Free Apocalipstick by Sue Margolis Page B

were from beauty company PRs looking for publicity for new products. The last one was from Mimi Frascatti at Mer de Rêves, who had been phoning every couple of days to try and persuade Rebecca to do an interview with the director of Mer de Rêves, Coco Dubonnet du Sauvignon.
    Rebecca, who had about as much interest in Coco Dubonnet du Sauvignon and her doings as she did in those of Sven Goran Eriksson, had repeatedly made “I’ll mention it to the editor”–type noises and promised to get back to her. Of course she never did, which meant Mimi was forever on the phone nagging.
    “Now, I even have a brilliant peg for the interview,” Mimi had trilled a few minutes ago. “Mer de Rêves is about to launch a new antiwrinkle cream—Revivessence. But unlike all the other wrinkle creams, this one really does work.”
    “Right,” Rebecca said, with the same kind of enthusiasm with which she greeted her dental hygienist.
    “No, honestly. It really does work. You see it contains this miracle ingredient, which dissolves wrinkles in a matter of days—completely organic, of course. Unfortunately we can’t let you have a sample yet because it’s all deeply under wraps until the official launch. But we’d adore some prepublicity—you know a
Hello!-
type interview with Coco looking gorgeous, sipping Taittinger at her rustic gîte in the Périgord.”
    Rebecca made the point, as tactfully as she could, that without a sample to try out on some willing guinea pigs, there really wasn’t much of a story.
    “Right,” Mimi said, going into flounce mode, “I desperately want to give it to you as a world exclusive, but we have got
Vogue
and
Elle
snapping at our heels.”
    “You must do what you think best,” Rebecca said, in little doubt that Mimi had already tried
Vogue, Elle
and very likely the
Romford Recorder
too and met with the same response.
    She’d just gotten rid of Mimi when the phone rang again. Once more she tried the sexy voice, only to discover yet again a woman’s voice on the end of the line.
    “Hello,” it said in an anxious nervous whisper, “you don’t know me. My name’s Wendy. I saw you at the Mer de Rêves party the other evening.”
    A cold chill shot down Rebecca’s back. She knew at once it was the creepy woman who’d been following her.
    “I tried to speak to you then,” she went on, “but I was too scared.”
    Rebecca frowned. “Scared? Of what?”
    Pause.
    “Them.”
    Them. Rebecca groaned inwardly. Why was it that wherever she’d worked the switchboard always sent her the paranoid, gibbering schizos convinced they’d seen Stalin in the Asda parking lot with a cart full of Vienettas?
    “Look, can you just tell me what this is about?” Rebecca said kindly. For some reason she decided to persevere with this one.
    “Well, until yesterday I worked at Mer de Rêves as a personal assistant. But I was sacked.”
    “Oh, I see,” Rebecca said, relieved. “Look, if you’re after publicity for an unfair dismissal case, I’m not really your person. You should talk to—”
    “No, no. It’s nothing like that. I mean, I was unfairly dismissed, but that’s not what I want to talk to you about. You see, I have some information about the company you might find interesting.”
    “What sort of information?”
    “I can’t say. Not over the phone. Could we meet?”
    There was no way Rebecca was going to meet up with a possible nutcase until she had something more to go on. She pressed the woman for more information, but she refused to say another word.
    In the end Rebecca’s curiosity won out over common sense and she agreed to meet her for coffee the next morning at Salvo’s, the sandwich bar across the road.
     
    When two o’clock came and Max still hadn’t called, she decided she’d definitely blown it. Having gathered most of the information she needed for the girl band piece, she decided to work on it at home.
    She was halfway there when she decided that as she hadn’t had lunch,