brown hair and Hollywood-perfect teeth – but because of who he was.
Fabian Flatley. The same Fabian Flatley who’d made a bid to purchase the Ginger Cat last year, wanting to close it down and turn it into luxury apartments. In the end there’d been a massive scandal over his tech start-up squirrelling away funds in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes, as well as dodgy quality and extortionate service charges in the apartment blocks he’d already built (never mind his habit of talking loudly on his mobile in the gym, which as far as I was concerned should have carried a custodial sentence), and he’d disappeared to San Francisco, where I’d assumed he still was.
But he wasn’t. He was here, and he was bad news.
‘That’s really interesting,’ Dani was saying. ‘So if you eat, like, an egg, that’s got the same number of calories as a piece of toast, you basically get fewer calories from the egg?’
‘Correct,’ Fabian said, squatting down next to her and taking out his phone. ‘There was a great article about it recently in Fitness magazine. Why don’t you give me your number and I’ll WhatsApp you a link?’
‘That would be great! I’d be really interested to read that,’ Dani said, reciting her number, although I knew she was as likely to read an article about calories as The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
I hesitated. I could hang around, wait for Fabian to go away and carry on sweating all over the weights bench, which he never wiped down after he’d used it, and warn Dani to give him a wide berth. Probably it was what I should have done.
But he didn’t look like he was going to make himself scarce any time soon; he’d stretched his legs out on the mat next to Dani and was settling in for a good old chat about whey-powder shakes (yawn). Also, his presence was making me feel really weird – almost like there was some kind of force field coming off him that was interfering with the signals in my brain, or I was allergic to his super-strong piney deodorant. And anyway, I needed to get back to work.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?’ I said to Dani, who gave me a half-wave before turning back to Fabian, as mesmerised as a mouse watching a snake that was about to swallow it whole. I’d have to warn her about him – although, from the way she was looking at him, I wasn’t sure she would listen to me.
I hurried back to the pub, showered and changed in my upstairs flat, and was back in the kitchen with plenty of time to get ready for evening service. But I didn’t start shaping the burgers and frying the onions. Instead I pushed open the door to the pub and went to look for Alice.
It was a strange thing. Last year, after I’d unexpectedly encountered Joe after so many years and he – with a good-hearted obliviousness to other people’s darker feelings that was typical of him – had offered me their spare room when I told him I had nowhere to live, I’d seen Alice as a rival. I’d persuaded her to give me the job at the Ginger Cat not just because I saw the potential the pub had, but because it was another way to get closer to Joe. But over the months we’d worked together, I’d got to know Alice as a person. She loved the pub and the community it served. Together, we’d fought off the threat from Fabian Flatley and worked our butts off to make the Ginger Cat the thriving business it was now. And during the course of all that, I’d realised Joe and Alice were rock solid and I would never be able to come between them – not that I wanted to, any more – and come to regard her as a friend.
And so, now, I was going to mention that I’d seen Fabian again. Just, you know, in case.
At first I couldn’t see her, then she straightened up from behind the bar, where I guessed she must have been checking the stock in the wine fridges. Her hair was scraped back in a ponytail, there was a smear of dust on her cheek and a pencil behind her ear, and she looked stressed and knackered. For a second I wondered whether this was a good time to bring up Fabian Flatley’s reappearance, but then I was pretty sure there never would