Watch Her Fall

by Erin Kelly

Genres: Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

Black Swan meets Killing Eve - the brilliant new novel from Erin Kelly

Swan Lake is divided into the black acts and the white acts. The Prince is on stage for most of the ballet, but it's the swans audiences flock to see. In early productions, Odette and Odile were performed by two different dancers. These days, it is usual for the same dancer to play both roles. Because of the faultless ballet technique required to master the steps, and the emotional range needed to perform both the virginal Odette and the dark, seductive Odile, this challenging dual role is one of the most coveted in all ballet. Dancers would kill for the part.

Ava Kirilova has reached the very top of her profession. After years and years of hard graft, pain and sacrifice as part of the London Russian Ballet Company, allowing nothing else to distract her, she is finally the poster girl for Swan Lake. Even Mr K - her father, and the intense, terrifying director of the company - can find no fault. Ava has pushed herself ahead of countless other talented, hardworking girls, and they are all watching her now.

But there is someone who really wants to see Ava fall ...

(P)2021 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Release date: April 1, 2021

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my brilliant and beloved agent Sarah Ballard. Thank you Eli Keren for absolutely bringing it. Thank you Jane Willis, Amy Mitchell, Georgina le Grice, Alex Stephens, Lucy Joyce and Fatima Amin and all at United Agents.

 

Thank you to everyone at Hodder & Stoughton: my fabulous new editor Jo Dickinson, and my fabulous not-new publicist Leni Lawrence. Thank you Carolyn Mays, Sorcha Rose, Kate Keehan, Alice Morley, Dom Gribben, Iman Khabl, Catherine Worsley, Sarah Clay and Richard Peters. Thank you to Ruth Tross for reading an early synopsis of this book some time in the late Jurassic period and to Kate Howard for her caretaking during the interregnum. Thank you Linda McQueen for a brilliant copy edit.

 

Thank you Tetyana Denford (whose novel Motherland I can’t recommend enough) for translating Roman’s words into Ukrainian. Thank you Valeriy Akimenko of the Conflict Studies Research centre for insight into the Ukrainian conscription process. Spasibo Viv Groskop for the masterclass in the Russian patronymic system.

 

Huge thanks and bottomless apologies to the orthopaedic surgeon Mr Simon Thompson who gave generously of his time to explain exactly how he would fix Ava’s knee so that she could dance again, and whose advice I ignored because it didn’t suit my plot. I know that if you had operated on her, she would have lived to twirl another day.

 

Thank you to all the early readers of Watch Her Fall. Helen Treacy, my novels only start to feel like proper books once you have set eyes on them. Emma Mitchell, your feedback was invaluable. And my dear friends in the crime-writing community, Michelle Davies, Sarah Hilary and Paddy Magrane: thank you, not just for reading but also for listening.

 

Thank you to Ellen Chambers from the charity Dancers’ Career Development for putting me in touch with the two brilliant ballet dancers who helped shape this novel, Mariana Rodriguez of the Northern Ballet and Matthew Broadbent of the Scottish National Ballet. Thank you, both, for answering my relentless questions and giving me such detailed responses to my manuscript. Any faithful portrayal of the ballet world is down to Mariana and Matthew: any inauthentic details are all mine.

 

Thank you Magda Charlton, who won an auction in aid of the Sobell House Hospice in Oxford, to name a character in this book. Magda, I hope you and your husband Jack Charlton are happy with his fictional namesake.

 

Thank you, too, to two ballet dancers I have never met, Natalia Osipova and Reece Clarke of The Royal Ballet, who brought me to tears as Odette/Odile and Siegfried in Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House in London in March 2020. Watching that performance was the last ‘normal’ thing I did before the COVID-19 pandemic halted the world on its axis. I was inspired too by the scores of dancers who shared their lockdown online. I watched, awe-struck, as they used kitchen worktops as barres, turned pirouettes on squares of lino in tiny flats and, as the summer progressed, performed on rooftops, on canal banks and rooftops.

 

Finally, thank you to my family. My parents, for always being there. Michael, for everything, as always. And thank you to the dedicatees of this book, our daughters, Marnie and Sadie, my constant companions through the strange, sad year of 2020. For every still, sunny day we spent together there seemed to be two when I had to close my study door in your faces and write. You bore the stress and uncertainty with grace and humour and I could not be prouder of you. Moyi lyubimiye devushki, my most beloved girls.

