It Felt Like A Kiss

Chapter Sixteen




Ellie had thought that as soon as she heard the reassuring soft click of the door to her hotel room shutting behind her, she’d burst into tears, but she stayed dry-eyed. She looked around cautiously.

All was soft and clean. Brilliant white and dove-grey accents. Everything was arranged in perfect order, from the pillows stacked up on the huge bed and the top cover folded invitingly down at an exact right angle. In the bathroom the bottles of toiletries were arranged in ruler-straight formation on the marble basin surround. It was ordered. It was calm. It was just what Ellie needed.

It was inconceivable that anything bad could happen to her in this room.

Ellie took off her sandals, feet sinking gratefully into deep, white carpet. She looked longingly at the bed, but as well as being bone weary, she was also grubby and hot. Messy and chaotic. After texting Ari to let her know where she was and whacking up the air conditioning, Ellie took a shower. The water sluiced away the dirt and grime that were the mementos of a dry, sticky day in the city heat.

She lowered her shower-capped head so the spray of water could pummel the back of her neck at the spot where all the tension was focused, and concentrated on breathing in and out very slowly and very deeply. By the time she was wrapping a pristine and plush towel around her, Ellie hadn’t solved any of her immediate problems but she felt more like herself again.

As she went through the familiar, comforting rituals of bedtime from brushing her hair to hot-cloth cleansing to patting the delicate skin under her gritty red eyes with revitalising cream, she wasn’t a figure of curiosity, a subject of speculation any more, or someone to be pitied or even a crisis to be managed, but Ellie Cohen.

But Ellie Cohen couldn’t even face the thought of calling room service, though she hadn’t eaten all day, and as she pulled back the covers so she could get into bed, she still had that sick feeling of dread spreading through her body in waves that started in the pit of her stomach. It was like the night before a big exam. Or when she’d just been dumped yet again. Or when there was some awful, snarly situation brewing at work that she needed to sort out.


Except, her dread was bigger than that. As she stared up at the ceiling, she wished that all she had to worry about were the kind of problems that had an expiry date. While her most pressing concern was hiding herself away from the press and cringing at the thought of tomorrow’s papers, there were other demons lurking just out of reach, dancing at the back of her mind, where Ellie would prefer them to stay.

She found that if she concentrated on a tiny gap in the curtains that let in a shaft of light from the world outside, then it didn’t matter that she hadn’t cried, even though she really wanted to, or that she couldn’t sleep, even though she really needed to. If she concentrated especially hard, then she needn’t think at all.

Eventually the heat and the weight of the covers heaped around her forced Ellie from her vigil. She pulled back the quilt, turned over, plumped up the pillows and snatched five minutes of sleep here and there while she thought about Billy Kay. Rather, she thought about what Billy Kay must think about her. He’d spent a lifetime apart from her so he had no way of knowing that Ellie wasn’t an amoral party girl constantly searching for the next thrill. It wasn’t as if she could rely on David Gold to give her some good press, to tell Billy that when you took Richey out of the equation, everything in her life was running smoothly, whether it was her career trajectory or her credit rating or how she’d tamed the frizzy curls that he’d passed down to her, Ari’s hair being poker straight.

But David Gold wouldn’t pass any of that on, because David Gold didn’t believe it was true. Apart from those fifteen minutes at Glastonbury when they’d been complete strangers who might have been perfect for each other, David Gold had every reason to believe that she was exactly like that girl in the newspapers who flashed her arse and fell apart at the first sign of trouble.

‘I’m not going to fall apart.’ Ellie said it out loud to the shadows in the furthest reaches of the room, so the words existed. ‘And I don’t care what he thinks about me. What either of them thinks about me.’

When there was a sharp rap on the door at six, it was a relief. Ellie had abandoned even the faintest hope of sleep and was watching one of the shopping channels where a camp man with an orange face was shilling a cubic zirconia jewellery set, so she was glad of an excuse to stagger off the bed, which had become her own personal purgatory.

