‘Do you know what all this means?’ I asked, waving it in the air.
‘Of course I do, missy. I wasn’t the bookkeeper at my husband’s practice for forty-five years for nothing.’
‘So?’
She snatched the letter away from me and started reading it. What followed was a series of very agitated sounds, punctuated with some words with rather negative connotations.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, just tell me what it means!’ I snapped.
She gazed suspiciously at me over the letter through glasses with such thick lenses that they magnified her eyes tenfold.
‘Put it this way . . . when Lake deLange discovered that her husband, Ryder Wood, was actually her long-lost brother’s evil twin, Hyder, and that she was pregnant with his child—’
I cut her off. ‘What are you talking about?’
She rolled her blue eyes. ‘FromThe Days and Nights of our Bold and Restless Children.’ She looked at me as if I should know what the hell she was talking about.
When I still looked blank, she pulled her glasses down her nose and glared. ‘The world’s most popular soapie.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Sorry, don’t watch it.’
She tutted loudly. ‘Well, it’s worse than that!’
My face must have betrayed my terror, because suddenly she looked empathetic. ‘But don’t worry, missy, I can help you. Let’s do it over tea and cake, though. I’m starved.’
And that was it. She marched us out of the elevator, my letter in hand, and headed down the corridor to her apartment.
I’d been on my third cup of coffee when I’d left my own apartment earlier. I’d locked and bolted the door – you can’t be too careful in my line of work – and as I walked past the stairwell, almost at Philly’s apartment,BAM!I ran into the last person I was hoping to see.
‘Byron. Hi!’ I said, and looked around. A bit of a coincidence thatI’d bumped into him at the exact time I was coming out of my apartment.
‘Hey. Hi, fancy running into you here.’
‘I think you ran into me on purpose,’ I said. ‘In fact, by the look of it, I think you’ve been waiting in the stairwell for me to emerge.’ I pointed at the mint wrapper that was lying on the floor. Byron had a habit of sucking on mints. ‘You shouldn’t litter.’
He gave one of those loud, resounding, resigned sighs, the kind I’d heard many times before. The sighs that came out of the mouths of cheaters when they realised they’d been caught and no amount of explanation would help them.
‘Fine. I did.’ His shoulders slumped. ‘I don’t get it, though. I don’t get you.’
‘What exactly don’t you get?’
‘We have fun together, don’t we?’ he asked.
I had to think about this for a moment. But when I did, I could recall that there had been a few pizza and movie evenings – mainly after sex.
‘Sure. We have fun,’ I said, slurping my coffee.
‘And we have a lot in common. We talk about stuff.’
I thought again. We both liked action movies. We both liked pizza with anchovies. He also had a fish.
‘Sure. I guess.’
‘And the sex is good?’
I cast my mind back and replayed some of our encounters. He was pretty well endowed. He had stamina, technique and was always willing, and I hadn’t seen any blue pills in his medicine cabinet when I did a routine sweep of his home one evening.
‘Yes. I enjoyed the sex.’
