Roz, arriving thirty minutes later with Hal’s sodden twenty pound note clutched in one hand and a blistering letter of denunciation in the other, stared in disbelief at what she saw.
The kitchen looked like a scene from Beirut in the aftermath of war.
Deserted and destroyed. The table, upended, leant drunkenly against the oven, two of its legs wrenched free.
Chairs, in pieces, lay amongst shards of broken crockery and jagged glass. And the fudge, tilted forward and balanced precariously on its open door, had poured its contents across the quarry tiling in streams of milk and congealed stock. She held a trembling hand to her lips.
Here and there, splashes of bright red blood had tinged the spreading milk pink.
She looked wildly up the alleyway, but there was no one in sight. What to do?
“Hal!” she called, but her voice was little more than a whisper.
“Hal!” This time it rose out of control and, in the silence that followed, she thought she heard a sound from the other side of the swing doors into the restaurant. She stuffed the letter and the money into her pockets and reached inside the door for one of the table legs.
“I’ve called the police,” she shouted, croaky with fear.
“They’re on their way.”
The door swung open and Hal emerged with a bottle of wine.
He nodded at the table leg.
“What are you planning to do with that?”
She let her arm fall.
“Have you gone mad? Did you do all this?”
“Am I likely to have done it?”
“Olive did.” She stared about her.
“This is just what Olive did. Lost her temper and destroyed her room.
She had all her privileges taken away.”
“You’re babbling.” He found a couple of glasses in an intact wall cupboard and filled them from the bottle.
“Here.” His dark eyes watched her closely.
“Have you called the police?”
“No.” Her teeth chattered against the wine glass.
“I thought if you were a burglar you’d run away. Your hand’s bleeding.”
“I know.” He took the table leg away from her and put it on top of the oven, then pulled forward the only intact chair from behind the back door and pressed her into it.
“What were you going to do if the burglar ran out this way?”
“Hit him, I suppose.” Her fear was beginning to subside.
“Is this what you thought I’d set you up for?”
“Yes.”
“God!” She didn’t know what else to say. She watched while he found a broom and started to sweep the mess towards one corner.
“Shouldn’t you leave that?”
“What for?”
“The police.”
He eyed her curiously.
“You said you hadn’t called them.”
She digested this in silence for several seconds, then put her glass on the floor beside her.
“This is all a bit heavy for me.”
She took the twenty-pound note from her pocket, but left the letter where it was.
“I only came back to give you this.” She held it out as she stood up.
“I’m sorry,” she said with an apologetic smile.
“What for?”
“Making you angry. I seem to have a knack for making people angry at the moment.” He moved towards her to take the money, but stopped abruptly at her look of alarm.
“Goddamnit, woman, do you think I did this?”
But he was speaking to thin air. Roz had taken to her heels down the alleyway and the twenty-pound note, once again, fluttered to the ground.
