The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [9]
‘They know it’s me. They’re going to fuck me up.’
As Stevie passed, turning for a moment to look into the rain-spattered faces, the smeared eyes, she realised with a shock that the girls couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Stevie kept walking.
They’re going to fuck me up. She wanted to stop—Who is? What have you done? You’re only children!—but she didn’t. She walked on. It felt horrible.
What would have happened if she had stopped? And asked what was wrong, offered help? They would probably have snarled at her like frightened dogs. It was too late now. On she hurried, through the damp. And yet, Stevie couldn’t get the girls out of her mind. Fifteen years old—they should be in school, dreaming of their first kisses, shopping with their mothers, not trembling on a wet bench anticipating violence. Much was wrong with the state of the world, she thought, and it seemed like so little could ever be done to fix it.
Someone else would have stopped and spoken to the girls on the bench but she had passed them by. She had proven herself a coward. She spent her days organising protection for the prominent names that asked for it. Some had good reason, some had a bad conscience; to others security was a symbol of status, a way to show people that their impact on the world was potentially so great that they were wanted dead. Still others felt themselves to be so exceptional that, in an era when random violence was vogue, they would somehow be singled out for misfortune above all others. But it was girls like these, vulnerable and hunted on a park bench, that most needed protection and who were most unlikely to get it.
Stevie thought of Pound’s famous image from the Paris metro.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
Only the picture in Stevie’s head was charged with menace and fear. Girls all over the world were sitting on wet park benches and standing on railway platforms and crouching in the lobbies of cheap hotels, quietly shaking, because no one could protect them. That is what it meant to be utterly alone.
Stevie looked back. The trees and the girls and the grey paths had melted into darkness. In the distance twinkled the lights of the Ritz, where very different lives were being lived.
Her mind, trained to assess, placed the Hammer-Belle situation neatly into a package that would be written up, insured and sold to the famous family. If it met with their approval, Stevie might even be able to wash her hands of the whole thing, providing security circumstances for the family didn’t change.
By the time she had finished thinking through the presentation of their requirements she would give to David Rice later that evening, Stevie found herself in front of Number One, London. It was the residence of the Duke of Wellington and his family. She stopped a moment to consider the miniature palace.
It had been a warm evening—if you could believe it had ever been warm—and there was a small party in the basement there after a dinner or a ball. Stevie couldn’t remember now where they’d been before, but she’d worn a long dress, silk tiger print.
The entrance to the basement was down the side. One of his friends played silly show tunes on an old piano. There was a makeshift bar with half-empty bottles of mainly gin and everyone had danced. She’d thought at the time that she was in love.
Keep walking, Stevie. She forced herself back into the present.
Rotten Row was lit by lampions. The broad, dirt avenue had once been the place for London society to see and be seen, a constant parade of horse and feather, but this afternoon very few people were out walking, one or two with dogs. She had ridden along here many times, loving the view from high up on a horse—you could almost see into the windows of the first-floor flats. When everything had gone wrong, Stevie had done miles on horseback, galloping through the woods outside Zurich, trusting her horse to find a path, not caring that the branches clawed at her face, that