The Score Read Online Free Page A

Cat’s scuffed leathers and witchy hair. ‘Everyone’s telling me you’re a screw-up, Price.’
    Cat looked down to her hands and finished making her roll-up.
    ‘Want one?’ Cat asked.
    Kyle looked at the roll-up as though it were dog shit.
    ‘I think you probably
are
up a screw-up.’ It was the kind of forthright remark Kyle had a reputation for, then momentarily her face seemed to soften. ‘But I keep an open mind.’
    Kyle was clearly in a hurry to leave. She was raising her hand towards a man parked in a Range Rover up on the marina’s ramp. He was keeping his distance. Through the driver’s window, Cat could make out the broad chest and bull neck of a body-builder, Kyle’s driver presumably.
    ‘I know why you’re here.’ Kyle sounded irritated. ‘Jill at the office told me.’
    ‘Ma’am.’ Cat could feel a throbbing over her left temple, one of the more persistent symptoms of her withdrawal. The timbre of Kyle’s voice was making it worse.
    ‘Don’t leave town, not on my time,’ Kyle said.
    ‘No, ma’am.’
    Their conversation was interrupted by movement beyond the cordon. The black car at the centre of the crowd was pulling out at speed. Following were a couple of other cars, one of them a convertible driven by Della Davies. Kyle silently watched her pass, her feelings expressed by a pair of pursed lips and an extra frown line.
    ‘Who’s in the Volvo?’ asked Cat, curious.
    Kyle shot a palely amused look at Cat. ‘The Volvo? Griff Morgan. Who else would it be? It’s his film.’
    Cat couldn’t really see much through the tinted back windows, but as the car turned the angle and the light shifted she got a brief view through the windscreen, beyond the driver into the back of the car. In the rear passenger seat, she saw the bunched-up shape of a man in a dark coat. He seemed thin. His pose somehow exhibited anxiety or something fragile, rather than anything commanding or curious. The man had long hair, fashionably unkempt – not unlike Griff Morgan’s hair in the iconic poster shot – but it was grey and pitifully thinning.
    Cat knew, of course, that the figure couldn’t be Morgan. He was down for thirty years, and he would never get out of prison alive. They don’t let prisoners out to watch a movie being made, even if it is about them. She would have asked again, only Kyle was already gone, striding away past the film trucks, face set against the wind. She looked fierce and pure, like a heroine from an older, simpler world. One of the rubberneckers from behind the cordon was following Kyle, asking for an autograph perhaps. She waved him away and got into the front of the Range Rover. Cat thought she saw Kyle reach across towards the driver, then the car sped away, merging with the lights of the passing traffic and into the night.
    The black car had moved down the dock, beyond the film trucks, apparently with carte blanche to go where it pleased. Della Davies’s convertible prowled after it, a terrier at the heels of a deer. Cat watched the show for another few minutes, wondering about the figure in the back of the Volvo. Then she’d had enough, and she left.

What is talent? It’s not being able to hold a tune. There are thousands of people who can do that. Thousands of girls, plenty of them pretty, or pretty enough if they make the effort
.
    Writing? Yes, that is a talent, of course. Being able to find the melody, find the words, bring it all together. Not so many who can do that. That’s true
.
    But that isn’t
her
talent. She respects the writers, but thinks of herself only as a performer. The vessel for the song
.
    The first time she heard that phrase, she wrote it down
. Vessel.
It made sense. When the song is bigger than you, when it possesses you. You’re not the singer any more. You’re the channel, the vessel
.
    Of course, the music game needs other things, too. The promoters. The agents. The talent scouts. She doesn’t understand that world, but knows she doesn’t