Chapter 9
I awoke with a shudder. My chest heaving as if I’d forgotten how to breathe.
Where was I? What house was this? What room was I in? What day was it?
Panic began to envelop me. Sunlight was streaming in through an open window, and the room was dazzlingly bright.
I didn’t recognise anything. I was in a huge four-poster bed with a canopy above me.
There was no other furniture in the room.
Wooden floors stretched for miles on either side of me before they reached the walls.
The bed was empty except for me. I looked around for any clues. I was naked and had no clothes to hand. Grabbing a blanket off the bed, I slowly made my way over to the door and opened it.
Oh.
I remembered now. I was at Verity’s house. I closed the door to the Marie Antoinette Sex Grotto behind me. Ollie had suggested we try that room last night. “What about my room?” I’d said.
“That room gets the sun all day and is boiling,” Ollie answered.
“What about the room you’ve been sleeping in all week?”
“The bed creaks like it’s possessed. I had a wank last night and thought it was going to wake the dead.”
“Why were you wanking?” I’d asked as he dragged me up the stairs.
He gave me a look. “I was thinking what we might have got up to on that kitchen table if you’d let me massage your shoulders.”
Where was Ollie now? I called his name out.
“Down here, babe,” he yelled.
I made my way to the kitchen, where he was standing in his boxers making coffee.
“What time is it?” I asked, wrapping the throw from the bed around me.
“A bit before eight. Coffee? Oh, and your clothes are on the chair.”
My shorts and T-shirt from yesterday were folded nicely beside my laptop. I went to pick them up and realised to put them on I was gonna have to drop trou – well, drop throw – in the middle of the room. Anything else would have Ollie questioning why I’d gone shy suddenly.
A wolf whistle informed me that he was pleased with the view.
“You are a sex pest, you know that?” I muttered. I felt his arms around me the moment I finished pulling on my T-shirt.
“Only for you, love. Only for you.” He leaned in and nuzzled my neck. “Mmm, you smell terrible.”
“Thanks.” God, he felt nice. He felt like home.
“Like sex and sweat and loads of nice things.”
I sniffed his hair. “You smell like coconut shampoo.”
“Correct, I’ve already had a shower.”
“Oh?” At least if he was clean, he might be less likely to want round two. Well, technically, like, round five, but semantics. Anyway, it might help de-complicate the situation if he didn’t try and bend me over the table before breakfast.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Things turned to shit yesterday. I have to go straight from here into the office, I’m afraid.”
“Oh.” My voice wavered only slightly.
“It would have been lovely to stay here all day and fuck in increasingly bizarre places around this truly ugly house, but I can’t.”
Without thinking, I told him, “I was planning on leaving today,” in, I hoped, an even tone of voice.
Ollie’s face fell. “I thought you … maybe … might come to London for the weekend? I’ve made some changes to the flat. I wondered if you’d want to see them. I think you’ll like them.”
“That might not be a good idea for Kenny and the cats. I think it best I face the music and head home.”
Ollie sighed and turned me to face him. He pressed his forehead against mine. “Do you regret last night? Please be honest. I need to know if it was anything. Because I can’t build my hopes up if it was nothing.”
“Last night was … perfect,” I said.
“But there is a but isn’t there?”
“Ollie,” I started – my phone began buzzing with an incoming call. I looked at it. “It’s Nigella, I should take it.”
He sighed again and walked back to the coffee, running his hands over his face. “I’ll go get dressed and give you some privacy.”
As he left, Kenny came up to me and leaned on my leg. “Hello, boy,” I said, stroking his velvety ear and then pressed answer.
“Good morning.” I tried to sound cheery.
“Is it?” Nigella asked.
“Someone not enjoying the heat?”
“Is it hot? I hadn’t noticed.” She sounded sincere.
“Everything alright?”
“Guy’s asked everyone around to Honningtons tomorrow night. He wants to clear the air and move forward.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s … I don’t have a message from him …”
“No, I’m doing that. He said it’s my discretion who I invite. It’ll be just a few of us.”
“I’m coming home today, anyway.”
“Great. Come to my place for seven. There are a few reporters, so I’ll have to take you the back way. I think you’re the only one who doesn’t know the route.”
