Holly Lester Read Online Free PDF

six? And what happened to Terry the Runt and his friend?’
    â€˜She’s Special Branch as a matter of fact. And Terry the Runt, as you call him, covers me when I go somewhere. Mrs Diamond is for the house.’
    â€˜Mrs Diamond? Is she Jewish, too? Two minorities for the price of one.’ He sounded petulant, he realized, but was actually feeling very stressed, drawn between his desire for this woman and the apparently hysterical logistics of her household.
    She seemed to sense his anxiety, for she gave him a look of cool appraisal, then smiled suddenly, half-wickedly, half with the radiance that had first attracted him. ‘Come on,’ she said ‘Let’s go.’
    For the nth time he found himself following her through the house, this time downstairs and out of the front door. When the redoubtable Mrs Diamond tried to interrupt their progress, Holly firmly waved her aside with some brief nonsense about the need for a treble hook for the Burgess and their imminent return from a visit to the ironmonger up the road.
    She led Billings instead across the street to her parked Audi, and drove him at speed through Regent’s Park, across Marylebone Road, and into Wimpole Street. Doctor land, thought Billings, who had remained silent during the drive. Parking at a meter, Holly switched the ignition off and turned and faced him. She spoke to him for the first time since they’d left her bathroom. ‘I’m game,’ she said firmly. ‘How about you?’
    He nodded, suddenly hoping, now that the interrupting sources of his anxiety – her child, her nanny, her ‘security’ – were removed, that she meant what he thought she meant. They both got out and he walked with her into a newish brick block of flats, anomalous here, deep in the heart of private medicine. As they walked in, a porter emerged, but he only nodded politely at Holly. ‘Is Mr Trachtenberg in residence?’ she asked without slowing down on her way to the lift.
    â€˜He’s away madam,’ said the man, and turned back to his office.
    In the lift she just smiled at Billings, but when they got out on the fourth floor she took his hand and swung it with hers as they walked down the corridor. Opening a door, she said, ‘There will be no interruptions now,’ and as they walked inside what seemed to be a flat – it was certainly not a surgery – she slammed the door shut behind them and put one hand up behind his neck the better to kiss him, the other again on his awakening trousers.
    After which, gentle reader, Billings himself would find it politic to draw a veil over subsequent events.

Chapter 4
    Like hell he would.
    He followed her through the front hallway into a large sitting room of almost ineffable drabness. The ceiling was low, for like many post-War blocks, the building had been compacted to allow six floors where its Victorian neighbours had five. The room was painted grey, with a brown wall-to-wall carpet and two standing lamps throwing out vectors of yellow, depressing light. On a pair of side tables sat at least a dozen animal miniatures (they looked a mix of Meissen and Staffordshire) which contributed to the overall effect of a 1950s waiting room, probably that of a psychoanalyst, who collected pieces on holiday in aping homage to Freud’s own collecting habits. Surprisingly, the pictures on the wall were rather good – a Glasgow School depiction of geese at the far end, a copy of a Fragonard oil of a reclining nude on the side wall – but they were hung too high and were so badly lit that their presence seemed an accident.
    â€˜This is nice,’ said Billings, and immediately regretted it when Holly looked at him sceptically. But in fact the overpowering dullness of the place struck him as quintessentially English, almost historically so, and far from lowering his sexual temperature, it inflamed it instead. A veteran of trendy New York, he thought of the