Free Bad Heir Day by Wendy Holden Page B

Cassandra now. Please God she hadn’t found someone else. She’d ring her first thing in the morning. In the meantime, Anna decided, as the silent sobs overtook her once more, she’d just sit in the bath and weep.

Chapter Seven
    Usually, Cassandra never saw first thing in the morning. She usually hit it around fourth or fifth thing, but this particular antemeridian was different. She’d had to get up ridiculously early to do an interview. In the normal course of events, Cassandra loved nothing better than talking endlessly about herself to journalists—friendly OK! and Hello! onesin particular. But there was nothing friendly about the sharp-faced, skinny woman sitting opposite her on the cowskin sofa with a tape recorder, a notebook, and a sceptical twist to her lips. Her eyesintermittently darted round the room, focusing in on, Cassandra was cringingly certain, every surface left respectively undusted, bashed, and unwiped by Lil as she had made her morning rounds. That was the trouble with minimalism; there was nowhere to run when it came to hiding dirt.
    Lil herself had already been grilled; as Cassandra had clumped down the thin, stripped wood stairs to greet her inquisitor, she had overheard the cleaner being questioned about her mistress’s working hours and daily routine. Although not a religious woman, Cassandra had sent a heartfelt prayer heavenwards to whichever benevolent deity had allowed her to appear on the scene before Lil had got on to the breakfast gin and tonics.
    A curse on her publishers though, thought Cassandra, grimacing. The deal that had eventually been hammered out between her agent and the increasingly irascible people who commissioned her books had been that, the continued non-appearance of Cassandra’s expected new manuscript notwithstanding, the planned publicity for the novel should continue to go ahead. Hence the presence of this spiky girl in her sitting room.
    Cassandra sighed inwardly and gazed glassily at the journalist. The pre-interview nerve-soothing double gin had not only affected her concentration, but had dealt a temporary death blow to her ability to see straight.
    “Sorry, can you rephrase that?” she asked.
    The journalist looked astonished. “Er, yes. I just asked you what the name of your son was.”
    “Zachary Alaric St. Felix Knight.” Alaric St. Felix had been the dashing hero of Impossible Lust ,in whose heady, thrilling, champagne-and-cash-flooded wake (and particularly the former) Zak had been conceived. Repeating Alaric’s name only reinforced Cassandra’s awareness that she had so far failed to invent a hero to rival him.
    “How do you cope with him?” the journalist asked next.
    Cassandra’s heart skipped a beat. What exactly had this woman heard about Zak? Surely she didn’t know about the dreadful events of yesterday. “Theft, madam, is a criminal offence no matter whose son you are,” that ghastly little Boots store detective had snapped. “How could you?” Cassandra had furiously admonished Zak all the way home. “Stealing like a common criminal.”
    It wasn’t the criminal bit she minded—heaven knew, half the squillionaires in the City were crooks and she was fervently hoping Zak might join their ranks one day. It was the common .And from Boots ,for Christ’s sake. If Zak had to steal, he could at least have chosen Harvey Nicks.
    “Cope?” she asked suspiciously. Was this woman trying to catch her out?
    “Well, we’ve talked about your bestsellers and how you write them, but we haven’t touched on how you also manage to run a house this size and have a family life. Not to mention how you keep yourself in such great shape.”
    Relief swept through Cassandra. This was more like it. “Oh, well, I find getting up at five and doing a couple of hours on the treadmill generally does the trick,” she simpered. “I try and read all the papers at the same time.”
    The journalist looked astonished. “But surely you have some help with