The Troika Dolls by Miranda Darling Read Free Book Online Page A

‘Right.
    Must go. I’m already late, all this nattering.’
    Stevie wished he would stay, maybe invite her to dinner, but he didn’t. He left as quickly as he had come.
    Watching him leave, Stevie felt very alone. She would book a flight back to Zurich tonight, she decided, and visit her grandmother Didi in the mountains.
    Perhaps David was right, but it didn’t stop her hating herself for having placed her happiness in such unsafe hands—in the hands of another person at all. She would not be making that mistake again.
    Stevie looked around. The bar had filled up. Elton John was playing at the Albert Hall. The shape of the overcoat standing at the bar was familiar. Her heart sank. Charlie was perfectly nice—in fact many people turned small somersaults just to meet him. He, or rather his father’s title, collected New Best Friends. But she wasn’t in a sociable mood, and Charlie was a close friend of Joss’.
    Stevie and Charlie had met at Oxford. Together they had ridden bicycles drunk over perilous cobblestones, celebrated in shabby rooms, shrunken pubs and warm lawns. But they had never been close.
    She remembered a Glühwein incident involving homemade fireworks and an enormous yellow teddy bear. Part of the upstairs floor had caved in. Charlie had leapt up in good cheer to urge the revels to continue. The armchair he landed on had wheels; it ran from under him, causing him to fall, jugular first, onto an abandoned glass of Glühwein .
    Stevie had seen the whole thing. No one else seemed to notice, as he lay on the floor of his own sitting room, a shard of glass in his throat. He lay as still as a doll. As Stevie knelt down beside him, blood began to pulse from the wound. His pale yellow shirt turned quickly black with blood.
    Stevie had pressed her fingers on his neck, as if feeling for a heartbeat, but pressing hard, trying to stop the blood from pumping out. The shard of glass was held in place between her fingers, like a piece of ice that refused to melt. She was afraid that if she pulled it out even more blood would start spurting.
    Charlie’s face had turned waxy and he began to perspire. Stevie thought he would die. She whispered things to him, kissed his forehead, covering her own face and hair and hands with his blood. She remembered ambulances, people in green, his mother arriving at 4 am dressed in black mink.
    Charlie recovered, but they had never spoken of the incident.
    Stevie drew a breath and became visible again. She saw him notice her and approach.
    ‘Blasted barman tried to give me vodka with my tonic.’ He stood over her, very tall, very thin, very handsome if his eyes hadn’t been quite so close together. A large scar ran horizontally across his neck.
    ‘You should drink with me,’ Stevie replied mildly. ‘They don’t seem to be as careless. I’m staying here.’
    Charlie looked up at the ceiling. ‘Bit gloomy. Still, not much to be cheerful about I suppose.’
    Not the conversation Stevie needed tonight.
    ‘Joss is back from Barbados,’ he said.
    Stevie swallowed her panic.
    ‘He’s been in Barbados with that Norah model.’ If Charlie had any idea of the effect his announcement might have on Stevie, he certainly didn’t show it. ‘Renting a house that belongs to a friend of mine. Terrible hailstorms.’
    This was definitely not the conversation Stevie needed tonight.
    ‘How awful,’ she grimaced. ‘About the hailstorms, I mean.’
    Charlie’s gaze slid around the room. His eyes seldom focused for long. It was a curiously unsettling quality.
    ‘Anyway, we’re all going to the Savages this weekend. Can’t think of anything else to bloody do. Probably be bored out of my mind. Everything bores me at the moment.’
    Stevie stared. She realised she had nothing to say to him.
    ‘I overheard two girls on a park bench today,’ she blurted out.
    ‘Someone wanted to kill them.’
    Charlie’s eyes were drifting again. ‘Really? I suppose that’s what happens to girls who