Anne Billson - Suckers

'Hello?' he whispered. 'Miss Westron?' He was clutching an attache case to his chest as though he thought someone was going to leap out of the shadows and snatch it away.

I followed Grauman's instructions and said nothing.

'Miss Westron,' he repeated, extending a trembling hand for me to shake. I ignored it. 'William Fitch,' he said, nodding like a car mascot. 'I've got the papers you sent for.'

'Oh good,' I said, before remembering I was supposed to be keeping my mouth shut.

'Do you want to go through them now?'

I shook my head and grabbed the case, but he continued to hover. 'Perhaps if I…'

I fixed him with what I hoped was a spine-chilling stare, and hissed, 'Go away.' His mouth opened wide, but no words came out, then he turned tail and fled. I watched him go, chuckling delightedly to myself. If this was power, I was already hooked. Being Violet full-time might be fun.

As soon as he was out of sight, I opened the case. It was full of loose pieces of paper and typewritten sheets, and I pulled out a bunch of crumbling yellowish cuttings. The top one was a picture of people milling around a blazing building, cut from an old French newspaper. The man nearest the camera had his mouth wide open and was yelling something. Visible in the background, wrestling with giant snakes and ladders, were harried firemen. My French was rusty but it wasn't hard to decipher the headline — Eleven Perish in Hotel Inferno .

I dug around in the case again and drew out a dog-eared black-and-white photograph of people sitting round a table in a restaurant, clinking glasses at the camera: two men, two women. One of the men was familiar; I knew I'd seen that face before somewhere and wondered if it was someone famous. One of the women was slender and chic, a bit like Audrey Hepburn only wispier and blonde. The other woman was a blur; she had moved while the shutter was being pressed and the flash hadn't been fast enough to capture her.

Grauman appeared from nowhere and, no respecter of personal space, started to breathe down the back of my neck. 'I will take those,' he said, easing the cuttings out of my hands so as not to tear them. Reluctantly, I handed him the photograph as well. He said, 'I do not remember giving you permission to examine the goods.'

'And I don't remember you saying I couldn't,' I said, watching him check the contents of the bag. 'Why can't I look? I played my role perfectly, didn't I?'

He flashed me a grin, unable to keep the smugness out of it. 'Maybe later. Maybe after you do for me another small favour.'

'What are you going to do with those?'

Grauman closed the case and patted it. 'She wants to keep Fender a secret, all to herself, because she knows there are others who would not hesitate to have him killed, if they knew who he was and thought he was getting in the way. She would do anything — anything — to protect him.'

'So, what next?'

'I show her these papers. And she will be grateful I was able to stop them falling into the wrong hands. But there will be other envelopes, and other cuttings, and she will be aware of that. She will leave Fender alone, because she fears for his safety.'

'If she's so fond of him, why doesn't she turn him into a vampire? Then she wouldn't have to worry about his life being in danger.'

Grauman stopped being smug. 'It is not so simple,' he snapped.

'I see,' I said, though I didn't. All I knew was that I was going to have to tread very carefully. 'And the favour?'

'Fender's five minutes are up,' Grauman said. 'It is time for him to find out the truth about his lady love. This is where you come in, Dora. You will tell him what she really is.'

I thought it was a bad move, but didn't say so, because Grauman was still in a snappy mood. I had to swallow a lot of pride in order to phone Duncan. I kept telling myself it was worth it; soon I would have him all to myself. But he didn't sound exactly overjoyed to hear me. In fact, he could barely remember who I was — just a vaguely familiar name dredged up from some dim, distant, pre-Violet past.

'Dora,' he echoed.

'Dora . You know, from college.'

'Oh yes.'

I said I had to see him, it was urgent. He didn't seem bowled over with enthusiasm. I was tempted to give up, but the thought of admitting my failure to Grauman was more than I could bear. I gave it one last shot, and he grudgingly agreed to meet for lunch the next day, in the cheapest restaurant I could think of.

When I arrived he was already there — slumped in a corner beneath the poster for the peach-flavoured aperitif called Sex Appeal. As a caption, it hardly applied to him, not as he was then. He looked up as I went over and it was obvious he wasn't in the best of health. His eyes were bloodshot, his stubble hadn't seen the edge of a razor for several days, and there were flaky patches on his face. The ashtray in front of him was brimming. It didn't take long to work out that the only way he could stop his hand from shaking was by moving a cigarette up and down like an automaton. Most of the time he forgot to flick off the ash, and it kept falling on to the table.

I said hello, and sat down and stared, searching again for those telltale signs. He wasn't sitting by the window, it was true, but he wasn't turning away from the light, or anything. I asked how he was, but couldn't help answering the question myself. 'You don't look too good.'

'I don't feel too good,' he admitted, squinting at me through a miasma of cigarette smoke. 'But you look great, Dora. Hey, you look terrific.'

I was pleased he'd noticed, and told him I'd stopped eating the buns. We gave our orders to a surly Italian waiter, and I brought him up to date with news from college until the food arrived. The conversation was one-sided, and the food killed it off. We both started picking at our plates. 'How's Violet?' I asked, trying to make the enquiry sound casual.

He shifted uncomfortably. 'Fine. We're both fine.'

I waited, not saying anything. The pause lengthened and grew awkward. Duncan lit up another cigarette — neither of us had got very far with our food — and sighed. Finally, he said, à propos de nothing in particular. 'We were thinking of going to Paris.'

I was surprised by an almost physical pain which swept through me. Paris. Oh yes. He had promised to take me there. He had promised to show me Pere Lachaise. He had promised me lots of things.

If any of this showed in my face, Duncan gave no sign of having noticed. He had more pressing concerns. 'I booked a hotel,' he said. 'I went out and bought tickets, I had it all set up, but then she suddenly decided she wouldn't be able to come after all.'

'What did you do with the tickets?' I blurted, thinking perhaps, even now, I could persuade him to take me .

'Tickets? Oh, I got a refund. But there's something wrong. I don't know why she backed down. I don't know what it is, but there's something she's not telling me.'

I took a deep breath. 'You're right. There is something she's not telling you. That's why I asked you here today. It's something dreadful, Duncan, something you have to know.'

He fixed his red eyes on me. I could see him trying and failing to work out what I knew, and how I knew it. But the effort was too much; he gave up and stared down at his lasagne, which by now had acquired a light sprinkling of ash. 'Don't tell me. She's married.'

I couldn't help it — I laughed. 'Oh, Duncan. What would you do if I said she was married? Or if you found out she was having an affair with someone else?'

'I'd kill myself,' he said, smiling so I could see he was joking.

'Don't be silly. If you felt that strongly about it, you should kill her .' I smiled so he could see that I too was making a joke. 'But it's academic, because that isn't the problem. It's something much worse.'