Chapter 22

The Marks & Spencer Simply Food is so cold it was worth braving the blistering sun for. Crutches and a wire basket might not make for the most elegant progress through the aisles but they’re good for clearing a path. I use my right crutch to halt the path of a well-heeled woman whose trolley is full of prosecco and ready-made trifles. If you can afford to do your big shop in M&S then you don’t need the reduced aisle. That belongs to those of us with thirty quid to our names. It’s rich pickings tonight, even better than yesterday: some of the salads are just 20p.

I cannot stop thinking about that safe. I was awake all last night, pinging between logistics and morality. Surely even someone as bricked into her ivory tower as Ava Kirilova couldn’t begrudge an injured dancer a few meals. Would someone as wealthy as her even notice a few thousand pounds missing? It’s as if all the energy I used to channel into dancing has found a new home. I see now that I miss ballet not only for its own sake but for the sense of purpose it gave me. The idea of borrowing cash from the safe is not just a plan for my survival: it’s somewhere to put my thoughts. And, unlike ballet, it doesn’t feel too tender to touch.

In the household goods aisle, a woman not much older than me wheels past a cage of toilet paper. I could apply for a job like this if I were able to stand up for more than thirty seconds without these bloody sticks. I could work in an office if they had taught me how to turn on a computer as well as how to hold an arabesque. My lack of options stops me feeling guilty about borrowing from the safe and makes me feel kind of . . . righteous. This is what they owe me, and not just me. There was a point last night where it felt almost like my duty: as though taking her money is something I need to do on behalf of every dancer the LRB have left destitute over the years.

If I could do it on my own I wouldn’t hesitate, but of course I can’t. I need Maxim Shevchenko. I have something to hold over him now, but I can’t work out how to get from that to the small matter of asking him to help me crack his client’s safe.

If it means him putting his job on the line, I can’t ask him to do it.

In the queue for the till I fondle the coins in my pocket as though that will make them multiply. It’s all theoretical until I can persuade him to explain how the system works. Once I know that, I’ll know whether I’m asking him to lend me his time or to risk his job. The man’s homeless: he will need money and I will give him a cut, like commission.

I dump the little yellow-stickered boxes of wheatberry and pomegranate on to the conveyer belt. He has no reason to trust me, apart from the matter of my not telling his employers he’s living on borrowed time, on borrowed ground. I shake my head. I should be worrying, not about him trusting me, but about me trusting him. If we open the safe, what’s to say he won’t take the lot? I don’t know him from Adam. He could be an escaped murderer for all I know.

It’s not worth the risk. It’s a stupid idea and I need to put it out of my mind.

By the time my shopping sails up to the cashier, I’ve changed my mind again. I’m going to at least try. Seduction, that’s the most obvious way to get him on-side. He’s not my type but I am a performer, after all. Once upon a time – less than three weeks ago – getting him into bed would have been easy. Men outside the industry, and some within it, you can see the word ballerina flick a switch in them, draining blood away from their brains. I don’t have that capital any more. I—

Bang! I’m jolted from my thoughts as, with a pop and a fizz, the overhead lights go out. There’s an eerie groaning sound as all the fridges and freezers power down simultaneously. Everyone blinks in the unexpected darkness, the sun through the window throwing the cashiers into chiaroscuro.

‘You are shitting me,’ says a man holding a single pint of milk, as staff emerge from a back room and a sales assistant pulls a shutter over the wine aisle.

‘Sorry, ladies and gents, we need to close,’ says a mountainous security guard. ‘We’ve had an outage.’

‘But my shopping!’ protests the woman with the trolley full of puddings.

‘I’m sorry, madam. We can’t ring it up if the tills aren’t working. We really must ask you to leave.’

‘But my barbecue is today.’ She asks if she can pay in cash, wilfully misunderstanding their patient explanations. The cashiers take over the evacuation, gently guiding an elderly lady and her shopping trolley towards the exit while the rest of the staff crowd around the barbecue woman, whose temper is rising with the heat in the shop. ‘You don’t understand, I’ve got family coming. Get me the manager. Get me the regional manager, on the phone. I’m not going anywhere.’

A daring thought soars inside me. If there’s no power, then there are no cameras and no alarms. The woman in front of me had bagged up most of her shopping before the transaction could be finished, and she’s already vanished. Two sturdy totes are waiting at the end of the conveyor. Without stopping to investigate what’s in them, I dump them in a lone trolley, place my crutches over the top in an X, then stroll out of the shop as though I have already paid, passing through the dead arch of the security gates in silence.

