CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Three days and nights had passed since my clash with Xander over the photograph in the newspaper. And I still hadn’t heard from him.
I’d texted him to suggest we should meet and talk about it. But he hadn’t replied. He obviously didn’t want to see me. So when Lyndsay had called the next day to say she was thinking of going to the police station when she finished work, I’d just said it was probably the right thing to do.
‘You don’t need to come with me,’ she said. ‘I know you feel weird about it. Have you heard from him?’
So I told her about showing him the photo in the newspaper at the station and how his reaction had been so strange. ‘He was denying it. But he couldn’t look me in the eye.’
‘Guilty?’ she murmured, sounding sad.
‘Maybe.’
There was a part of me that had expected to get the cold shoulder from Xander... the part of me that felt guilty because maybe I should have believed Xander without question when he’d denied being the man in the photo.
But on the other hand, I knew my reaction to the photo had been logical and sensible. I’d just started to get to know Xander. I knew very little about his past and I still hadn’t even seen where he lived.
I was wondering now whether he’d been deliberately putting off taking me to his flat for some reason, possibly because he had something to hide – using the excuse that his hob wasn’t working or that my place was nearer.
But what he could be hiding, I had no idea...
*****
I’d been hot all day in the café, operating the steamy coffee machine, so when I finished work, I decided I couldn’t bear to stew inside on a stiflingly warm summer’s night.
Janet was going to visit Dad in hospital that evening, and I’d told him I would see him the following day. So if I went straight home from Magic of Dance, all I’d be doing would be trying to watch TV but driving myself crazy thinking about Xander.
I needed to get out . . . get some fresh air . . .
Stepping outside and breathing in the delicious scents of the woodland in high summer, my mind was made up. I’d go foraging in the woods near our house, like Dad and I used to do regularly. Mum would join us at weekends sometimes.
It would be a way of feeling close to them both on a day when I so badly needed the comfort...