Ready or Not (9 page)

             
Lydia dropped the bag to the floor and pushed it with her foot in Chris’ direction. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘You can do it. The boot’s open.’

             
Chris shook his head and bit his tongue. An argument was just what she’d be hoping for and exactly what he wasn’t going to give her. Instead, he gave Holly a wink and smiled; if Lydia was hoping for evidence that she was winning, she wasn’t going to get it from him.              

             
‘I’ll come back for the other one,’ he said, meeting Lydia’s eye and prolonging the smile. He caught the look of irritation in her eye and couldn’t help himself from smiling inwardly.

             
He was out on the street when the house phone began ringing. Lydia crossed the room and stared at the caller ID.

             
She knew it. She’d always known it. She picked the phone up on the fourth ring.

             
‘Hello?’

             
Silence.

             
‘Hello?’ she repeated.

             
The line went dead.

             
Moments later Chris came back in for the second bag. ‘Did you answer the phone?’ he asked.

             
Lydia smiled and took Holly by the hand. ‘Wrong number,’ she said.

Eleven

When Kate got back to the flat that evening, something didn’t feel right. The place was cold and she went straight to the kitchen to turn the heating on. As she walked through the poky living room and past the sofa on which she’d slept last night, she noticed the magazine she had idly flicked through early that morning abandoned on the floor by the coffee table. The magazine was face up; a model with too-perfect white teeth and a smile that was treacle thick and sickening gazed up at Kate from the floor. She picked it up and dropped it face down back onto the floor. Kate was sure that when she had left for work that morning that was how she’d left it. 

             
In the kitchen she flicked the switch on the kettle and searched in the fridge for something suitably unhealthy and comforting to eat. Kate very rarely cooked meals for herself and her diet generally consisted of frozen ready meals for one or late night, last minute calls to the local take away. Cooking for one had always seemed to her a sad and fruitless task: one that only served as a reminder of how incomplete and unsatisfactory her personal life was.

             
Finding nothing sufficiently easy to prepare, Kate made herself a coffee and went back into the living room. She put her mug on the table and reached down to retrieve the abandoned reading material from the floor. She shoved it onto the shelf beneath the glass table top and sat on the sofa, shifting the cushions behind her. She reached for the remote control, which she always left on the arm of the sofa. Not there. She put a hand down the side of the sofa, between the arm rest and the edge of the cushion, and groped around.

             
The remote was on the other end of the sofa; the end that she rarely sat at. Like everyone, Kate had her habits; one of which was to always sit at the left hand end of the sofa, directly in front of the TV and right next to the phone. She only sat at the other end of the sofa if she had visitors and that, these days, was a rare occurrence. The only other person who would sit at the right end of the sofa was Stuart.

             
Kate leaned across the sofa and grabbed the remote. This morning while getting ready for work she’d had the BBC news channel on in the background, as she did every morning. She liked to know what was going on in the world, even though it was invariably depressing and did little to help her already poor opinion of mankind as a species.

             
She turned on the television and was unsurprised when she was greeted by an over enthusiastic middle aged man discussing the complexities of the universe. Pressing the select button on the Sky remote, she was even less surprised to find that she was watching National Geographic and that Stuart – despite Kate’s earlier wishes that he would clear the rest of his things from her flat whilst she was out at work – had been around and let himself into her home without her knowledge or consent.

             
Kate went into the bedroom. The pile of records that had been sitting in the corner of her room for months were gone; in their place, a patch of clean carpet, lighter than the rest, reminded Kate that the flat was well overdue a spring clean and that she would find whatever excuse she could to get out of having to do it.

             
She wished she’d smashed the records whilst she had the chance.

             
National Geographic, she thought angrily as she padded back into the living room. Stuart wasn’t even interested in science or nature; he watched those bloody documentaries because he thought it made him seem more intellectual than he actually was. Kate used to find herself cringing when he quoted some ‘interesting’ fact or statistic when they were amongst friends or family; usually inappropriately timed and often in the wrong context. Stupid bastard.

             
She was beyond annoyed. Despite yesterday’s wishes that he’d just go to the flat and clear out the remainder of his belongings, now that he’d actually done so she was infuriated by the cheek of it. This was her flat, not his. He’d used her keys. He’d invaded her privacy.

             
She went back into the kitchen and opened the cupboard next to the fridge. Predictably, one of the two beers that had been left there since Stuart had moved out months earlier was gone. Kate slammed the cupboard door and went to get her mobile from her handbag. She knew that he would call her irrational, but the fact that Stuart had watched TV and helped himself to the contents of her kitchen during his visit to retrieve his records made her furious.

             
Stuart’s mobile went straight to the answer phone service. Kate drummed the kitchen work top impatiently as a mechanical female voice at the end of the line told her that the person she had called was unavailable.

             
‘Stuart,’ Kate snapped after the beep, ‘it’s Kate. You remember – the woman you lived with and scrounged off for two years. You seem to have been here quite a while this afternoon, I don’t know why you didn’t just have done with and moved back in. Next time you feel like popping in, do something useful and run the hoover round, will you? I want the key back in the post within the week.’

