Free Until It's Over by Nicci French

my leg, and I shivered helplessly.

Chapter Seven
    ‘That’s such a nice jacket,’ said Orla.
    ‘Oh, thanks,’ I said. ‘I just wear it for my job.’
    ‘You a photographer as well?’
    ‘I’m a bike messenger,’ I said. ‘I’m being Owen’s assistant for the afternoon. Carrying his bags and holding up the silver umbrella.’
    ‘Where’d you get it?’
    ‘The jacket? Another rider gave it to me,’ I said. ‘He was from Poland. I think he got it there.’
    ‘Excuse me,’ said Owen, with a nasty politeness. ‘We haven’t really got much time.’
    ‘It’s great,’ said Orla. ‘Poland?’
    ‘I think so. Perhaps we should get on with the shoot, though. As Owen said, we are running a bit –’
    ‘Is there a toilet here?’ asked Orla.
    Owen looked at her. His expression didn’t change but I saw him clench his fists. ‘Outside and up the stairs,’ he said.
    ‘Ta.’
    Orla – allegedly one of the ten most promising young actresses in the UK – scampered out of the studio, pulling the door shut behind her with a loud bang. Owen rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and wandered over to the small window that gave out on to the street. He leaned his head against the pane and closed his eyes.
    ‘Are you OK?’ I asked.
    ‘What in hell am I doing here?’ he said.
    ‘It’s not that bad. It’s going to be fine.’
    ‘The picture editor wants “vivacious”.’
    That morning, Owen had phoned me as I was cycling past King’s Cross and asked me if I would help him out. He didn’t ask me very politely and he made no reference at all to the fact that in the past few hours we’d had sex twice. ‘Say “please”,’ I said sweetly.
    ‘Please,’ he muttered.
    I told myself it would be a change from delivering packages, anyway, and called Campbell to inform him that I wouldn’t be available for the afternoon. As a last-minute stand-in, Owen had been commissioned to take a portrait for a feature on young British talent. Nineteen-year-old Orla Porter, rake-thin, pasty and pouty, had been the star of a TV soap I had never seen and she was apparently about to become famous in a film that hadn’t come out yet. But she wasn’t a real star yet. She didn’t have an entourage, a press representative, a makeup artist. She had just shown up at Owen’s friend’s studio and said she had to, absolutely had to, leave by four. And she hadn’t looked vivacious once, except on the subject of my jacket.
    ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I see. Vivacious. I see.’
    ‘She looks depressed,’ said Owen. ‘Depressed and ill. She looks like a rubber band. There’s no life in her. I hate jobs like this – artificial photographs of fake celebrities wearing too much makeup and too few clothes, who’ve been spoilt rotten by attention but who’ll get dumped next season. Look at the pages of the magazines – these women all end up looking the same. You can hardly tell them apart. And that’s what everyone wants. They don’t want a real photograph. It’s just a con and I’m part of the whole stupid process.’ He turned away from the window and faced me. ‘Why the fuck am I doing it?’
    ‘For the money?’
    ‘Yeah. Money .’ He snarled the word at me, as if it was an obviously bad thing.
    ‘What’s the problem? Don’t take yourself so seriously, Owen.’
    ‘That’s it. I’m out of here.’
    And he actually started picking up his equipment and stuffing it clumsily into bags. I put my hand on his forearm, but he pulled away. ‘Fuck off,’ he said. ‘You’re just like the rest.’
    ‘The rest of what? The capitalist system? Humanity?’
    I tugged at the bag he was holding but he wrenched it back and it fell with a thud. A zoom lens rolled across the floor. ‘Have you any idea what that costs?’
    ‘I’m just a stupid bike messenger, remember? But it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s just money, after all.’
    He gripped me by the forearm; I could feel his fingers digging into my flesh.
    ‘You’re