Maybe if she’d slept better she might have paused, but it wasn’t until the door was opened and she was momentarily blinded by the flashing light of a camera that Ellie stopped to consider who might be knocking her up this early as she stood there open-mouthed and squinty-eyed, in a skimpy cotton nightdress.

‘Velvet! Want to give us a quote on your fragile mental state?’

‘What the hell …?’

‘Lots of celebs stay at this hotel. Anyone in particular you’ve got your eye on?’ asked her early-morning caller, a leering middle-aged man with sweat patches under the arms of his straining white shirt, camera slung round his neck. Even though she was stupid from lack of sleep, Ellie instantly knew the spin he’d put on this. Any vaguely famous person that had stayed at the hotel in the last six months would be someone that she was having a torrid affair with. She was all set to spit out a denial when she remembered what had happened the last time.

Slamming the door was far more effective. Then, to the familiar accompaniment of a steady banging at the door, she phoned down to reception.

The night manager was extremely apologetic when he came up to Ellie’s room. The reporter had booked into the Penthouse Suite, so wasn’t trespassing and couldn’t be ejected from the premises. He had promised to keep the noise down because other guests were starting to complain, but there was nothing the hotel could do if he wanted to camp outside Ellie’s door for what was left of the night.

However, he could pretend there was a problem with the credit card the man had checked in with and while he was down at reception, Ellie, now back in the crumpled, flouncy dress she’d worn earlier, was led down the fire stairs to the manager’s office, to stay, red-eyed and jaw-clenchingly awake, until she could come up with a plan B.

‘This happens all the time,’ Eamonn, the night manager, told Ellie helpfully as she tried hard not to rest her head on his desk. ‘Celebrity signs in. An hour later, the press turn up. I don’t know how they always find out.’

‘Beats me.’ Being diplomatic required more effort than Ellie possessed. ‘Unless someone on your staff tipped them off.’

‘Never!’ Eamonn sounded appalled. ‘Now, the Grillon down the road; they’d sell out their grandmothers for five quid and a fish supper. Apart from the people you came in with, who else knew you were here?’

Ellie couldn’t imagine Ari passing her location on to the entertainment desk of the Daily Mirror, which left just David Gold and Georgie Leigh.

It was unthinkable that either of them had any hand in this, because they were taking their orders from Billy Kay, who’d sent them to help her in her hour of need. Not because his paternal instincts were kicking in but because he wanted her to keep her mouth shut so she could disappear back to her own obscure little life as quickly as possible. So, despite Eamonn’s protestations, it was obvious someone at the hotel had tipped the papers off and she needed to find somewhere else to hunker down stat.

At eight o’clock, when Eamonn handed over to Mohamed, the day manager, Ellie decided it was a perfectly acceptable time to start ringing round to see if she could scrounge a place to crash. Her dreams of a minimalist, holistically healing white room had to be dialled back. It was clear that all hotels had a pet reporter on speed dial in case a celebrity OD’d in an en suite. Ellie could only stay in private residences belonging to people she absolutely trusted.

Lola and Tess were still under siege – ‘though now that they know you’re not here, it’s a very civilised siege,’ Tess explained when Ellie called her. ‘Lola asked them to get us some milk last night when we forgot to buy any on the way home.’

She already knew that Ari was surrounded. Chester was in Benidorm. Sadie and Morry would have her to stay in a heartbeat but if word got out, then Ellie didn’t want them besieged by a shoving, jostling mass of media mercenaries. They were too old and frail. Tabitha was on lockdown as she thought there were moths in her latest consignment of vintage dresses and Ellie was just wondering if she had the guts to ring Vaughn and beg for a room in his obscenely huge house, which was nestled behind a very convenient alarmed security gate, when the BlackBerry she was clutching in her sweaty hand rang.

It was David Gold. ‘Good morning, Ellie. I take it that you didn’t have the most peaceful of nights?’ he asked without preamble.