             
She ended the call and launched the phone at the sofa. She had hoped the call would make her feel better, but it hadn’t. If anything, it made her feel worse. She dropped onto the sofa and allowed herself a moment to feel sorry for herself. It was something she tried not to indulge in, but now felt as good a time as any to let self pity rule. She wondered if having Stuart still there might have been better than coming home to an empty flat, and whether the sound of continual bickering would have been preferable to the unbearable silence that now enveloped the space around her.

             
Of course not, she told herself. She felt a sudden twinge of guilt for what she had done behind Stuart’s back all those months ago, when her father had died. Should she really be sitting here cursing him? She wasn’t much better, was she? Or had karma served her penance for her crime by dishing out Stuart’s affair? What she’d done was wrong, but at least it had been a one-off. He had cheated on her for months.             

             
Her anger fully focused on Stuart again, she retrieved her mobile and scrolled through the phone book for Chris’ house number. A calm voice might cool her mood and maybe he’d be available for a drink or two to make up for the ones they’d missed on yesterday evening. Kate couldn’t think of anything worse than having to spend another night alone in the flat, staring at the TV screen and hoping for something exciting or even vaguely interesting to happen.

             
There were four rings before the phone was answered.

             
‘Hello?’

             
Kate opened her mouth to speak, but stopped herself. She hadn’t been expecting a woman’s voice at the other end of the line.

             
‘Hello?’ Lydia repeated.

             
Kate moved the phone from her ear and ended the call.

*

Kate reached into her handbag and retrieved the scrap of paper that Neil Davies had passed to her that afternoon in her office. She had glanced at it briefly as she had taken it from him and wondered if it was entirely appropriate for the father of a missing boy – whose case she was heading – to be handing her his mobile number in the middle of an investigation, meeting her eyes for a little longer than was natural as the scrap of paper exchanged hands.
Of course it wasn’t, probably.

             
But anyway, he probably intended that she should have it in case she had any news of his son she needed to pass on to him. But was it inappropriate for him to be looking at her the way he had, with brooding, James Dean eyes that bore into her; inappropriate for her to react the way she had, with a quickened pulse and a brush of skin as she took the number from him?

             
At the time, she had known, of course it was.

             
But hadn’t he felt, as Kate had, that there was some spark between them; some indescribable pull that drew her to him in a way she had never experienced before? He had looked at her as though reading her mind and he knew - she knew - that she would take the number. He had known, as much as she had, that she would call.

             
Now, standing in the emptiness of a lonely flat - the echo of Lydia’s voice resounding in her head - it seemed entirely reasonable that Neil should have given her the note and pursued the attraction she knew they both had felt.

Twelve

Joseph Ryan, a good looking man in his late thirties with a successful career as an estate agent and part-time property developer, was cheating on his wife. He’d been having an affair with a girl at work for the past six months, which they’d successfully managed to keep a secret from both their families and their colleagues. The only person he had confided in was Adam: a man he had known for only a matter of months, but already thought of as a good friend.

             
‘How do you do it?’ Adam asked him, feigning admiration and interest over the top of his pint. ‘How have you kept it going so long without being caught? Why would you want to?’

             
Joseph, an overly confident man with a face that made him appear younger than his thirty seven years and an attitude that said he could get away with whatever he felt like, shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, smiling. ‘Luck, I suppose. You’ve either got it or you haven’t.’ He stopped smiling and frowned. ‘I’m not proud of it.’

             
Liar, Adam thought.

*

When Joseph wasn’t at work or overseeing some building project, he was either with Lauren, the girl from work (nineteen – barely more than a child) or in the pub with Adam. Adam had often wondered whether or not Stephanie, Joseph’s wife, objected to his succession of evenings out, but it seemed not.

             
‘I go home to her,’ Joseph said, as means of explanation. ‘It’s the best way to do it. If I stayed out overnight she’d start to get suspicious, but this way…’ He shrugged and grinned. ‘She trusts me.’

             
What a bloody fool, Adam thought; and the thought was directed as much at Stephanie as it was at Joseph. Could a woman really be that blind, to mistake what should have been staring her in the pretty face? And she was pretty. More than pretty, actually. Adam had seen enough photographs to know that the first hadn’t been a lucky shot at capturing her beauty, and when he’d seen her for the first and only time after following her at the local supermarket he had had the chance to see that beauty for himself.

             
Yet here was Joseph Ryan, ungrateful bastard that he was, cheating with teenagers when he had a beautiful woman waiting for him at home, and two kids who had no idea what a miserable son-of-a-bitch their father was. 

             
Adam and Joseph had met during a pool tournament at a local pub. Adam had never been there before, but had decided one evening to stop by and see if the place was any good. It wasn’t, but he had met Joseph in the next door lounge bar and their meeting had made the experience a little more interesting. He’d found what he came for. After that, the two men got together on occasion and enjoyed a few more visits to the pub before upgrading to the more respectable wine bars in town.