pressed her lips together and tried not to smile. ‘Learnt it from you.’
Maggs mimed taking a bullet to the chest. ‘And the hits just keep on coming.’
Claire pulled into a space outside of Maggs’s house and yanked on the handbrake. ‘You can’t go all superior on me, otherwise you’ll have to admit you were a bad influence.’
‘All I’m saying, is that you could do with some male company,’ Maggs said, as she opened the door and eased her slightly creaky body from the car. ‘You work all the time and when you’re not working, you’re doing club stuff, or hanging out with girls.’
‘And George,’ Claire reminded her, smiling just a little too sweetly.
‘You’re on a roll today,’ Maggs said, her tone grudging. ‘I shouldn’t have taught you so well.’
Claire got out of the car and came round to where her grandmother’s best friend was standing and gave her a hug. Maggs shook her head, but smiled as she did it, and let Claire press a kiss to her papery cheek.
‘I’ve told you before not to meddle in my love life,’ Claire said, ‘not until you’ve got one of your own, at least.’
‘You’re no fun,’ Maggs said, as they pulled apart.
‘You want me to turn the tables on you? I saw the way George looked when you blew him off this evening. Crushed doesn’t even begin to cover it.’
Maggs shook her head. ‘He’s too young for me.’
‘So? What’s wrong with a toy boy?’
‘I’d eat him for breakfast.’
Claire laughed. Maggs probably would as well. Poor old George. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. ‘See? You need to start taking some of your own advice, Dr Maggs. You accuse me of not moving on, but I don’t see you doing much of that yourself.’
‘I’m practically in the grave,’ Maggs said wearily. ‘If I “move on” too much, I’ll just fall straight into it.’
‘Now you’re just getting dramatic,’ Claire said, although she knew Maggs was okay when she was hamming it up. It was when she closed right down, didn’t show a thing, that Claire got truly worried about her.
Maggs sighed as she headed up her garden path. ‘I do hate it when you’re like this,’ she said, with more than a touch of the martyr about her.
Claire smiled to herself as she got back into the car. ‘When I’m like what?’ she called out.
‘Right,’ Maggs replied, as she opened her front door and disappeared.
By the Light of the Silvery Moon
Claire was having the strangest dream. The sun was warm on her skin and the waves of a clear turquoise sea lapped against the edges of the little rowing boat she was sitting in. Okay, that didn’t seem strange at all. In fact, it was rather lovely, and if that had been all there was to the dream she probably would have enjoyed it.
She glanced down and saw a flash of something in the sand and rocks thirty feet below. At first she thought it must be a little fish, the sun glinting off its scales, but then she realised the shiny thing wasn’t moving.
The thought slid through her head like a whisper. Treasure …
She stood up, prepared to dive in, and that’s when things got strange. Instead of hearing a splash and discovering her body slipping through the cool water, there was something more akin to a boing and she bounced right off it. It was as if the whole surface of the sea had turned into a stretchy, rubbery, see-through skin and as hard as she tried she couldn’t break through. It was most frustrating.
Eventually, she sat down, cross-legged on the undulating surface and folded her arms. The waves ran under her, making her bob up and down, just as if she’d been on a trampoline and someone else was jumping on the other end.
The only sounds were the gentle rustle of her hair in the breeze and the slap of the waves against the hull of the boat. She wasn’t sure how the boat didn’t just sit on the water like she did, rolling over onto one side, but it didn’t. Apparently, it was just her having this strange problem.
As she sat there, wondering what to do next, she started to think she could hear music. At first it was just a tickle at the corner of her consciousness, and she wasn’t even sure if it was coming from inside or outside her head, but then it grew louder.
Outside. Definitely outside.
She got excited again. Perhaps it was mermaids. Anything seemed possible in this strange place she’d found herself in.
The music grew steadily in volume, a bass beat thrumming through the rubbery sea surface and vibrating on her bare legs. Maybe not mermaids after all. Not unless they were the kind that didn’t like operatic arpeggios, but pounding metal verging on the edge of goth …
That was when Claire woke up. The boat, the sun, the strange waves were all sucked back into her subconscious. The music, however, remained.
She sat up and pushed the hair out of her face, trying to make sense of it all, waiting for the music to disappear with the rest of the dream. It didn’t. It just carried on thumping, like the beginning of one of those headaches she got sometimes that sat right behind her left eye. She put one foot on the floor and felt the vibration of it through the polished boards.
It became crystal clear that this had nothing to do with the dream and everything to do with the nightmare who lived downstairs.
Okay. This was it. She’d just about had enough.
Not only had there been the whole bike incident, and the letterbox that ever-spouted pizza delivery leaflets. She’d also had to deal with his bins again. He hadn’t pulled them forward on rubbish collection day, so she’d had to do it. She’d have left them, and rejoiced at the thought of him rotting away in his own mess, if it hadn’t been for the very real possibility of attracting rats. Or foxes. It was bad enough pulling his stinky dustbin to the kerb, but she wasn’t about to gather up the contents once they’d been strewn halfway down the street by a vixen looking for a nice juicy chicken carcass.
Of course that had meant yet another note. And yet another cheeky reply.
She knew she should have left it at that, but for some reason letting him have the last word didn’t sit well with her. Her pile of posh stationery in the kitchen was diminishing rapidly, along with her live-and-let-live, que sera, sera philosophy. She was doing her best to ignore everything but the troubles each day brought; it just seemed that each day brought a new batch from Mr Dominic flipping Arden.
She stood up and marched across the bedroom. No more notes. This was it. It was about time the pair of them had some face-to-face communication. And, if her palm met the side of his face during that communication, so much the better.
She stomped down the stairs, growing angrier with each step, because