Had he fitted her with some kind of tracking device last night? ‘Well, no, I didn’t, but how you—’

‘Obviously it was too soon for the print edition but you’re the lead story on the Chronicle’s website,’ he explained as Ellie’s fingers fumbled to type in the address. The page loaded before she had time to remember what she’d been wearing and mentally prepare herself. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

Her thin cotton nightdress had been no match for the glare of a camera flash and the Chronicle readers and, once again – oh God, no – David Gold could clearly see the dark outline of her nipples. At least she’d been wearing knickers. At least she’d been spared that final humiliation, not that it was much comfort. It used to be that if Ellie wanted someone to see her nipples, she let them come home with her.


‘It could be worse.’ His words weren’t even a token comfort. ‘And I hate to be the bearer of yet more bad news but the Daily Mail has a photo of you from yesterday and you’re reaching up to touch that hanging bike and maybe you weren’t aware that your dress—’

‘Please don’t say anything else. I get the picture.’ Ellie’s face once again hurt from the acid burn of mortification and she was swallowing hard to choke away the sobs that were rising up in her throat. Ari was a big fan of a fifties pin-up artist called Elvgren and his paintings of voluptuous women all caught in a state of accidental undress: skirts snagging on nails as they climbed over fences, frock hems caught between the teeth of playful puppies and an ‘Ooops! You can see my panties!’ expression of sheer coquetry on their faces. Nobody liked a girl who played coy. ‘I can’t take much more of this.’

Ellie hated to admit even to her friends, even to Ari, that there were things that she couldn’t control, and telling David Gold this, when he was always so impeccably in control, was almost as humiliating as her press coverage. Why couldn’t it have been Sadie who’d been her first phone call of the brand-new day?

‘Do you need my help?’ he asked baldly.

‘I don’t know,’ Ellie stumbled. She’d never thought of herself as one of those girls who needed rescuing. Usually, she was able to rescue herself. ‘What sort of help, exactly?’

‘Why do I have to keep reminding you I have considerable experience in this field? I represent a number of clients from the entertainment industry who occasionally need extracting from similar predicaments,’ he muttered darkly as if he spent a lot of time paying off hotel chambermaids and concerned parents whose underage daughters had been cavorting with … ‘Is the hotel manager there? Put him on.’

Ellie looked at Mohamed, who’d just come back to his office and had spent the last thirty minutes fretting about the effects the events of last night would have on his hotel’s reputation. ‘Billy Kay’s lawyer wants to speak to you.’ She held out her BlackBerry, which he took reluctantly.

The conversation was brief. It was impossible to tell from Mohamed’s nervous smile and his ‘I see’s and ‘that’s do-able’s what David Gold was saying.

She found out half an hour later when a porter came to take her bags and Mohamed led her out through the kitchens to a loading bay where a huge trolley was waiting to be loaded on to a laundry van under David Gold’s supervision.

He turned as Ellie and her entourage approached and smiled. It wasn’t a very comforting smile. She tensed already aching muscles.

‘I’ll give you a leg-up, shall I?’ he asked, gesturing at the laundry trolley, and Ellie, who’d been expecting a nondescript people carrier with tinted windows, looked at him in dismay. And aghast. Also with sheer unadulterated horror. There was only so much she could handle in a twenty-four-hour period.

‘But … but … is that dirty linen in there? Bed sheets that people have slept on and towels they’ve dried their hands on after they’ve been to the loo?’

‘The housekeeping staff always put the less soiled linens on top,’ Mohamed said, but Ellie knew he was lying, and anyway he’d used the word ‘soiled’ and things were either soiled or they weren’t.

She wasn’t being a princess, she really wasn’t, but Ellie refused to go near the laundry hamper until several clean towels and sheets had been spread on top. She didn’t care how bad it was for the environment to launder already laundered linen.

Then she climbed in, despite grave misgivings and the barely concealed smirk on David Gold’s face. She was ceremonially covered up with yet another clean sheet, before the trolley was loaded onto the back of the van and the door slammed shut.

There was no reason not to shuck off her shrouds, but Ellie didn’t know if the laundry service were in on the subterfuge so she stayed exactly where she was, trying to take only very, very shallow breaths so she didn’t inhale the smell of other people’s bottoms. I bet Angelina Jolie’s never had to put up with this, she thought to herself as she tried to track where the van was going from the corners it was taking, but that proved impossible.