I thrust the trolley across the road, through the gates and up the hill, sweat-slicked hands sliding over the handle, my good leg burning with the effort. I don’t suppose Gabriel’s Hill sees many red-faced, lame ballerinas pushing loaded shopping trolleys along its leafy pavements, but today there are no skinny women in Range Rovers, no cleaners’ cars or gardeners’ vans, no roaming beauticians; even Force Patrol are nowhere to be seen. I have broken the law. I should feel terrible but I don’t: I feel excited, alive in a way that I’ve only ever known when I’m dancing.

 

It seems that I had a visitor while I was out shopping. There’s a note pinned to a bag on the doorstep. Holding on to the trolley for balance, I bend to pick it up in a clumsy arabesque. She’s written in ballpoint, childish print on an LRB compliments slip.

Hope ur ok, got ur painkillers and some letters to drop off. I’ll call u later. xLx

The combination of text-speak and the twee sign-off stoke my dislike for her. She has left another week’s worth of my medication, which is welcome, and some fan mail for Ava Kirilova, which is fantastically tactless. I throw it into the trolley with the bags.

As I turn the key in the lock, I notice fingerprints on the letterbox and an oily nose-print on one of the front windows. It seems that Lizanne’s had a good old look at the house. Nosiness, or part of her job? Only the LRB would abandon me and check up on me at the same time.

Stepping into the hallway, I am struck again by the simplicity, the taste, the money. That’s when it hits me. It’s not me Lizanne is checking up on. It’s Ava Kirilova’s house. This place is an asset, just as I once was but will never be again.

Chapter 1

It was nine o’clock in the morning and already thirty-one degrees. London shimmered in a dirty haze. The weather reporter on the radio had said that it was hot enough to fry an egg on the pavement. Ava Kirilova thought about this as heat from the paving stones burned through the soles of her shoes, but she was not allowed to eat fried eggs, and wouldn’t have known how to cook one if she were.

The stroll to work always eased out the aches of the day before, but today the sun blasted away any comfort. Sweat stung the crooks of Ava’s elbows and the backs of her knees. A red bus sneezed a cloud of diesel that stuck to the sunscreen on her arms in little black globules. She had begun to crave the shower in her dressing room almost as soon as she had left the place she called home, even though the theatre was and would always be that.

The London Russian Ballet Theatre was a concrete block at the end of an avenue of thirsty plane trees. It was a palace of magic, a hothouse of excellence that looked, to the uninitiated, like a multi-storey car park. Today there was a splash of colour on its grey façade: a picture that quickened Ava’s pace as well as her heart until she was standing before a poster, three metres high and two metres wide. Ava was reflected in the frame, her skin shiny as the glass. She watched her mirror twin’s hand go to her mouth in happiness and disbelief.

At last, she thought.

Across the top of the poster, the red legend SWAN LAKE; underneath that, Ava herself, large as life, in costume as Odile, the sly black swan in a dress and crown of glossy black feathers. She had been lit so that her skin looked impossibly white, and behind her, entwined around her, Luca’s limbs gleamed like polished wood. Their heads were turned from the camera but their bodies were as expressive as faces: sly suggestion in the slope of her shoulder; youthful energy in the curve of his calf. Beneath the portraits in tiny print was a list of the cities they would visit over the next nine months, summer 2018 to spring 2019. A huge undertaking, covering most of the globe. There would be eighty dancers on stage at once, a Swan Lake bigger and more daring and darker than anyone had done before. And, across the top of the poster, the name of the only person insane and ingenious enough to attempt it on that scale: A NEW PRODUCTION BY NIKOLAI KIRILOV. The ballet masters’ ballet master, founder of the company, owner of the theatre: Nikolai Kirilov to his audiences and to the world’s press, Mr K to his dancers, Nicky to a select few friends, and Papa to Ava.

He had been waiting her whole career, which was her whole life, for her to grow into the ultimate role. And now every ten-hour day, every bloodied ballet shoe, every pleasure denied, had paid off. The posters made it real in a way that the announcement and the months of rehearsal and costume fittings hadn’t. The enormity of it made Ava sway, the street tilting around her. I have to do his vision justice, she thought, staggering as if expectation itself had reached out and shoved her. She put out her hand to steady herself, pressing against the concrete wall. It was as hot as a hob. The skin on her palm glowed, as if the building had branded her.

