The Mistress - Jill Childs Page 0,43

from that unknown number. Just like the strange feeling I’d had inside my flat.

That evening, I couldn’t eat. I sat in silence in the sitting room with the school photograph propped up against an open book on the table in front of me and stared at the tiny, half-obscured figure. It burned into my eyes.

Suddenly, I felt a rush of hopelessness, of self-pity for the person I’d become. So shy and constrained, all the more so in the years since I moved to this city. My life had become so inward-looking. I’d been so focussed on Matthew and our life together, so determined to please him, to make it work, that I’d suffocated him. Then, when he tore a ragged, bleeding hole in my life, I’d withdrawn and focussed just on myself, nursing my own quietness and awkwardness.

Then Ralph came to rescue me from myself. And what had I done to him?

I thought again about the strange shadow in the photograph, the figure which looked so very like him that it tormented me, about the trace of his own, unique smell inside my flat. There was only one person I could imagine who would try so carefully to hurt me, to drive me to destruction.

Helen.

I grabbed my coat and car keys and drove, as fast as I could, to Ralph’s house.

The light was mellow and starting to fade by the time I’d parked in my usual place and rounded the corner. Usually, I crept like a burglar along the pavement to their home. This time, I strode. I pushed open the gate and marched boldly to the front door, then pressed the buzzer. My heart was hard in my chest. I felt giddy, out of control, gripped by some determination that was strange to me. Silence. I rapped loudly on the shiny wood with tight knuckles. Waited. Listened for footsteps which didn’t come.

The curtains hung open and I crossed to stand on the gravel, a low tangle of rose bushes grasping for my socks and trouser legs, and peered in. I pitched forward and put my hands on the white wood windowsill to steady myself. It was dingy inside, shadows creeping through the sitting room and slowly engulfing it. The television was dark. A streak of light gleamed on the large darkening mirror hanging over the fireplace.

I cupped my hands to my face, nose close to the glass, and strained to see further. The sitting room led through to the kitchen and the small downstairs toilet, I knew the layout only too well. But that too lay in darkness. I pulled back, leaving a wet smear on the window where my hot breath had condensed. I returned to the path and backed to the gate, then stared up at the windows on the first floor.

The curtains stood open. Ralph and Helen’s bedroom lay over the sitting room, Anna’s next to it on the same landing. No sign of life from either.

I frowned. It was too early for them to be asleep in bed but too late surely for them to be still out. I stood at the gate, thinking. The adrenalin rush which had propelled me to dash over here and confront Helen had ebbed away now into exhaustion. My legs felt suddenly a dead weight. All I wanted really was to feel peaceful, to go home and curl up in bed, take a couple more tablets to calm my nerves and sleep. But I couldn’t go home, not yet. My mind was too agitated.

An engine throbbed into life, close by. I turned to look. A parked car, across the road from their house and further down the street, flashed its headlights. At me? I looked round, warily. The street was deserted.

I moved cautiously down towards it, watching. As I approached, the lights and engine clicked off and the car, a crimson saloon, sat again in darkness. I crept towards it.

He was sitting inside, in the driver’s seat, looking right at me. It was the man I’d seen before, reading his newspaper at the bus stop near my flat and here in this road, parked watchfully in this same car. I stopped, pinned by his gaze. This was the nearest I’d been to him and, instinctively, I was afraid.

He was about fifty. His face was tight and weather-beaten as if he were used to an active, outdoor life. He looked almost entirely bald. Whatever hair still grew must be close-shaven. Without hair, his ears jutted out, one more than the