Chameleon's Shadow

back of his chair. ‘I wouldn’t want you accusing me of theft after I’ve gone.’

Her gaze travelled with amusement from his underpants to his socks and shoes. ‘You jump to too many conclusions, my friend, and none of them reflect well on you. Being one-eyed doesn’t make a man blind or stupid – or shouldn’t – although in your case I’m beginning to wonder. You can come back when you’ve learned some tolerance . . . but not before.’

‘It won’t happen,’ he said, heading for the door. ‘I can’t bloody well afford it.’

‘Of course you can,’ she said comfortably. ‘Daisy offers a ten per cent discount to anyone who stays the week.’

Eight

DEPRIVED OF MOST of his cash by Jackson, Acland stopped at an ATM on the way to the tube station. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and flipped it open to retrieve his Switch, but as soon as he thumbed the plastic from its slot, he noticed that Robert Willis’s business card was in the wrong place. It should have been tucked behind the American Express but now it was where the Switch had been.

He had a mental picture of Jackson going through his wallet, looking for someone to phone, and he knew she’d have found a psychiatrist irresistible. What had Willis told her? What had she told Willis? ‘Your patient’s showing psychopathic tendencies, Doctor.’ ‘Did you warn him that injuries to the head can inhibit moral sense?’ ‘Did you know he was dysfunctional when you gave him the all clear?’

Acland wondered why he’d kept Willis’s card, except that it was a link, however tenuous, with a time when he was still in the army. Perhaps, too, he had hoped to leave an upbeat message one day that everything had worked out fine, as if somewhere in his subconscious the psychiatrist’s good opinion mattered to him. Instead, Willis now knew that every gloomy prediction he’d made had come true. Acland was a loner. He was suspicious to the point of paranoia. And the recurring pains in his head were making him unstable.

Someone shifted impatiently in the rapidly building queue behind him and he went through the process of inserting the card and tapping in his PIN. He pictured Willis phoning his parents, or giving their number to Jackson, and a sweat of humiliation broke out in the small of his back. Did they know their son had run amok in a London pub? Christ!

He felt a prod in his back. ‘Are you planning on taking that money, son, or are you just gonna look at it?’

Acland drew in a breath through his nose and resisted the impulse to round on the man and punch him in the face. With a muttered apology, he tugged the wad of twenties out of the ATM’s metal grip, stuffed them into his wallet and turned away.

Another prod. ‘You’ve forgotten your card.’

It might have evolved into a rerun of the previous evening if the creaky voice hadn’t so clearly belonged to an old man. Nevertheless, Acland swung round and grabbed an arthritic finger before it could jab him again. ‘Don’t do that,’ he grated, staring into a pair of rheumy eyes.

Indignantly, the eighty-something wrestled himself free. ‘I was trying to do you a favour, mate, but go ahead . . . leave the card. Do you think I care if you’re robbed of all your savings?’

‘I don’t like people touching me.’

The pensioner wasn’t easily intimidated. ‘Then stick a sign on your back. There’s not many of us gonna realize you’re a bad-tempered bastard if we’re standing behind you. A man’s gotta see your face for that.’

 Acland took up a position across the road in the shadow of a plane tree. He was prepared for a long wait – even welcomed a period of calm in the hope his anger might dissipate – but, in the event, he abandoned his stake- out after fifteen minutes. The old man had been right. His temper was evil. When the attack happened there was no sympathy in his heart, just an increase of frustrated fury. Now what? he thought in unfeeling calculation. Now what?

Back in his flat, the lower one of two in a converted Victorian terraced house, he tore up Willis’s card and, for good measure,

burned the pieces in an ashtray. He followed that by going into the pint-sized garden that came with the apartment and lighting a ceremonial bonfire of anything that connected him to the army

– commission papers, regimental documents, pay slips, medical board reports. He would have tossed his old fatigues on to the flames as well if the woman above him hadn’t shouted out of her window that what he was doing was illegal.

Taking breaths to compose himself, Acland raised his head to look at her, shielding his eye with one hand. He’d avoided her as far as possible, put off by her excessive show of friendliness on the day he took over the lease, and the way she reminded him of Jen. He could have tolerated any other tenant, but not a woman who demanded attention.

She’d arrived at his door with a bottle of wine, entered without invitation, shortened his name to Charlie and insisted that he call her by her nickname, Kitten. In short order, he learned that she was a thirty-five-year-old divorcee with two children, that her ex was a two-timing bastard, that she was lonely, that she thought Charlie’s eyepatch was ‘cute’ and that she was always up for a night out as long as somebody else paid.

After an hour of making an effort to be polite – he was about to spend six months with this woman as a neighbour – Acland’s responses became increasingly monosyllabic. There was nothing about her that attracted him. She even looked like Jen. Blonde, vacuously pretty with large mascaraed eyes, and a body like a beanpole, clad in tight jeans and a cropped top. She drank most of the bottle, but couldn’t hold the alcohol and veered between vicious remarks about her ex’s new wife and clumsy, slurred attempts to tell Charlie she found him attractive. When she asked him coyly if she was outstaying her welcome, he delivered a curt yes and her mask slipped abruptly.

Playful flirting gave way to hissing antagonism. She was only trying to be friendly. What sort of woman did he think she was? Acland listened to her without comment, wondering what she’d expected from him. Sex? Admiration? Whichever, he turned from being ‘cute’ to ‘sick’ in the time it took her to stumble to his door.

Her subsequent spite took the form of petty nuisances – intrusive noise from upstairs, litter thrown into the garden or in front of his door, watching to see when he left and when he came in. On the outside, he presented a frigid indifference; on the inside her behaviour ate away at the fragile respect he still had for her sex. The whole experience was a dangerously negative one for a man as alienated as Acland. In the end, her only achievement was to reinforce his distrust of women.

He saw a movement in the upstairs window of the next-door house and shifted his gaze from Kitten to their