Run To You. Charlotte Stein

       Chapter One

      Sometimes I’m sure Lucy hasn’t really gone on holiday. Something else has happened to her, something terrible, like the little scene at the start of a gritty crime drama. The police are going to find her tomorrow, floating in the Thames. In fact, I can almost see it when I close my eyes: that pretty under-slip of hers drifting around her pale, still body, like transparent water weeds. Her red hair so bright against those murky depths.

      She isn’t somewhere exotic, living the life of Riley. She wouldn’t leave with only a note for a goodbye. And yet, when I search for some other answer, there’s nothing to be found. Her apartment is as clean and featureless as ever: an open book. There’s no clue stuck on her refrigerator, in the form of a shopping list she suspiciously never went out for. I can’t find clothes she didn’t take, or arrangements she didn’t make.

      ‘I’m moving to my Mediterranean heaven – rent’s paid for the next three months,’ she said, which should be explanation enough, really. It’s only because I’m left with an absence, and a sense that I meant far less to her than I thought I did. I was just a blip to her, in a life filled with jagged edges and full Technicolor. I am a speck, a stripe of grey.

      But that’s OK, because I like it that way. It’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. I have a sensible job at a sensible company, and every night I eat sensible meals in my sensible flat, before retiring at a sensible hour. My pleasures are few and simple, but they are pleasures.

      And even better: they can never hurt me. I don’t have to flee to some far-off place because I did something very wicked – though I don’t know if this wickedness of Lucy’s is just my imagination. It certainly seems like it might be when I flick through the little date diary she’s left in the upper right-hand drawer of her desk.

      ‘Dentist at three,’ it says, in that looping, dangerous-looking scrawl of hers. ‘Floor waxing at nine.’ Dull appointments like that almost look disingenuous, dressed in those slashing black ‘T’s and her big, all-consuming ‘S’s. The latter letter seems to devour entire pages, and puts my own handwriting to shame. My words creep across the bottom of pages, narrow and cramped and completely unobtrusive. I can’t bring myself to turn my ‘C’s into great, gaping mouths. And I certainly don’t know how to write in red.

      But she does. She has. Every third Friday, there it is – the one appointment that doesn’t seem quite as dull as the rest. ‘Assignation’, it says, in bold, bloody crimson. And then as though to emphasise how incongruous that one word looks and sounds, she’s circled it three times. She’s circled all of them three times – these sibilant, secretive marks of the thing she must have been doing.

      She was meeting someone. Someone she didn’t tell me about, someone dark and deadly. Or maybe it’s worse than that: an affair, an embroilment in the underworld … anything. It could be anything, which probably explains why I then pick up the telephone, and call the place she’s listed under every instance of that word.

      ‘The Harrington’, her diary says, and I immediately picture a great, grand dinosaur of a place. It will be one of those hotels that’s been caught between the wealth it once commanded and the seediness it’s disappearing into, and when a woman answers the phone she does nothing to dispel this impression.

      ‘How can we be of service?’ she says, in a tone designed to put the casual patron off. It’s both haughty and bored, like a person who’s just stepped out of the nineteenth century. She could kill with a voice like that, but my answer spills out of me anyway. I stretch my neck out, and put it on the chopping block.

      ‘My name is Lucy Talbert,’ I say. ‘I believe I have a reservation with you for Friday.’

      And the woman says, ‘Yes. Yes, Lucy, you do.’

      * * *

      The place is even more intimidating than I had initially imagined – mainly because that seediness simply isn’t present. There are no holes in the velvet curtains, or cracks in the yellowing plaster. Everything gleams like the inside of a wine glass, and for a moment I stand transfixed in the doorway. I’m afraid to walk on the glossy marble floor, in case my cheap heels crack it.

      Or maybe I’ll slip. Yes, slipping seems likely. It’s practically an ice rink in front of me, and I’ve never been known for my poise. Whereas the woman descending the elegantly curved stairs in front of me … well. She has poise in abundance. She’s wearing a skirt so slim and tight I’m surprised she can walk, and her heels are daggers.

      But she doesn’t falter on that smooth floor. She doesn’t even seem aware of it. She glides to reception with all the grace of a swan, murmurs something to the equally elegant lady behind the mahogany desk and waltzes on.

      It