He looked at me. In the end, I shook my head, which seemed to satisfy him. Men are easily satisfied.
“It wasn’t serious,” he said, as if that excused it. “Men tend to sow a few wild oats before they settle down. Women are different.”
Were they? If all women were different, how could the men sow their wild oats?
He looked at his watch again. “Oh lord, I must go. I’ll see you tomorrow. What time would suit you?”
“About twelve-thirty?”
“Splendid.”
We went into the hall. He bent towards me and his lips brushed my cheek.
“You’ve always been a good pal. You’re not shocked? Charles thought you would be.”
“Don’t be silly.” I smiled up at him. “Boys will be boys.”
We said goodnight and I closed the door behind him. I went back into the lounge. The room was empty and desolate. There was nothing left of Nigel except crumbs on a plate, a puddle of tea at the bottom of a cup and golden flecks of tobacco on the hearthrug. I went over to the bookcase and ran my finger along the spines of the Kiplings. I tried to think about Ghislaine but she was too abstract, too foreign for me to grasp. She wasn’t flesh and blood like Marina. Marina, I thought idly, would be home by now.
One of the books was a little out of line. It was Stalky and Co, the schoolboy stories which had been Nigel and Charles’s favourite. Boys will be boys. There was a slip of paper protruding from the pages, presumably a bookmark. I took it out, suddenly curious to re-read the story about the dead cat and the smell. The bookmark was buff coloured. I pulled it out and discovered it was a telegram. For a moment, I thought that Nigel’s telegram to me had somehow found its way into Stalky and Co. But that was still propped up on the mantelpiece behind the clock. This one was addressed to Charles and dated in September, while I was in hospital.
YOU’RE WELCOME OLD BOY. WHILE THE CAT’S AWAY. HAVE FUN. NIGEL.
I sat down beside the bookcase in the chair that was still warm from Nigel’s body. I read and re-read the telegram. It had come all the way from Suez. Nigel must have sent it on his way down to East Africa. Suddenly many things were clear. Nigel, Charles and Marina — they had all betrayed me in their different ways, even Nigel.
Nigel worst of all.
It was growing very cold. I stood up and put more coal on the fire. A Book of Mediterranean Food was on the sideboard. I riffled through the pages, looking for a suitable recipe for tomorrow. I knew I would find something. And I also knew that, whatever I cooked, Nigel would eat with apparent relish because he felt guilty.
A little later, I went outside. It was a cold night, with stars like diamonds. The moon gave a hard, clear light. Frost gleamed on the path to the stable. I opened the door. Moonlight streamed across the floor and showed me a saucer in the corner. I picked it up and left the stable.
As I was walking back to the house I heard the sound of an ambulance. The bell drew closer and closer. It was coming down Victoria Road from the direction of the park and Raglan Court. In the freezing night air, I stood still and listened to the sound of the ambulance as it slowed for the junction with the Chepstow Road, turned left and sped towards the hospital.
What if? What if?
Hungry Eyes
Sheila Quigley
The archaeologist, a tall, very thin man with a heavy grey moustache, smiled at his audience.
The hall was full of people eager to learn about the recent dig at St Michael and All Angels church in Houghton le Spring. A new floor was being laid, so the archaeologists had moved in.
His lecture was finished, and he summed up, “So what have we learned? That this was once a prehistoric ritual site? Perhaps... A Roman temple? Possibly; it was after all standard practice for Romans to take over earlier religious sites. There is definite evidence of Normans and Saxons, and during the last excavation in the churchyard in the late nineties an erratic line of whinstone boulders, probably from the Hadrian’s Wall area, do suggest a prehistoric use of the site. Several other such boulders have now been found inside the church, so there is a suggestion — not proof, mind you — that perhaps there was a stone circle on the site.”
PC Steven Carter gasped in awe. He couldn’t wait to get back to the station and tell his boss, DI Lorraine Hunt. She was always so interested in the history of Houghton le Spring, he thought, applauding along with everyone else.
As Carter made his way outside, he was followed by three men. They were locals from the Seahills estate in Houghton le Spring; Carter hadn’t noticed them because they had been sitting at the back.
“So what do yer reckon?” Danny Jorden asked his two friends. Danny was a chancer, had been all his life, skirting the boundary between legal and illegal, nothing big, nothing bad, just enough to keep his kids in shoe leather and food on the table.
“Hmm, don’t really know.” His cousin Len Jorden scratched his chin, looking sideways at the other member of the trio. Like Danny, Len was dark-haired with green eyes. The resemblance ended there though; Danny was tall and thickset, and frequently wore a smile, while Len was as tall as the archaeologist but even thinner, and had the look of a professional pall-bearer.
“You’re a bloody old woman, Len.” Adam Glazier, at twenty-six the youngest by nine years, grinned at Len.
“And your jokes stink,” Len retorted.
“Knock knock,” Adam laughed.
“Piss off.”
“Shut up, the pair of you. What we gonna do? I reckon there’s a fortune in coins lying in this old church. We need to get to them before those archaeologist blokes do, and it has to be tonight. Tomorrow they start filling the floor in.”
“It’s a damn shame they couldn’t go deeper — God knows what they might have found. I mean, all those old bones.” Len shivered.
Danny shook his head. “That’s the point, Len, they can’t dig any further. But we can.”
“I don’t know, the church in the middle of the night... Kinda spooky if yer ask me.”
“Old woman,” Adam hissed.
“All right, for God’s sake,” Danny snapped, the pressure of new shoes for his oldest making him edgy. “Are youse in or not?”
Adam shrugged. “Yeah, fine by me.”
“Len?” Danny looked at his cousin.
Len thought about it for a moment, sighed then answered, “I suppose so. But the first sign of a ghost...”
Adam burst out laughing. “Bloody ghosts, no such thing, yer soft shite... We gonna cut Jacko in?”
“Jacko.” Danny thought for a minute. Jacko was a good mate and probably would have been here if he wasn’t ill. “Depends what we find, I suppose.”
They continued arguing all the way to Danny’s van. When they got there Danny kissed his fingers and patted the wing mirror. Len tutted but Danny ignored him. The van, which he called Elizabeth after his dream woman Elizabeth Taylor, was his pride and joy. At the moment his girlfriend wasn’t speaking to him because three nights ago he’d called out, “Oh more, Elizabeth, more,” at totally the wrong moment, and not for the first time either.
As they drove away, another man came out of the church, tall and dark-skinned with a heavy beard. He was talking on his mobile phone in an East European accent, and he was angry. “You get to him and you get to him now. You have two hours, or it’s your skin I’ll be stretching over my lampshade.” He snapped his phone shut and strode over to the waiting Mercedes.