consciousness. He looked up. Dusk had fallen as he worked. Through the window the outline of the willows showed charcoal against a violet sky.
The sounds were more definitive this time—a louder click, followed by a creak. Kincaid slid from the chair and moved quietly out into the hall. He listened for a moment, then went quickly down the stairs, keeping his feet carefully to the outside of the treads. When he reached the last step, the light came on in the sitting room. He listened again, then stepped around the corner.
She stood by the front door, one hand still on the light switch. The glow from the table lamps revealed tight jeans, a fuzzy pink sweater in a weave so loose it revealed the line of her bra, impossibly high heels, blond hair permed into Medusa-like ropes. He could see the quick rise and fall of her chest beneath the sweater.
“Hullo,” he said, trying on a smile.
She took one gulping breath before she shrieked. “Who the bloody hell are you?”
CHAPTER
5
Disoriented, Gemma reached out and touched the other side of the double bed, patted it. Empty. Opening her eyes, she saw the faint gray light brightening the wrong side of the room.
She came fully awake. New flat. No husband. Of course. Sitting up against the pillows, she pushed the tangle of hair away from her face. It had been months since she dreamed of Rob, and she had thought that particular ghost well laid to rest.
The hot water had just begun to gurgle through the radiator pipes as the automatic timer switched on the central heating. For a panicked moment she wondered why the alarm hadn’t gone off, then relaxed in relief. It was Sunday. She closed her eyes and snuggled down into the pillows, feeling that luxurious laziness that comes with waking early and knowing one doesn’t have to get up.
Sleep, however, refused to be coaxed back. The thought of the interview she’d managed to schedule later in the morning at the Coliseum niggled at her consciousness until finally, with a yawn, she swung her feet from under the duvet. The opera had seemed the logical place to start checking out Gerald Asherton’s story, and she found herself looking forward to her day with a tingle of pleasure.
When her toes touched the floor they curled involuntarily from the cold, and she fumbled for her slippers as she shrugged into her dressing gown. At least she could take advantage of the time before Toby awakened to have a quiet cup of coffee and organize her thoughts for the day.
A few minutes later the flat was warming nicely and she sat at the black-slatted table in front of the garden windows, cradling a hot mug in her hands and questioning her sanity.
She had sold her house in Leyton—three bedrooms, semidetached with garden, a symbol in brick and pebbledust of Rob’s unrealistic plans for their marriage—and instead of buying the sensible flat in Wanstead she’d had in mind, she’d leased… this. She gazed round the room, bemused.
Her estate agent had begged, “Just have a quick look, Gemma, that’s all I ask. I know it’s not what you’re looking for, but you simply must see it.” And so she had come, and seen, and signed on the dotted line, finding herself the surprised tenant of the converted garage behind a square detached Victorian house in a tree-lined street in Islington. The house itself was unexpected, standing as it did between two of Islington’s most elegant Georgian terraces, but it occupied its space with the confidence of good breeding.
The garage was separate from the house, and lower than the garden, so that the hip-high windows which lined one entire wall of the flat were actually ground level on the outside. The owners, a psychiatrist who worked from a shed in the garden, and his Dutch wife, had done up the garage in what the agent described as “Japanese minimalist” decor.
Gemma almost laughed aloud, thinking of it. An exercise in “minimalist living” would be a fitting description of what it had become for her. The flat was basically one large room, furnished with a futon and a few other sleek, contemporary pieces. Cubbyholes along the wall opposite the bed contained kitchen and water closet, and a storage room with a small window had become Toby’s bedroom. The arrangement didn’t allow much privacy, but privacy with a small child was a negligible quality anyway, and Gemma couldn’t imagine sharing her bed with anyone in the foreseeable future.
Gemma’s furniture and most of their belongings had been stored in the back of her parents’ bakery in Leyton High Street. Her mum had shaken her faded red curls and tut-tutted. “What were you thinking of, love?”
She felt stripped clean, pared down to essentials, serene in the room’s black-and-gray simplicity.
Or at least she had until this morning. She frowned, wondering again what had made her feel so unsettled, and the image of twelve-year-old Matthew Asherton came unbidden to her mind.
She rose, put two slices of brown bread in the toaster that stood on the tabletop and went to kiss Toby awake.
Having deposited Toby at her mum’s, Gemma took the tube to Charing Cross. As the train pulled away, the rush of wind down the tunnel whipped her skirt around her knees and she hugged the lapels of her jacket together. She left the station and entered the pedestrian mall behind St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and rounding the church into St. Martin’s Lane she found the outside no better. A gust of north wind funneled down the street, flinging grit and scraps of paper and leaving tiny whirlwinds in its wake.
She rubbed her eyes with her knuckles and blinked several times to clear them, then looked about her. Before her on the corner stood the Chandos Pub, and just beyond it a black-on-white vertical sign said LONDON COLISEUM. Blue and white banners emblazoned with the letters ENO surrounded it and drew her eyes upward. Against the blue-washed canvas of the sky, the ornate white cupola stood out sharply. Near the top of the dome, white letters spelled out ENGLISH NATIONAL OPERA rather sedately, and Gemma thought they must be lit at night.
Something tugged at her memory and she realized she’d been here before. She and Rob had been to a play at the Albury Theatre up the street, and afterward had stopped for a drink at the Chandos. It had been a warm night and they’d taken their drinks outside, escaping the smoky crush in the bar. Gemma remembered sipping her Pimm’s and watching the operagoers spill out onto the pavement, their faces animated, hands moving with quick gestures as they dissected the performance. “It might be fun,” she’d said rather wistfully to Rob.
