a dash for it to get to work on time."
She shook her head, slowly. "No, we weren't, Trev. I got home round ten."
He grinned, still focused on the handlebars.
When he raised his head with a nervous laugh, he still didn't look at her. "Hey, Rache, that's not the way it was. Course, I don't expect you to get the time exactly straight cause we was sort of involved."
"I was involved," Rachel corrected him. "I don't remember you doing much of anything after you pulled your prong from your trousers."
He finally looked at her. For the first time ever in her recollection, his face was scared.
"Rachel," he said miserably. "Come on, Rache. You remember how it was."
"I remember it being dark," she said. "I remember you telling me to wait ten minutes while you went up to the hut - third from the end in the top row, it was - to ... What was it, Trev?
To 'air it out,' you said. I was to wait underneath the pier and when ten minutes were up, I was supposed to follow."
"You wouldn't've wanted to go inside when it was all smelly," he protested.
"And you wouldn't've wanted to be seen with me."
"That is not the case," he said, and for a moment he sounded so stiff with outrage that Rachel truly wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe that it really meant nothing that the single time they'd been in public together had been dinner at a Chinese restaurant conveniently located some fifteen miles from Balford-le-Nez. She wanted to believe that the fact that he'd never kissed her mouth meant he was only shy and working up his courage. And most of all, she wanted to believe that his letting her service him fifteen times without ever once wondering what she was getting out of the activity aside from the humiliation of yearning so openly for anything remotely resembling hope of a normal future only meant that he'd not yet learned from her example how to give. But she couldn't believe. So she was stuck with the truth.
"I got home round ten, Trev. I know cause I felt all hollow inside, so I turned on the telly.
And I even know what I watched, Trev. The middle and end of that old movie with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. I bet you know the one: They're kids and it's summer and they fall in love and mess around. And they sort of finally realise that love's more important than being scared and hiding who you really are."
"Can't you just tell them?" he asked. "Can't you say it was half past eleven? Rache, the cops're going to ask you cause I said I was with you that night. And I was. If you tell them you got home round ten, don't you see what that means?"
"I expect it means you had time to give Haytham Querashi the business," she answered.
"I didn't do it," he said. "Rache, I never saw the bloke that night. I swear. I swear. But if you don't back me up in what I said, then they'll know I'm lying. And if they know I'm lying about that, they'll think I'm lying about not having killed him. Can't you help me out? What's another hour?"
"Hour and a half," she corrected him. "You said half-eleven."
"Okay. Hour and a half. What's another hour and a half?"
Plenty of time for you to show you had at least one thought in your mind about me, she told him silently. But she said, "I won't lie for you, Trev.
I might've once. But I won't do it now."
"Why?" The word was a plea. He reached for her arm and ran his fingers up her bare skin.
"Rachel, I thought we had something special, you and me. Didn't you feel it? When we
'as together, it was like . . . Hey, it was like magic, didn't you think?" His fingers reached the sleeve of her blouse and insinuated themselves inside, up her shoulder, along the strap of her bra.
She wanted touch so bad that she felt the damp answer to his question. It was between her legs, on the backs of her knees, and in the hollow of her throat, where her heart was lodged.
"Rache . . . ?" The fingers grazed the front of her bra.
This was how it was supposed to be, she thought. A man touching a woman and the woman wanting, needing, melting -
"Please, Rache. You're the only one who c'n help me."
But this was