The main door was open, which meant it was safe for Ava to enter the theatre through the front. After ten the public were allowed in, and it wasn’t worth meeting the fans because they’d invariably ask for selfies and never understand when she had to decline. She pushed the heavy glass. The atrium – fifteen metres high, the dimensions of a cathedral cast in the material of motorway bridges – was barely cooler than the street. Nicky Kirilov’s theatre was five miles and a world away from the gilt and brocade of the grand West End theatres, and that was the point. Strip away the candelabras and the swags of red velvet and all you were left with was the ballet: the work, in all its challenging genius. Only the most dedicated balletomanes made the pilgrimage to this unfashionable corner of the city with its graph-paper office blocks, but they made that pilgrimage from all over the world.

The interior walls were lined with more Swan Lake posters. The engineers were in, measuring and tapping and photographing. Two men with clipboards examined a rumbling air-con unit, installed thirty years ago and unfit for this overheating century. The whole place was being dragged up to date: glass, wires and pipes ripped out and replaced. The shiny new theatre would be the version she would inherit one day, along with the company and its repertoire. Nicky’s life’s work would become hers. She was lucky – she would never be exiled from the ballet world – but the next stage of her career meant two of Ava’s nightmares would come true: her own retirement from the stage, and her father’s death. A weird mewling came out of her mouth now at the thought, drawing the attention of the one of the engineers.

‘Alright, love?’ He clearly had no idea who she was. To be anonymous in this building gave her a little thrill. She regained her composure to nod and smile with practised grace.

The five floors in the complex were linked by an Escheresque system of concrete stairs, balconies and galleries. High above Ava’s head, an unseen door banged and voices drifted down from the gallery that circled the second floor.

‘I’m boiling to actual death. Why does he even want us in this early?’

The acoustics in this atrium were as sharp as a stage but it could have been any ballerina talking. Nicky drew his dancers from all over the world and they shared the subtle accent that anyone who’d grown up in the company developed, no matter where in the world they’d spent the first half of their childhood: received pronunciation with a trace element of Eurotrash.

‘Ours not to reason why,’ replied her friend, then drew in her breath. ‘Oh! The posters are in.’ They leaned over the edge of the walkway, casting elegant silhouettes on the floor. ‘Look at her. She’s so beautiful. She looks unreal.’

Ava took a step back, pressed herself against a pillar and smiled to herself. If they came down the main staircase for a closer look, she would duck out of sight, but they seemed to prefer to judge from on high.

‘Just in the nick of time, too,’ said the first dancer, her voice scored with significance.

‘What d’you mean?’

Yes, thought Ava, what did she mean? She was aware, of course, that she was the subject of gossip, but it was rare that she got to hear the details. Her spine throbbed against the cool concrete.

‘Well, she’s thirty.’ The dancer dropped the word deliberately, left a beat to relish its echo. ‘It’s all a bit now-or-never, isn’t it? The beginning of the end?’

Ava’s feet twitched to step into the girls’ view. One word from her – one look – and their careers would be over. She was the prima ballerina and her father’s heir. But the sick need to know what came next held her still.

‘As if she needs to worry. She’ll go on forever.’

The silhouettes retreated and a door squeaked on its hinges.

‘Honey, none of us go on forever.’

The door banged closed and the girls were gone. Ava would never know who they were, but it hardly mattered. They all thought the same way. They thought she was secure. They thought it was easy, once you were at the top. They couldn’t understand that to dance at her level did not exempt you from paranoia: it stitched it to your heels as tightly as your shadow.

They had no idea what it was like to carry a show, to carry a name, with nothing but responsibility stretching out into the future and everyone’s eyes on you, all the time.

For the second time that morning, Ava Kirilova’s nerves unbalanced her. She pressed deeper into the column as though it might absorb her, and engaged the muscles of her core to steady herself. What they didn’t understand – what nobody understood – was that the higher you flew, the farther you had to fall.

Chapter 10

By class the next morning Ava still hadn’t heard from Nicky, and the flame of hope she’d felt during the costume fitting had guttered overnight. She shouldered the door of Studio 1 in a state of hypervigilance. Whose dropped eyes would betray the dancer who’d overheard Nicky’s reprimand? But, inside, Ava barely made a ripple. All eyes were on Felicity, who stood in Nicky’s place at the front of the room.

