Wicked Ambition. Victoria Fox

if that was right but she couldn’t stop. Two more, thirty more, two more, thirty more, two more, desperation building and panic surging and then…

      Nothing.

       ‘Don’t die on me, sweetheart. Come on, not here, not now…’

      She didn’t know how long she kept it up for, and only stopped when she saw the girl was grey in the face. She was dead. It was over.

      Grace sat back on her knees. Cosmo was clothed, stalking the room. He tossed her belongings and numbly she dressed. ‘Get her the hell out of here,’ he ordered.

       The word floated in Grace’s throat before she caught hold of it. ‘What?’

       ‘You whores stick together, don’t you? Get out and take her with you. Far as you’re concerned she never set foot in this place.’

       ‘You heartless bastard. I’m taking her nowhere.’

       ‘You’re in this too, cunt.’

       ‘I tried to save her.’

       ‘Or else you killed her. I bet you finished her off right there, thumping her chest like that without a clue what you were doing!’

      Grace’s mouth was dry. She didn’t believe him, she couldn’t, but even as he uttered the words she knew they would haunt her as long as she lived.

      They folded the body into the trunk of Cosmo’s car. He told her that if she breathed a word to anyone he would kill her, and it had been both their faults because if she’d given him time to think then they might have been able to save the bitch. Grace didn’t speak a word as they drove out to the desert. Cosmo flicked the radio on and smoked manically out of the window. All she would remember of that drive was Bruce Springsteen on the airwaves, ‘Born to Run’, and it seemed that her whole life had been spent doing exactly that.

      She shivered in the cold night as Cosmo dug the hole. It took forever. A host of stars observed overhead as the body was thrown in, eliciting a sickening thump. Grace pleaded once more to go to the cops and he hit her so hard she was thrown across the hood of the car.

      ‘This goes nowhere,’ he told her on the ride back to town. ‘Do you understand? I give you your money; you crawl back to whatever hole you came from and I never want to see you again. That bitch is nothing to me, and neither are you. You claim to know me and you’re a crazy-ass motherfucker off the goddamn street. You even think about telling anyone any of this and you’re more of a corpse than the girl I just buried. Got it? It’s your fingerprints all over her, too. Never forget that.’

      Grace Turquoise quit Madam Babydoll’s the next morning. She didn’t leave a note, just the cut she owed. Downtown she rented an apartment and took a job in a bar. One night she was singing as she worked and invited to the stage, where as long-overdue luck would have it a visiting record producer encountered the most astonishing voice he’d ever heard.

       A week later she was signed to her first label. Cosmo Angelopoulos soon became a horrifying memory, one that would wake her in the night, bathed in sweat and remembering his words. He couldn’t touch her now…could he?

      She wasn’t to know that her flourishing stardom was going to lead her straight back into the ring. And that one day she would have to face her adversary—and then, only then, one of them would be made to pay.

       14

      Robin’s tour manager had arranged a dance audition in West Hollywood. They needed to select eight principal dancers and twenty backing, and with hundreds queueing round the block from six a.m., they knew they had their work cut out.

      ‘We’ll see you in groups of thirty, three rows of ten,’ Marc Delgado told them. ‘When I hold my hand up like this, front row goes to the back and the next comes forward. Clear?’

      The studio was a kaleidoscopic jumble of leg warmers, slashed T-shirts and hairstyles that rivalled even her own. California-tanned bellies peeked out above hip-hugging slouch pants, and smooth, powerful limbs practised stretch warm-ups with ease. There couldn’t be more than an ounce of fat in the room. Robin didn’t think she’d ever seen so many gorgeous people in the same place: African, Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic, each was as cute as the next.

      ‘This is going to be tough,’ she said, grabbing a coffee and taking her place alongside Marc and Barney. Barney was flipping through the dancers’ profiles.

      ‘Jeez, where do we start?’

      ‘Stamina,’ Marc advised. ‘These guys need to be able to perform night after night and week after week. Today should give you an idea of how they keep pace. We’ll have the finalists moving for an hour or more, but any sign of flagging, breathlessness or ill-coordination and it’s a no as far as I’m concerned.’

      ‘Harsh!’ said Robin.

      Marc shrugged. ‘But true.’

      The routines fired up to Robin’s opening number ‘Told You So’ and an army of bodies slipped into the choreographed routine. Marc had arranged a killer string of steps, jagged one minute, supple the next, and the dancers adhered with poise and precision.

      After the first round the panel conferred, starring the names of those they’d call back and striking through any who hadn’t made it. Marc explained it was a rigorous process and the dancers selected would be made to endure several gruelling cycles before decisions were made. He found Robin’s determination to employ a majority of women refreshing, and unlike most stars he’d worked with she was unthreatened by their beauty. ‘If you’re doing me a hot show, Marc, then I want the hottest girls there are.’

      Take two surrendered some formidable talent. The competition was brutal. Several dancers quit, short of air or fumbling their steps, and once the momentum was broken it was hard to get back. Robin had taken basic training when her star began its ascent, in how to cover the stage, how to move while holding her voice and how to execute a basic catalogue of struts, but not nearly enough to compete with the professionals. To be dismissing them felt cruel, but as Marc kept pointing out they had to get the numbers down somehow.

      It was a thrill to be amassing her troupe. They would be like one big crew on the road, and she wasn’t just picking a bunch of randoms to take the stage, she was picking people with whom she’d be content to spend time, people who might become friends.

      ‘Like them,’ Barney had counselled on the way over, ‘but trust them more.’

      A runner put his head round the door. Marc went to shoo him off but he gestured at Robin with a tentative, ‘Sorry to disturb. Phone call for Ms Ryder.’

      Robin looked up. ‘Who is it?’

      ‘The girl says it’s family. I wouldn’t have interrupted otherwise…’

      Robin was puzzled. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘this won’t take long.’

      Family?

      Outside the corridor was deserted, quiet apart from the shouts of kids passing on the street several storeys below. There was a booth, the phone resting expectantly on a little plastic counter. Robin scooped it up. ‘Hello?’

      Nothing.

      ‘Hello?’ she repeated.

      She went to replace the receiver, thinking the line must have been cut off, when she began to detect a very faint breathing, so delicate it was hardly there.

      ‘Who is it?’ she demanded. ‘Who is this?’

      The breathing was quickening, deepening, getting louder. Thickly she remembered the walker at her heels in London. The dodgy fan mail. And then three words, faint and rattling, so muffled that she couldn’t be at all sure but she thought a female voice rasped:

       ‘I’m