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Leigh frowned.
‘I assumed you’d had some kind of quarrel and that he wanted to make it up.’
‘A lovers’ quarrel, do you mean?’ Debra laughed bitterly. ‘Hardly. What he wanted to see me for was to tell me that I needed to give the firm three months’ notice of my resignation and not one, as I had thought.’
‘You’re leaving! But—’ Leigh knew that she mustn’t let Debra realise that Marsh had told her this already.
‘I have to. You must see that. I can’t continue to work there. Not with Marsh there.’
She saw Leigh’s face, and told her despairingly, ‘I might love him, Leigh, but he doesn’t love me.’
‘But he was so concerned about you...’
‘Concerned to keep me out of his life, not in it,’ Debra told her with uncharacteristic bluntness. She glanced at her watch. ‘I must go. I want to get to Chester before the traffic gets too busy.’
‘Chester?’ Leigh’s frown deepened.
‘I’m going to check on the house,’ Debra told her, deliberately avoiding looking at her. ‘I... I rang my insurance broker earlier and he says that most of the redecoration work has been finished, and I wanted to check on what still needs to be done before I can put it up for sale.’
Strictly, that wasn’t the truth. She had spoken to her broker, who had seemed surprised and oddly confused to hear from her, but then she could understand why. In the first few days after Kevin Riley had broken in she had refused to have anything to do with any of the arrangements for clearing the house up. She didn’t want anything from the house, she had told him sickly. Not one single item from her personal possessions. She couldn’t bear the thought of seeing them, touching them, remembering ... knowing.
She would leave it in his hands to have the place cleaned up and redecorated once the insurance assessors had agreed her claims, she had told him, and until last night she had had no intention of ever going back there again.
Until last night. Until Marsh had so cruelly accused her of being a coward.
‘Look, if you’d like me to come with you...’ Leigh suggested uncertainly.
Immediately Debra shook her head.
‘No. I’ll be fine on my own,’ she told her.
All the locks had been changed, of course, but she had a new set of keys, sent to her by her efficient insurance broker, and these were now tucked safely in her handbag.
She kissed her mother and Leigh and opened the back door. Her stomach was churning, but she wasn’t going to back out now, not with Marsh’s words still ringing in her ears.
As she climbed into her car the telephone started to ring. Leigh, who was standing closest to it, answered it, her expression changing as she heard Marsh’s voice.
‘No, I’m afraid she isn’t here,’ she told him.
The closer she got to Chester, the more nervous Debra became. Three times she circled the end of the street before finally managing to find the courage to turn her car into it.
She was trembling so hard when she parked outside the house that she stalled the gears, wincing at the tortured noise from the engine, stiffening defensively as she looked around, but no one wa
s watching her; the street was quite empty.
As she walked up to her front door she noticed that even that had been repainted and that the brass letter-box gleamed brightly with polish.
The new locks were a little stiff—or was it just that she was shaking too much to turn the key properly?—but at last she got them unfastened and opened the door.
The hall smelled of polish and fresh flowers. She frowned a little over this, and then came to a startled halt as she saw the huge copper bowl of flowers on the hall table, their colours reflected in the mirror on the wall behind it.
The same mirror which she had last seen lying on the carpet in so many tiny pieces, she recognised, unable to resist walking up to it and touching its smooth surface.
The wall sconces had been repaired as well. And, where the walls had dripped paint as bright as any blood, they were now smoothly papered, the paper exactly the same as the one she had chosen with such care and pleasure.
In fact, she realised as she looked around, everything was just as it had always been.
Apart from the flowers. She frowned a little over those, wondering if her insurance broker had arranged for them, perhaps to add a homey touch to the house’s emptiness, to woo prospective buyers. But the house wasn’t up for sale as yet.
