enabling me to track it down to a café on the seafront.
She carried on stirring, her back to me.
‘Yeah but it’s clearly been unlocked and disabled by someone.’ She flashed me a quick, bright smile. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It was a bit knackered anyway. I treated myself to an iPhone 8. I’ll give you the new number, wait …’
She fished the phone from her back pocket and tapped at the screen. My own phone buzzed with her message, but I ignored it, a little distracted by what she’d said.
‘Why did you change the number?’ I said after a moment.
She shrugged. ‘Oh, it was just a security thing … they prefer you to do that when it’s been stolen … or whatever.’
I didn’t reply. I’d never heard that before. Plus, it was unlike her to blithely spend money like that; and then I remembered that she had been with Patrick and Julia yesterday. They would have given her the cash for the new phone.
Those were the kind of things that rankled a bit, much as I loved my parents-in-law. It was the assumption that they could just spare, what, seven hundred pounds like that. As though it meant nothing.
When dinner was ready, we settled in front of the Sky planner with our food on trays.
I got through my portion quickly and was rising for more when I looked over and saw that Anya had basically rearranged hers, barely touching her food.
‘Not hungry?’ I said and she shrugged.
‘Just a bit tired, is all.’
It was a strange evening, overall. I was aching all over from my earlier tumble and took myself off for a hot bath after we’d watched two episodes of a crime drama we’d been following. It was a good one, but watching the murder victim being covered in dead roses by the masked killer who had been hiding in their attic wasn’t exactly a mood-lifter.
Before I went for my bath I looked over and saw Anya staring at the television with the oddest expression on her face.
It was a hard, angry look; quite unlike her, really. She’d turned the telly over to some sort of dating reality thing and it was almost like she was glaring at the contestants currently making idiots of themselves.
‘Hey, you don’t have to watch that, you know,’ I said and for a second she snapped her gaze towards me in a way that made me stop in the doorway. Her face relaxed into a smile then and she gave a big yawn, arms above her head so the baggy sleeves of her favourite cardigan slipped down over her slim, freckled arms.
‘I like enjoying the discomfort of others,’ she said with a grin. ‘Plus, I get to be really judgemental.’
‘Well, I’ll leave you to your schadenfreude,’ I said as I went through to the bathroom.
‘You and your fancy book learnin’,’ she said, in a daft American accent, before throwing a cushion at me.
She went to bed before me and I thought she was asleep when I came in later. I was a natural night owl and Anya was the opposite. I slipped gingerly under the duvet in the dark, wincing as my knee stung and my lower back throbbed.
But she turned to me straight away, bringing her face close. I saw the gleam of her wide eyes and felt her warm breath on my face.
‘I love you,’ she whispered.
‘I love—’ I started to say but then her mouth was on mine, hard, mashing against my lips so that after a moment I tasted blood. Then she was pushing the duvet away and climbing onto me. She was ready and, despite all my aches, I was too. I slid inside her with a groan. She started to rock quickly, fists pressing onto my chest, so I could feel each of her knuckles grinding into my skin. Even though it hurt, it was so exhilarating and unexpected I found myself unable to hold back after a few moments.
‘Ah, sorry,’ I said sheepishly. She stopped moving and leaned down, kissing me tenderly on the bruised place on my lip.
‘No need to be,’ she said. ‘I was almost there before you came into the room. I was having a very hot dream.’ She paused. ‘And then there you were.’
‘I’m glad I was,’ I murmured and, as she turned round, I pulled her in towards me and let my sore, happy body melt into the bed.
The sound of smashing glass woke us at three am.
The first thing I did, half asleep, was flail an arm under the bed, still programmed to reach for that baseball bat of my youth. But as I properly woke up, I leaped out of bed so fast I cracked my knee – the other, non-injured one – against the bedpost. Swearing, I stumbled out of the room in the T-shirt and boxers I slept in, then crashed down the stairs, almost falling on the way.
Bursting into the living room, I couldn’t see anything unusual, so I walked into the kitchen, wincing at the cold tiles beneath my bare feet. The cold air, laced with rain, was the first thing I noticed, right before I almost stood on the broken glass.
The brick lay in the middle of the kitchen floor. Standard red house brick. My first, strange, thought, was that would have come from the house a few doors down that was currently having a loft conversion. But who would do this?
‘Oh my God.’ Anya was behind me now, her face ashen.
‘Right?’ I said, my jaw tight. I was suddenly picturing Lee Bennett and his smirking face. As if on cue, my grazed hand throbbed and I discovered I was clenching my fist.
Could it really be him? Surely not?
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m calling the police.’
‘Wait!’ said Anya, grabbing hold of my arm. Her hand felt hot against my goose-pimpled skin. ‘And tell them what?’ she added, her face creased with disapproval. ‘That a bunch of kids threw something through the window? What do you expect them to do? Send in Special Branch?’
‘What if—’ then I bit off the end of the sentence.
‘What?’
I felt stupid even saying it out loud.
‘What if it’s that Bennett bloke from school?’ I said, with heat. ‘What if he tried to knock me off my bike too?’
She gave me a strange look. Obviously thought I was being ridiculous. I was probably being ridiculous.
‘Ell,’ she said, ‘if it’s him, then I think you’d need more evidence before you start accusing him.’ I was surprised, having expected her to dismiss my paranoia.
She went on, gently placing her hand on my arm. ‘But look, you know how stretched the police are round here. You’ve seen the same reports I have. Let’s just assume it was kids and get the window fixed, yeah?’
I hesitated, knowing she was right. The local paper had been covered in screaming headlines a few weeks back about the low rates of arrest for robberies around here. Apparently, the police had almost stopped investigating minor