It was also impossible to know how long she was confined. It felt like an hour, but could have been five minutes before the van stopped and the doors opened.

‘No, keep yourself covered,’ she heard David Gold say as Ellie went to unveil herself. A hand delved into the trolley to haul her out; a tricky manoeuvre as she needed to keep one hand on her dress so she didn’t flash her gusset to all and sundry, but especially him. ‘Let me help.’

David wrapped his arm round her waist. Ellie was aware of his tightly corded muscles but it wasn’t anything like that scene from An Officer and a Gentleman when Richard Gere sweeps Debra Winger up into his arms. He hauled her out like she was a sack of spuds. ‘The car’s just here,’ he said. Then Ellie could smell leather, posh air freshener and an expensive car smell as she was pushed down in the well between front passenger seat and back seat.

David Gold got in on the other side as Ellie uncovered herself. She caught a glimpse of his annoyed expression before he flipped the sheet back over her. ‘Stop that,’ he snapped, all charm gone, then put his hand on her head to keep her down when the car pulled away and Ellie tried to sit on the seat. ‘And stay there!’

‘But hasn’t the car got tinted windows? No one will be able to see me!’

‘Maybe I don’t want you to know where we’re going.’ While Ellie spluttered furiously, he continued, ‘You might be our press leak.’

‘Well, that’s unbelievable—’

‘Harry? Could we have the radio on? There’s a strange squeaking sound coming from the back of the car.’

Ellie settled down with an aggrieved huff. He still had his hand on her covered head, like she was a bloody dog. She shook herself free and wondered if this was actually her crisis being managed or if she was cooperating with her own kidnapping. Maybe he was sick of lawyering and had decided to abduct Ellie and demand a ransom from Billy Kay, who’d never, ever pay up, even when Ellie had run out of fingers and toes to chop off and send to him in Jiffy bags.

‘Ellie? Does Radio Four meet with your approval?’

Then again, if David Gold was kidnapping her, he probably wouldn’t give her a choice of radio stations and with all these cloak-and-dagger machinations at least the press wouldn’t be able to track her down.

They were twenty minutes into Woman’s Hour, when David said, ‘We’re here,’ as they were driven down a steep slope. The car stopped, Ellie heard the driver get out and she waited patiently, even though her knees were sore from kneeling on the rubber car mat and she still wasn’t convinced of the cleanliness of the sheet.

Finally the door opened. ‘Can I take this off now?’ she asked, and at last David was pulling off the sheet.

He got out of the car as Ellie carefully eased herself from her cramped position. He stood there watching as she gingerly rotated her ankle, then reached down to rub her right calf, which was cramping.

‘Sorry for all the subterfuge,’ he said, as the car drove away. ‘It’s best if no one knows that you’re here.’

Here was an underground parking garage but before she could ask exactly where she was, David Gold lifted up both her holdalls and grabbed her suitcase. ‘Can you manage the rest?’ he threw over his shoulder. Ellie picked up her laptop case, tote bag, handbag and a mysterious small cardboard box that Mohamed had given her as she left the hotel, and followed him to a lift.


‘Shouldn’t you be at work, then?’ she asked stupidly, once they were on their way up to the fifteenth floor. He was wearing an exquisitely cut dark grey suit, crisp white shirt and dark blue tie. Though he must have got home late and been up early in order to read the papers and call her before eight thirty, he looked remarkably fresh-faced. No shadows under his blue eyes, no harsh lines around his mouth.

On the other hand, Ellie was painfully aware that she didn’t have a scrap of make-up on, her eyes were piggy and swollen, and she was still wearing the creased and grubby dress from last night. She caught sight of her hair in the mirrors that lined the lift and wished she hadn’t.

‘You are work,’ David Gold said. ‘You’re the first item on today’s to-do list.’

He really seemed to take pleasure in reminding Ellie that she was a problem he was paid, handsomely no doubt, to deal with so Billy Kay didn’t have to.

