The Mistress - Jill Childs Page 0,34

door behind me with a bang. Unnecessarily loud. If someone was here, inside the flat, some burglar ransacking the place, this was their cue to run. To climb back out of whatever window they’d forced and shimmy off down a drainpipe.

Stillness. Nothing.

I dropped my bag on the carpet and started to walk through the rooms. There was no sign of a break-in. Nothing was disturbed.

Halfway down the hall passage, something reached out, caught at my heart and twisted it hard. That smell. Ralph’s smell.

I opened the bathroom door. The shower mat was rumpled. The door to the bathroom cabinet was ajar. There was a faint, lingering smell of soap – different, surely, from the shower gel I’d used that morning?

‘Ralph?’

My voice sounded thin, all alone in the emptiness. What was I thinking? Did I really expect him to answer, to appear in the doorway and say hi?

I stood on the threshold and strained to listen. Silence. My nerves strained.

I hurried into the kitchen. Everything was just as I’d left it. Toast crumbs on the bread board. Plate and knife in the sink. So why did I have the sense that someone else had been here?

I shouted, ‘Is anyone here?’

I ran back through the flat, slamming open the doors and looking wildly round each room. Nothing. No one. I came to a halt in the middle of the sitting room, panting, staring round.

Nothing appeared altered and yet something was different. I didn’t know why. I just knew. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that someone had invaded my home.

My phone pinged. A message.

I looked down at my phone, lying there on the coffee table in its case. My hands hung stiffly by my sides. I should look. Something held me back. I thought of the strange message I’d received so recently. A wrong number, I’d decided. Sent to me by mistake.

My hands seemed to know better. They trembled, suddenly ice cold. They didn’t want to pick up my phone and see.

I forced myself to open up the case and look, then, as soon as I’d read the words, let the phone drop to the carpet.

Like last time, the number was withheld and the message brief.

Did you really think I’d gone?

Twenty-Four

Ralph had given me a smart speaker that Christmas, the must-have gift of the season. He came round on Christmas Eve to set it up for me, knowing how anxious I was about new technology. Matthew had loved gadgets. He used to keep me up-to-date. Since he’d left, I hadn’t had the heart to bother.

Ralph found me amusing.

‘My old-fashioned gal,’ he’d say if we settled down in front of my TV, the old kind that sits in a corner on a stand with its DVD player on a shelf beneath. ‘Let’s select one of these – what do you call them, madam – DVDs, shall we?’

I didn’t mind being teased by him. He and Helen streamed their films, of course. I understood the advantage, but I didn’t see the point of committing to a monthly contract when I didn’t really need it. I was trying to save from my salary, not pay out for things I could manage without. We had a perfectly decent local library. I could rent a DVD from there for a pound, if I fancied something different.

I already had a drawer filled with DVDs and I didn’t want to buy those same films all over again. I never told him about the VHS tapes I still stored in another box under the bed.

I was careful with money. It was one of the issues Matthew and I argued about, towards the end. He was eager to be out every weekend, burning through cash. I didn’t see the point of dining in a restaurant if you had a perfectly good kitchen at home. Or drinking in a bar when you could buy the same stuff from a supermarket for a fraction of the price.

Ralph and I had agreed to celebrate Christmas Eve together as if it were our Christmas Day. I understood why. He could get away on Christmas Eve. His wife wouldn’t be too suspicious if he said he needed to dash to the shops. Christmas Day was important for his daughter, for Anna. I didn’t like any of it, but I respected that. Even in the future, I thought, after he’d left Helen, he should make an effort to be with Anna for special holidays, at least while she was still a child. I’d always let him do