Ava’s stomach tightened. It wasn’t unusual for Felicity or Boyko to lead company class but she always, always knew about it beforehand, and she always knew why. She found herself scanning the barres and mirrors for the second swan, and when she couldn’t find her in the sea of lookalike ballerinas she leapt to the conclusion that they must be together. The only dancer Nicky ever skipped class to focus on was Ava.

She made straight for Felicity. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Felicity brightly. ‘Mr K’s got a meeting this morning. Some last-minute legal thing. Raisa and Boyko are in it as well. Didn’t he tell you?’

Pride handed her the oldest excuse in the book. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I forgot.’

‘Pre-production brain,’ said Felicity, with what might have been pity. ‘We’ve all got it.’

Ava set her bottle and bag at the base of the barre. When she straightened up, she saw that the second swan was a knight’s move away, one metre to the right and two metres behind her. Ava had been the last one in; she must have been there all along. She was staring at Ava, a nervous smile on its starting blocks, but then the music began and Ava broke eye contact.

Felicity’s class was hard, fast, exacting, so rigorous that, as the sweat began to smart in her eyes, Ava wished she’d done a warm-up to prepare for the warm-up. The demands of instructing filleted Felicity’s usual niceties and for forty-five blistering minutes the steely dancer at her core was exposed. There you are, thought Ava. It was a reminder that no matter how long you had been dancing, no matter what your position, everyone had something to prove and something to mask. It was as exhausting as it was reassuring.

 

When she opened her dressing room door, something slithered sideways across the floor. Ava shrieked and performed a spontaneous sauté, landing on the daybed. If the cockroaches from the Gulag had migrated to the theatre she didn’t think she could take it.

The creature didn’t move. Ava summoned the courage to inspect it and saw that it wasn’t a cockroach or a living thing at all but a single black feather, the span of Ava’s hand, a rime of purple glitter on its tip. Her relief was short-lived. Odile’s costume was locked in the mirrored wardrobe. Had someone been in there?

She took the key from her dressing-table drawer and opened the wardrobe door. The mannequins stood side by side but an asymmetry on Odile’s neckline made it clear where the feather had come from; in fact there were a few missing, a bald patch on the fabric. This happened, feathers came loose all the time, and, while a gap under the wardrobe door accounted for its presence on her floor, where were the rest of them? She crawled on all fours but there was no sign.

Sakurako knew the costumes were here, and she was only next door, and the four principals locked their dressing-table drawers but not their doors. You never knew when you might run out of padding or tape. Delia had said that Sakurako wanted to try the dresses on for the same reasons Ava did. Could she have damaged the dress, accidentally or – the thought brushed Ava’s mind like a feather riding a breeze – out of spite, or some kind of deliberate sabotage? It was the kind of thing you heard about, but there was the small matter of it being the most out-of-character thing Sakurako could do. Nicky’s paranoia was infecting her. It must have been me, thought Ava. I must have dislodged them and the cleaners, not realising that every feather was hand-painted, must have swept them up.

She was tired, she was sore and she was, she realised as her belly imploded, ravenous. From the fruit bowl she took a banana – ninety calories but worth every one of them, with fibre, Vitamin B6 and potassium for muscle recovery – and peeled it. Purple glitter – that stuff got everywhere – left a faint smear on the yellow skin. She caught sight of herself in the mirror. The banana looked like a tree going into a woodchipper. When there was a rap on the door she said, ‘It’s open,’ through a mouthful of simple carbohydrate.

‘Is only us.’ Nicky’s voice stepped her nerves up a gear. He must be here to confirm, or deny, her demotion. The first night was Sakurako’s, or it was hers.

He loves me, he loves me not.

As the door handle turned, she prepared to arrange her features to reflect his mood, in the hope that she could bring about a last-minute reprieve if there was one going, but when he creaked into the room there was nothing to bounce off. On his face, pain had painted out all other feeling. Raisa’s expression gave no more clue. Ava felt her earlier defiance change shape inside her, and the impulse to apologise rise up, but Nicky spoke before she could.

‘You have interview day after tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Important journalist. Sunday broadsheet.’

Surprise overtook relief and Ava swallowed the rest of her banana whole. Of course the press reviewed their shows in the dance pages, but Nicky had always behaved as though he actively wanted not to be known outside the dance circles, as though the dinner-and-a-show brigade couldn’t understand his work and didn’t deserve it. He had always said that the only reason to court the papers was to fill the box office, and what did that matter when his capital and his shadowy oligarch patrons would bankroll any show?

