’
He went for a white lie to divert her concern. ‘I’m sure she has, but we’ve been a bit wrapped up in each other since we met.’ There was some truth in that. In the six months they’d been together, they spent most nights going out for dinner, or chilling at home with a movie – at least, that was on the nightsthat Lila didn’t have spin, or boxercise, or personal training sessions. She’d had loads of those lately – said it was because she wanted to look great in a bikini if they went off somewhere tropical in the post-Christmas lull in January.
That’s why the friends thing had never really fazed him. He just thought they were doing that thing a couple does when they first fall in love, where they want to spend all their time together. Usually naked. Nothing wrong with that. Understandable, actually.
Before he’d gone over to LA, he’d been a die-hard founding member of the party scene in the city – out every night with an ever-evolving group of party people. He’d gone back to that for a few weeks when he first got home and he just felt… past it. Out of place. He’d soon realised he was getting too old for all that carry-on, so after twelve hours a day in the shop, six days a week, chilling out with Lila suited him just fine. In fact, he felt really lucky to have found someone who felt the same way he did.
‘She’s just so busy being madly in love with me that she’s let her friends slip a little over the last few months,’ he added for good measure.
Josie snorted. ‘She’s not too busy to post twenty photographs a day on that Facegram.’
‘Instagram. Or Facebook. I’ll explain it to you again later,’ Val said, sagely, sounding like she was so up on these things she had Zuckerberg on her friends and family list.
‘Well, whatever. I’ve never known a grown woman who needs that many photos of herself.’