She was saved from having to respond by the lift doors opening. They stepped into a lobby, then walked along a corridor that curved around the building, glass brick tiles refracting the brilliant sunlight outside.

‘This is nice,’ Ellie said. There were window ledges filled with plants. It was light and airy, but snug and safe too. Probably not a hotel, but self-service apartments, she thought. They reached a door at the end of the corridor. David Gold opened the top and bottom locks and gestured her through. ‘Very fancy.’

‘Yes, that was the general idea,’ he agreed. ‘It’s quite nice inside too.’

They were on a little dais, which led down to a open-plan living room, dominated by floor-to-ceiling windows. Over the buildings she could see a leafy expanse of green that stretched for miles. She’d never seen it from this high up before.

‘Is that Hampstead Heath?’

David Gold didn’t say anything at first. He busied himself parking her suitcase and setting down her holdalls, fussing until they were all neatly aligned, then turned to her with a shifty expression.

‘How would you feel if I told you things only on a need-to-know basis?’

‘Not very happy.’ Ellie folded her arms. ‘I need to know where I am. So will other people, like my grandparents and the gallery, and knowing where you are is a basic human need. It’s why they invented GPS. I can get my phone out and go to Google Maps, but it would be a lot easier if you just tell me.’

His mouth pulled. No smile for her until she toed the party line. ‘Very well, we’re in Highgate.’ He swallowed hard. ‘Actually, we’re in my flat.’ He frowned. ‘When I say that out loud, it sounds rather inappropriate, doesn’t it?’





Camden, London, 1986

They’d been recording songs in the studio under the railway bridge for two weeks when one of the girlfriends of the band in the studio next door asked if she had a spare tampon and Ari couldn’t remember the last time she’d needed a tampon.

She wasn’t worried. She often skipped periods when she forgot to take her pill, then doubled up the dose to compensate. She’d also been missing periods because ever since that first encounter with Billy at the Black Horse months ago, Ari had been living on red wine, cigarettes and the edge of her nerves, and her cycle was always screwy when she was stressing about gigs or men and … No! Her sister Carol had been trying for a baby for four years. Four years! It was really, really hard to get pregnant and most likely she was anaemic and needed to eat more red meat. That was the most likely explanation.

Not that Ari was already five months pregnant, even though her stomach was as flat as it ever was. She felt like some stupid schoolgirl so in denial about her condition that even her parents didn’t know she was up the duff until she went into labour after a hockey match.

Still, it was her body, her choice and Ari chose not to have it heavy with child. Didn’t even think twice about it. When Patti Smith had had kids, she’d stopped making music and Ari thought she might die if she had to stop making music.

She wasn’t even going to tell Billy because it would just f*ck everything up when everything was so good. Then one night, a few days after, she’d peed on a stick with disastrous results. Billy played her a song he’d been working on. It was good but she knew how to make it better, and after hours of plugging away Ari stumbled upon a chorus that sounded like nothing she’d heard before but was so catchy, she could have sworn she’d been humming the melody all her life, even as she riffed on The Crystals’

‘He Hit Me’: ‘He touched me and it felt like a kiss.’ She pulled a face as she scribbled down the lines in one of the Black n’ Red Notebooks they were using to make notes on each song. ‘Lyric needs work, doesn’t it?’

Billy didn’t answer at first. They were sitting side by side on a sagging sofa in the seedy studio that always smelled of damp, even on a hot September evening. Then he lifted her hand to his lips. ‘You know something? The songs have never sounded like this before. You’re my muse.’

It was the kind of crap that always made Ari snort in derision, but this time she burst into tears and when Billy held her and kissed her damp cheeks, she said it. ‘I’m pregnant.’

‘Is it mine?’ he asked, without missing a beat.

‘Of course it’s yours,’ she snapped back. ‘Don’t worry, there’s no way I’m having it.’ It was that simple. Ari pushed Billy’s hand away when he splayed it across her belly. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘And don’t go sentimental on me. It doesn’t suit you.’