get me so that it would all be over.'
Ben took another flannel and draped it over his face. I heard a sort of murmuring from under it.
'I'm sorry,' I said.
He pulled the flannel away. 'What?' he asked.
'About all this. It's bad enough for me, but I can't do anything about that. I'm sorry that you've been landed with it as well. Maybe we met at the wrong time.'
'You shouldn't say sorry.'
'I should. And I'm also saying it in advance.'
'What do you mean?'
'Because I'm about to ask you for a favour.'
'Go on, then.'
'I was going to ask you to go to Jo's flat and get my stuff for me.' Ben looked so unhappy at this that I immediately rushed into a desperate explanation. 'Because I obviously can't go there myself. I can't go there ever again. He might be watching from outside. But you'll be fine. He's only looking for me. He might assume that he's got the wrong flat.'
'Right,' said Ben, looking even less happy. 'Yes, of course, I'll do it.'
The atmosphere had definitely changed. We didn't talk for a bit.
'Are you all right?' I said, eager to break the silence.
'This wasn't what I planned,' he said.
'I know, I know, it would have been easier for you if you'd met somebody who wasn't involved in something like this.'
'That's not what I meant. I was talking about here, in this bath, now. I was planning to help wash you. I would have rubbed you on your shoulders, and then down over your breasts. We would have gone to bed. But now, instead of that, I'm going to get dressed and go out and probably get murdered myself. Or he might torture me to find out where you are.'
'You don't have to, if you don't want to,' I said.
In the end, Ben phoned up a friend of his, Scud. 'Not his real name,' Ben said. Scud worked with computer graphics, but in his spare time, he played club rugby. 'He's fifteen stone and a lunatic,' Ben said. He managed to persuade Scud to come over straight away. 'Yes, now,' I heard him say on the phone. Scud arrived fifteen minutes later and he was, as advertised, massive. He looked amused to meet a new woman wearing Ben's dressing-gown and he was evidently puzzled by the pared-down version of my story that Ben gave him. But he shrugged and said it would be no problem.
I gave a brief description of where my stuff was.
'And when you leave, make sure you're not followed,' I said.
Scud looked at me, apparently alarmed. I'd forgotten that much of what I said made me sound insane to unprepared normal people. Ben pulled a face.
'You said there'd be no problem.'
'Not for you. But he might think you're connected with me and follow you. Just keep an eye out.'
The two men exchanged glances.
Ben was back in less than an hour, an hour in which I drank a tumbler of whisky and flicked through Ben's glossy magazines. He came in looking as if he had been Christmas shopping. He dumped the bulging carrier-bags on the floor. 'I owe Scud one,' he said.
'What for? Did anything happen?'
'I owe Scud one for dragging him away from his wife and children in order to rummage around the flat of someone he doesn't know. And then possibly involving him in criminal activity.'
'What do you mean?'
'Jo's front door was open. It had been forced.'
'But there's a chain.'
'It must have been kicked in. The whole frame was broken.'
'Jesus.'
'Yes. We weren't sure what to do. It's probably not legal to go round a crime scene helping yourself to things that don't belong to you.'
'He broke in,' I murmured, almost to myself.
'I think I've got everything,' Ben said. 'Clothes, mainly. Some of the odds and ends you asked for. Your pieces of paper, stuff from the bathroom shelf. I can't guarantee that some of this isn't Jo's. In fact, the more I think about this the less legal it seems.'
'Great,' I said, hardly listening.
'And Jo's photograph, like you asked.'
He put it on the table and we both looked at it for a moment.
'I did want to make one comment,' he said. 'In fact, more than one. I assume that you've got nowhere to stay, so I don't want to make a big deal of this or presume on anything but you're welcome to stay here. As long as you want to, basically.'
I couldn't stop myself. I gave him a hug. 'Are you sure?' I said. 'You don't have to, just because I'm in this helpless state. I'm sure I could find somewhere.'
'Don't be stupid.'
'I don't want to be like this dismal, needy woman forcing herself on a man who's too polite to kick her out.'
He put up his hand. 'Stop,' he said. 'Shut up. We should find somewhere to put all this stuff.'
We started going through this odd assortment that I'd gathered over the past days.
'The other thing I wanted to say,' he said, while sorting through my underwear, 'at least I wanted to raise it as a possibility, is that this was just a normal break-in.'
'What about the person who rang work pretending to be my dad?'
'I don't know. There might have been a misunderstanding.
Perhaps what you heard at the door was someone breaking in. They rang the door bell, as they do, to check that no one's home. You didn't answer, in your normal style. The villain assumes nobody's home and breaks in. There's so much of that happening in the area. Just a few days ago, these friends of mine round the corner heard a huge crash in the middle of the night. They went downstairs and exactly the same thing had happened. Someone had kicked the door open and grabbed a bag and a camera. It might have been the same thing.'
'Was anything taken?'
'I couldn't tell. A couple of drawers were open. The VCR was still there.'
'Hmmm,' I said sceptic ally
Ben looked thoughtful for a moment. He seemed to be thinking so hard that it hurt. 'What do you want for supper?' he said.
I liked that. I liked that so much. In the middle of all I was going through, that question as if we were a couple living together. Which we were, as it turned out.
'Anything,' I said. 'Anything you've got that's left over. But, look, Jo's vanished, someone got my address from Carol under false pretences, there's a knock at the door. I scoot out of the back and he breaks in. It's too much.'
Ben stood like a statue, except it was a statue holding a pair of my knickers. I snatched them from him.
'Tomorrow I'll call the police,' he said. 'Jo's parents should be back tonight. We'll speak to them and then, unless they've got good news, we've got to report her missing.'
I put my hand on his. 'Thanks, Ben.'
'Is that whisky?' he asked, catching sight of my glass. Well, his glass, strictly speaking.
'Yes, sorry,' I said. 'I was in urgent need of something.'
He picked up the glass and took a gulp from it. I saw his hand was shaking.
'Are you all right?' I said.
He shook his head. 'You know you said that you thought we might have met at the wrong time? I hope that's wrong. Things feel right in all sorts of ways. But I'm afraid that I'm not really the person who's going to be able to fight anybody -off, take a bullet for you. I think I'm afraid, to be honest.'