“Sounds awful. Can’t wait.” I hung up.
I looked down at Kenny. “Today is going to be shit.”
Ollie left not long afterwards. He gave me a timid kiss on the cheek as he got ready to depart, once again, suited and booted for the city life.
His ￡100 holdall was in his hand. The Jag awaited. The week-long reprieve from Real Life was over.
“Shall I call you?” I knew he was seeking clarity on where we stood. I should let him down gently. Or I should be firm and direct. Any route would be better than the one I took, which was to give a wan smile and nod slightly.
He cupped my cheek for a second and then made his departure.
After a final inspection of the house to make sure I hadn’t left a cat behind and there weren’t condom wrappers flung around the bedroom, I hit the road back to Lilbury.
Kenny behaved himself on the journey, which was twice in a row, so I assumed he now knew car etiquette, and I could take him with me anywhere.
I arrived in Lilbury a little after midday and realised there would be nothing in the fridge except for things that by now had grown friends.
I pulled over at the Co-op at the northern end of the village and walked in.
It was less risky here, as most of the residents used the shop owned by Roz at the other end of the high street. This was purely for passing traffic.
Making my way around, throwing my odds and sods in a basket, I walked smack bang into Katrina Pettigrew. She looked as startled as I did, and we both clutched our chests like we were having a heart attack.
“Goodness, you’re stealthy,” she remarked, trying to smile.
“Sorry, my fault,” I stuttered.
She finally settled her nerves enough to give me a hundred-watt smile. “I’m so sorry to hear what’s been going on. I’ve been helping Nigella all week with the fallout.”
“Oh. Oh, thanks. Are you a PR person too?” I asked. Or a Tory?
“Gosh, no. I worked at a hospital in Scotland, so I’ve a bit of experience in the IT side of things, which poor Nigella doesn’t understand at all. It’s been dreadful this week – what they’ve put Guy through. It makes me so mad.”
I gave my now practised wan smile.
“Will I see you tomorrow at the … meeting, shall we call it?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said. For reasons unknown to me, I was desperate for an escape. The last time I’d met Katrina, she’d barely have said boo to a goose, and now she was Chatty Kathy while my Ben & Jerry’s was melting.
“Have you been away this week?” she asked. “I thought I’d see you helping out, but you never appeared.”
“I was … uh, in Surrey. Staying with a friend.” How could she not know?
It seemed to click as soon as I said that because her eyes went wider than should be humanly possible, and she fumbled to find the words in a garbled apology.
“It’s fine. I’d rather not dwell. On any of it.”
After several more minutes of awkward chit-chat where she deliberately didn’t bring it up again, we parted ways.
Kenny and the cats were delirious to be home and showed that by doing laps of the house at high speed and having a rare spat.
Normally, the cats ignored Kenny, and he ignored them.
Eisenhower tolerated his presence slightly more, but Roosevelt wouldn’t even acknowledge him.
That is, until I came into the living room in the evening and found the three of them curled up together on the armchair, all looking happy.
“Is this an I can’t see you if you can’t see me situation?
” I asked as I backtracked out of the room with three sets of eyes glaring daggers at me.
After separating them all and giving everyone a telling off, I took a long shower to scrub away the drive and the lingering smell of Ollie on my skin.
Under the water, though, a new issue occurred as I remembered every touch and squeeze and kiss he’d given me yesterday, and I struggled to convince myself to leave the shower again.
I decided to take Kenny for the longest walk of his life. “Come on,” I said as we made our way out the door. With this attitude I’d definitely be able to convince everyone else and possibly myself that I was fine.
“How are you, Arden?” they would ask.
“I’m fine,” I would say with almost no hysterical high-pitched inflection.
I had chosen a pair of upmarket chinos with tapered legs and my most non-awkward thirty-something dad plimsolls and a lightweight polo shirt for the evening.
I instinctively turned right to take the lane down the hill to the village, but looked out over the meadow across the road, which was a yellow haze melding into the light blue of the sky.
It was another fine day, and I breathed in deeply.
I took a step, and instead we walked across the lane and into the field, taking the path down the hill to where it met the pond around the back of the Fox and Lamprey. The place I had found Arabella’s body.