‘Why now?’ she said, when the banana had finished its painful progress. Her next thought nearly brought it back up. ‘Are you – are we running out of money?’

There had always been money, and she had been brought up to assume that there always would.

‘Nooo.’ He laughed to dismiss the idea, pitching her from panic back into relief so quickly she felt a kind of seasickness. ‘Is because I am proud of you.’

It was as if her blood itself halted. She drew the deepest breath she had taken all day. ‘So you aren’t giving the first night to Sakurako, then?’

‘Pff!’ He threw his hands up in the air. ‘You take things so serious.’

Her blood flowed again, hotter than before; anger pushed it through her veins at a rolling boil. It had not been a joke at the time and they both knew it.

‘Right.’ Raisa, to his right, gave the slightest of eye-rolls. Ava found herself wondering what would happen if someone were to follow her around all day measuring the adrenaline levels in her blood. She pictured the tight zigzag it would make on a graph. She wondered what that did to a body, over time. She wondered what it did to a mind.

‘What if they ask me about—’ She was afraid to say my mother but Nicky knew what she meant. Their father-daughter telepathy had its uses away from the stage. He shook his head.

‘They won’t. Or money. Is condition of giving interview. Is coup.’

‘That’s hardly a word a Russian uses lightly,’ said Raisa, and Nicky roared with laughter.

‘OK,’ Ava said. ‘It’ll be interesting, I’ll look forward to it.’

‘Moya lyubimaya devushka,’ he said, my most, beloved girl, which often meant that a present was coming, and sure enough his hand went into his pocket and pulled out a purple roll of notes. ‘This is prize for surviving. Go to Bond Street. Get something nice for first night. Red, white, black only.’

‘Thank you, Papa.’ Ava’s hand closed around the slim roll. She could measure cash with a bank-teller’s expertise: there were three hundred pounds here at least.

Raisa clicked her tongue. ‘Always with the cash.’ Ava swallowed the reply that Raisa hadn’t thought cash wasn’t so vulgar when he’d put her up in a flat near the theatre, or when he’d bought her a little dacha for her holidays on the Black Sea. ‘You know I don’t like the girls carrying that much money around London. It makes them vulnerable.’

Whenever Raisa displayed flashes of almost maternal concern, she always countered it with a gesture of disapproval. Now, she ran her finger over Ava’s dressing-table mirror to inspect for dust.

‘But I like cash,’ said Ava. ‘You can see it disappearing.’

Nicky laughed, and Ava felt the internal glow that only came on the rare occasions she got to side with him against Raisa. ‘Cash teach value,’ he said. ‘You no overspend what you no have. Raisa, you should understand that.’

Raisa said something in Russian that Ava thought was I guess so. Like Nicky, she had grown up in poverty – empty-belly, icicles-inside-the-house poverty – in Soviet Russia. He had been born under Stalin, for goodness’ sake. With a childhood like that, who could blame him for hoarding cash? When the only bank was run by the state that was also your jailer, was it any wonder he didn’t trust financial institutions?

‘I’ll be careful,’ said Ava, and kissed him. A rasp against her cheek drew her attention to a little white triangle of stubble where he’d missed a bit shaving.

‘I know you are always in and out of each other’s rooms but if you are going to have all that cash lying around, you must lock the door,’ said Raisa on the way out. ‘I walked past earlier and it was wide open. I had to close it myself.’

So someone had been in. Ava’s eyes went to the black feather on the dressing table, then darted away in case she betrayed Delia’s breach of protocol. ‘The locks are going, that’s the problem,’ she said. ‘The magnet on Luca’s door hasn’t worked for weeks.’

‘Only insane person go in Luca’s bloody pigsty anyway,’ said Nicky. ‘New locking system will be state-of-art. Face scan. Like airport security.’

It took a while for the seasick feeling to subside when they had gone.

Ava counted the cash. Five hundred; she was losing her touch. She set eighty aside. She would do what she always did: pick up something from Zara, knowing that her dancer’s body made off-the-peg look bespoke. The remaining money she would add to what she called, when she allowed herself to think about it, her fund. Ava’s fund amounted to tens of thousands of pounds – she had never counted it all – skimmed off her father’s gifts over many years. Whenever she locked money away like this, in a drawer here, in the safe at home, she would ask herself what she was doing, have a moment of revulsion as she thought about the good it could do for charity, or compared her income to the low wages of the junior dancers in her own company. Yet she was as powerless to spend the money as she was to stop herself hoarding it.

Was it for running away?