out of the window, she would be clearly visible as twilight was only just beginning to fall on this warm late-September evening.
Reaching the back door without mishap, she breathed a great sigh of relief. So far, so good. She took a tentative peek through the kitchen window. The doctor was in the house somewhere, but thankfully not in there. Deftly opening the back door, Aidy slipped inside, quickly shutting it behind her.
Now she was actually inside the house illegally, what she was in fact doing hit home and fear of discovery had her quaking. Should the doctor find her prowling uninvited around his house, she had no plausible reason to excuse her presence. With a vision of him marching her off to the police station, she shot across the black-and-white-tiled kitchen floor to the door opposite. She opened it up just far enough to steal a glance through. A long empty corridor faced her, the front door at the end along with the staircase. There were four doors leading off the corridor. Two to the left of her, two to her right. The rooms to the left were smaller than those to the right, judging by the space between the doors. She judged the first one on the left to be Doc’s actual surgery, the next one to it the waiting room. The staircase rose beyond. The room to the immediate right must be his sitting room, and the room beyond the dining room. Which room was the doctor in now? Was it too much to hope he was in his bedroom, readying himself for the interviews? Anyway, hopefully she had located the waiting room, which was the one she was after. She would waste no time in getting herself inside.
She made to step out into the corridor then froze as the sound of cutlery scraping on china became audible. The sound had come from the room to the right of her she had judged to be the dining room. The doctor was in there eating his evening meal! In order to get to the waiting room she had to pass that room and he could come out of it at any second … Plus the door was open and her getting past it unseen by him depended on whether he was sitting facing it or with his back to it. Hardly daring to breathe, her heart pounding, painfully Aidy tiptoed over and peeped through the crack between the door and the frame. She could have yelped for joy. The doctor was sitting with his back to the door! Luck was certainly on her side tonight. Dare she hope it stayed on her side a little longer …
Creeping past the dining room and on to the waiting-room door, she paused before it just long enough to take a deep breath to calm her jangling nerves. Then, planting a smile on her face, she grabbed hold of the door knob, turned it and quickly entered, shutting the door behind her.
At her entry the fifteen occupants of the room all looked over at her expectantly.
Feeling no guilt whatsoever for the lies she was about to tell, she addressed them all breezily with, ‘Doc’s asked me to tell you that the job’s gone.’
Before she could say anything more a disgruntled voice piped up, ‘What d’yer mean, the job’s gone? None of us has had an interview for it yet.’
Aidy looked over to the person who’d protested. She hadn’t noticed her when she had taken a sneaky look through the surgery window earlier. Bella Graves! A nineteen-year-old bleached blonde, her voluptuous figure encased in a shabby red tight-fitting dress, ample bosom spilling out over the low-cut top. She lived with her blowsy mother who was rumoured to be on the game … as quite possibly Bella herself was too … in a crumbling, one-roomed dwelling in a part of the area even the hardest of men thought twice about visiting. The next street to the one Aidy’s in-laws had lived, in fact. Bella was a Pat Nelson in the making. It was glaringly apparent to Aidy that it wasn’t the job Bella was after but the doctor himself, planning to ensnare him with her charms with a view to becoming his wife. Why any woman would want to spend any more time with that sourpuss was beyond Aidy, but was Bella mad to think a man of his obvious breeding would look twice at the likes of her, let alone contemplate marriage?
Scathingly she said,