Deadheads

'Yes me too.' He laughed boyishly, looking about twenty. 'I thought it might all fall through and I wanted to spare you that. But when it didn't, I wished I'd had you with me. I missed you.'

'Did you?'

She turned her face towards him. He kissed her gently.

'Yes. I did.'

He kissed her again. Suddenly there was no doubt about the passion there.

'Patrick!' she said with the instinctive alarm of one not accustomed to such things in such locations at such times.

'Diana's out, isn't she?' he murmured. 'And you're not expecting anyone, are you?'

Oh Christ! The police! she remembered. But she didn't say. Twelve o'clock, they had said they would call. She squinted round Patrick's head at the ormolu clock on the mantelshelf. It was just after eleven. Surely the police wouldn't be early?

But who cared? Some risks were made to be taken. She drew Patrick down towards her and embraced him with arms and mouth and long slender legs.

Their love-making was short and savage as if they had both been simmering just below the boiling point through many hours of foreplay. Drained, they lay on the cool woodblock floor, clinging to each other like spent swimmers.

Time for talk without fear or reproach. Hardly words. More like the murmur of the sea.

'You should have told me.'

'Yes. But you always seemed so calm, so self-sufficient, I didn't feel able to involve you in my hopes and perhaps disappointments.'

'That's how I seemed? Calm and self-contained?'

'Yes. Or perhaps I feared, which would be worse, that my hopes wouldn't involve you. It was a project so dear to me, I couldn't have borne for it not to be dear to you also.'

'Oh Patrick.'

She drew him even closer. Above their naked bodies the clock ticked on.

'Not that it matters,' she said, after a while, 'but will there be much money in all this?'

He drew back a little and smiled at her and said, 'Some. Not a fortune. But more to come, perhaps. At least it means I'll be able to make my peace with Dick Elgood.'

'Elgood?' she sounded more alarmed than she intended, less than she felt.

'Yes. It's been bothering me, all this unpleasantness about the financial directorship. Dick clearly doesn't want me. And I've never been all that keen, but it seemed silly to miss a chance. But now, well, at least I know where I am at the moment. I can do the job I've got now standing on my head. There'll be minimum interference with the books and the roses.'

'You mean you'll withdraw?'

'That's what I mean.'

'Oh, I'm so glad.'

And in her gladness and her relief that it was all over she found herself launched on a description of Elgood's allegations and the police investigations. But she had not gone far before a slight tension in the naked body in her arms triggered off an awareness of her own foolishness. Nothing good lay at the end of this road. Desperately she looked for an escape route. Ingeniously she found one, chattering on like the idle female gossip she hoped to be taken for.

'I got all this from Ellie Pascoe, you know, the policeman's wife I've been telling you about. We almost fell out about it, it was so absurd, well, I think she thought so too, that's why she told me.'

'Mrs Pascoe told you about her husband's work? Not very discreet. Or loyal. And you didn't tell me.'

He sounded not suspicious but surprised. And speculative.

'I didn't know what to say. Oh Patrick, we've both been stupidly reticent, haven't we?'

She kissed him passionately and caressed him intimately. It was the right response. She felt the tension in his mind relax as the stiffness between his legs returned.

And then as he rolled her over on her back once more her eyes caught the clock face. It was ten to twelve.

'Oh hurry, hurry, hurry!' she cried.

He hurried. As they got dressed she breathlessly explained about the police visit and its reasons.

'You mean all that haste wasn't passion?' he said.

'Yes, of course, most of it, I mean, I'm sorry,' she began. But when she looked at him, he was smiling.

In the event the police were ten minutes late, and though Daphne still felt certain that the evidence of the recent activity in the lounge was clearly there for the professional eye to see, she found she did not give a damn.

'Hello,' she said to Peter Pascoe. 'I've been looking forward to seeing you in the flesh.'

Did he grin faintly and look at the three buttons she had left undone on her blouse as he said, 'Me too.'