Strangers. Rosie Thomas

      ‘Why?’ Annie heard herself ask. ‘Are you married?’

      The street had been cleared. Out of the first desperate scramble to reach the injured the police had created a kind of order. They had unrolled orange plastic tapes to make a cordon around the store, and inside the circle the rescue workers were at work. The orange fluorescent jackets worn by the police seemed to spill their colour into the grey air, and the firemen’s yellow helmets bobbed up and down as they unloaded their complicated equipment, pulleys and lifting tackle and strange, cumbersome cameras. They moved quickly, with practised efficiency.

      Outside the orange line the rescue vehicles were drawn up. The high grey and scarlet walls of the fire engines made a solid wall, and beyond them an ambulance waited, drawn up beside the big white emergency first aid trailer. Another ambulance moved away with the last of the injured from the pavement outside the store. Sixty yards to the south two police constables opened the white tapes of the outer cordon to let it through.

      The crowd, swollen with arriving sightseers, had been moved back beyond the fluttering white tapes. One of the uniformed constables at the cordon still carried a loudhailer, to warn back anyone who tried to come closer.

      In the centre of a huddle of police cars drawn up between the inner and outer cordons stood an anonymous pale blue van with a domed roof. It was the major incident vehicle from Scotland Yard, and inside it the duty inspector from the local station was handing the direction of the operation over to the commander who had arrived with it. The bomb squad’s equally anonymous control van stood close beside it.

      A few yards away, at a special point in the white cordon, the press had already formed a restless knot. The first television news crew had set up, and their reporter was moving along the crowd at the tapes in search of an eye-witness to interview. But he turned away again as a senior police officer and a police press officer emerged from the control van.

      ‘We don’t have any idea, as yet,’ the policeman told them. ‘The store had only been open for a few minutes, as you know, so the chances are that there were fewer shoppers inside than there would have been later in the morning. We have a list of store personnel and it is being checked now against the survivors we have already reached.’

      A dozen more questions were fired at him.

      ‘No. We do not yet have an accurate figure for the number of casualties, nor will we for some time. The rescue operation has already begun, and it will continue until it is clear that no survivors remain.’

      The cold, wet air was alive with the static crackle of police radios.

      ‘No,’ the officer said. ‘We don’t have any idea yet as to how many people may be buried.’

      He turned away with a brusque nod, back towards the control van. At the cordon the press officer read out to the journalists the telephone number of the central casualty bureau set up at Scotland Yard.

      Steve knew how it would be. He had been imagining it, using the picture in his mind’s eye to convince himself that they would be rescued. He needed to convince the girl, too, make her believe in the precision of the rescue operation. Her hand was so cold, and he could feel her trembling even in her fingertips.

      ‘I was married, for a while. Not any more.’

      ‘Why?’

      She wanted him to talk, too. She was reaching out in the same way, wanting to hold on to the sound of his voice. Steve tasted the dust in his throat.

      Why? Cass had been waiting for him, that evening. She hadn’t had a booking, and so she had been at home all day. It was very late when he came in, but it was often late. The irony was that that night he really had been working.

      ‘Had a good time?’ she had asked, without looking up. There was a bottle on the low glass table beside her, almost empty. So she had been drinking. And, as there always was wherever Cass went, there was a litter of other stuff as well. Two or three glossy magazines, a scarlet phial of nail-varnish with a plastic crest to the lid like a stiletto blade, her Sony Walkman with its leads trailing on the floor, a scatter of open cassette packs.

      Steve had draped his jacket over the back of a chair and gone into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee.

      ‘Had a good time?’ she called after him. He had ground the coffee very fine, almost relishing the noise, and then he had gone to the kitchen doorway to look at her.

      Cass was a model. She wasn’t quite the youngest in the business now, but she was still successful. Cass’s real name was Jennifer Cassady, but her agency had agreed when they took her on the books that her given name wasn’t quite right. So they had opted simply for ‘Cass’. There was the name, in the agency’s folder, in her portfolio, on her cards. ‘Cass. Hair, brown. Eyes, green. 5ft 10in. 35–24–34.’ And all the rest of the information – her shoe and glove sizes, her particular modelling expertise, her willingness to ‘do’ underwear ads.

      Like most of her model friends, Cass rarely wore make-up when she wasn’t working. Her pale, triangular face turned towards Steve, expressionless under its straight-cut fringe of hair. Steve had often thought that with her wide-set eyes and her pointed chin, she looked like a Persian cat. She moved like a cat, too.

      ‘Not particularly.’ Steve answered her question deliberately slowly. ‘I’ve been doing a reshoot for Fawcetts. I’ve had Phil Day on my back all evening.’

      ‘That must make a change,’ Cass said, carefully, not wanting to muff her line now that it had been presented to her, ‘from having Vicky on hers.’

      Steve hadn’t said anything. There wasn’t any point in saying anything, both of them understood that. He had gone back into the kitchen and rummaged in the drawers for the coffee strainer. He had poured himself a mugful of coffee and leant against the grey-painted cupboard, staring blankly at the newspaper, while he drank it.

      When he went back into the living room, Cass wasn’t there. He turned off the lights, went through into the bedroom, and found her.

      She had made up her face, and changed out of her sweatshirt and track pants. Steve was used to her chameleon transformations, but now he stood still and stared at her. Later he remembered a black lace bra, French knickers slit high at the sides, suspenders and black stockings. Cass had painted pouting red lips over her own, but her black-rimmed eyes belied them. They met his, full of bewildered resentment. But she faced him squarely with one hand on her hip, posing.

      ‘I’m sorry you didn’t have a good time tonight. Shall I give you one now?’

      ‘Cass, for God’s sake …’

      She came swaying towards him, reaching up to the catch of her bra but holding it over her breasts, sliding the straps off her smooth brown shoulders.

      She was very pretty, tall and a little too thin, with hip-bones that jutted on either side of the soft concavity of her stomach. Against his will, knowing that she was manipulating him, Steve put out his hand to touch her. Her skin was warm, and he knew the intimate scent of it.

      ‘Cass,’ he whispered. ‘What are you doing?’

      ‘I am your wife, aren’t I?’

      ‘You are.’

      He drew her to him and her half-naked body fitted against his. He kissed her, smudging the scarlet mouth, and she began to undo the buttons of his shirt. Steve tilted her sideways, down on to the bed. For a moment she lay looking up at him, then she rolled over so that she was on top. She undid the last button and her fingers moved to the buckle of his belt. She bent her head to kiss him and then looked downwards, dreamily, the soft ends of her hair trailing over his bare chest. For the moment Steve had forgotten the complicated sequence of their long-running battle. His fingers found the lace-trimmed edge of the provocative knickers. He slid them inside, reaching for her.

      Cass pushed him away. She rolled out his arms and stood up. Without a glance back at him she went to her wardrobe, took out a coat and put it on over the black lace underthings. Then