accommodation since the bank sold up the old man’s pride, do you? Most places you enquire about you miss out on and those you do manage to get... Well, this is—what?—the third time in just over a month that you’ve had to move due to unforeseen circumstances arising with landlords or flatmates—’
Jane’s head whipped round, her hair swirling like a black storm around her pale face. The fact that the council inspections had been conducted on a secret tip-off and that her flat was the only one that couldn’t be occupied while being brought up to ‘complying standard’ had clearly borne the mark of Ryan Blair’s influence. But all those other times, when she had presumed she’d been simply unlucky...
Damn him!
‘Are you beginning to feel you might be jinxed, Jane?’ he enquired silkily. ‘That maybe you’re on a slippery downward slope to nowhere?’ He raised her throbbing hand to within a hair’s breadth of his mouth in a parody of polite salute. ‘It’s a long, dark, dirty, dangerous way...but perhaps someone’ll catch you before you hit rock bottom. Who knows? If I’m feeling generous, it could even be me...’
Jane twisted her hand away and stumbled out of the car on unsteady heels, his dark laughter following her into the ill-lit street.
‘Goodnight. Sweet dreams.’
Her dreams that night were anything but sweet. It took her ages to undress, and by the time she was ready for bed her hand was hurting so much that she had to take the last two aspirins in her medicine cabinet.
They didn’t seem to help much and she tossed and turned for hours on the hard sofa-bed that had come with the partly furnished apartment, worried about the stack of bills that she could only afford to pay if she used the bond her landlord was obliged by law to return. But that would mean she wouldn’t have the money to offer as bond on another flat. Even in shared accommodation one was expected to pay a lump sum up front.
Worse, her small reserve of cash was dwindling alarmingly fast, and the company was continuing to accumulate debts against her name even though it was no longer operating. Since she was directly responsible for all monies owed by Sherwood Properties, and lawyers’ and accountants’ fees had already eaten a huge hole in the surplus from the sale of the house and unhindered personal assets, the threat of bankruptcy loomed ever closer. Without a car it was going to take longer to get around the sprawling city, hampering her search for a job, but at least she would no longer have to contemplate skipping meals to pay for petrol!
When she finally fell into a troubled sleep Jane was tormented by lurid monsters who gnawed at her fingers, and when she woke in the morning she was horrified to find that her left hand had swollen like an overripe piece of fruit. The blade of her hand was blue and pulpy, her skin feeling as if it was stretched to bursting point and the fingers almost impossible to straighten. Moving carefully, she showered and searched her wardrobe for a dress that didn’t have a back fastening.
Unfortunately there wasn’t a lot of choice. Her former lifestyle had dictated very few casual clothes, and most of her custom-designed business suits and high-fashion dresses had been forfeited, along with her jewellery and extensive collection of shoes, when the bank’s valuers had swept through the Sherwood residence, spiriting off everything that was considered saleable. What was left would have fitted into two suitcases—except the matching leather luggage had gone too, and Jane had been forced to leave the house with her remaining possessions packed into plastic supermarket bags.
The black dress had fortunately been out for cleaning at the time and the valuers had been so ruthless in the execution of their duty that when Jane had later found the dry-cleaning receipt in her purse she had had no qualms about claiming it for herself. She looked on it as a symbol of hope, a small victory over the forces of darkness: a reminder that, even when the odds were stacked wildly against you, you could sometimes still win.
The black dress now hung shoulder to shoulder with off-the-peg skirts and blouses and the subdued dresses that the all-male valuers had considered ‘of insufficient interest’ to turn the quick profit the mortgagee was demanding. At least she had got to keep all her underwear, despite the famous French and Italian labels, but they had only left her three pairs of shoes, all of them flats.
Jane struggled into a simple shirt-waister with large buttons that were easy to do up one-handed and didn’t even bother trying to put up her hair.
Ever since she had moved in two weeks ago she had walked three blocks to a tiny pavement café where, for the price of a cup of breakfast tea, she could read the morning newspaper and copy out all the likely prospects from the Situations Vacant columns. Then she would return to the flat and write her application letters before starting the rounds of interviews and enquiries at the various employment bureaus. But today there didn’t seem to be much point. With her hand the way it was she wouldn’t present the image of flawless competence that she had glowingly described in her CV.
In an effort to relieve the swelling Jane tried bathing her hand in water chilled with ice-chunks chipped off the sides of the tiny freezer compartment of her fridge, but although the pain was numbed for a while it only seemed to get worse when the cold wore off, and by mid-morning she knew she was going to have to see a doctor.
When she returned the borrowed black high-heels to the girl who lived in the even pokier flat next door, Collette—she had admitted it wasn’t her real name but ‘guys think it’s sexy’—offered some gratuitous advice.
She shook her bleached head at the sight of the mangled hand, her crystal earrings clacking with outrage. ‘God, did that guy you were meeting last night do that? One of those, eh? Been there, done that, honey. Take my advice—dump him! And ignore any sob stuff—bastards like that never change...a few drinks and pow! They thump you and make you think it’s your fault.’
Jane smiled weakly. For all his ferocious temper Ryan Blair wasn’t a physically violent man. He was an expert at more sophisticated forms of intimidation...like kissing!
‘You should have used the shoes,’ Collette advised. ‘We don’t wear them just ’cos they make our legs look miles long, you know. A stiletto in the groin can give a man a whole new perspective on life, know what I mean?’
Jane nodded hastily, suspecting that the ‘we’ to whom Collette referred was a loose street-sisterhood engaged in a profession much more venerable than her own.
Having cheerfully targeted a few more choice portions of the male anatomy where application of a stiletto could produce instant indifference to the idea of violence and/ or sex, Collette gave Jane the address of the nearest emergency medical clinic. On the back of a dog-eared medical centre card, prominently promoting its STD clinic, she wrote down the numbers of the buses that Jane would have to catch there and back.
It was the first time Jane had been on a bus since her schooldays, but she was in too much pain to appreciate the novelty. The clinic’s crowded waiting room was also a first for her, and after a long, enervating wait Jane was relieved to be ushered into a bare office where a depressingly bouncy young doctor examined her and diagnosed a broken bone before sending her off to the X-Ray department ‘just to make sure I’m right’.
‘What does the other guy look like?’ he chirped forty-five minutes later, when Jane had come back with the X-Ray and he had clipped it to the light box to show her the thin, pale line unevenly bisecting one of the five long bones of her hand.
A fleeting vision of a dark, handsome face, inky hair and piercing blue eyes made her heart give a nervous skip. Thank goodness the doctor wasn’t taking her pulse. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘See this?’ He tapped the image.
