hiding in their attic wasn’t exactly a mood-lifter.
Before I went for my bath I looked over and saw Anya staring at the television with the oddest expression on her face.
It was a hard, angry look; quite unlike her, really. She’d turned the telly over to some sort of dating reality thing and it was almost like she was glaring at the contestants currently making idiots of themselves.
‘Hey, you don’t have to watch that, you know,’ I said and for a second she snapped her gaze towards me in a way that made me stop in the doorway. Her face relaxed into a smile then and she gave a big yawn, arms above her head so the baggy sleeves of her favourite cardigan slipped down over her slim, freckled arms.
‘I like enjoying the discomfort of others,’ she said with a grin. ‘Plus, I get to be really judgemental.’
‘Well, I’ll leave you to your schadenfreude,’ I said as I went through to the bathroom.
‘You and your fancy book learnin’,’ she said, in a daft American accent, before throwing a cushion at me.
She went to bed before me and I thought she was asleep when I came in later. I was a natural night owl and Anya was the opposite. I slipped gingerly under the duvet in the dark, wincing as my knee stung and my lower back throbbed.
But she turned to me straight away, bringing her face close. I saw the gleam of her wide eyes and felt her warm breath on my face.
‘I love you,’ she whispered.
‘I love—’ I started to say but then her mouth was on mine, hard, mashing against my lips so that after a moment I tasted blood. Then she was pushing the duvet away and climbing onto me. She was ready and, despite all my aches, I was too. I slid inside her with a groan. She started to rock quickly, fists pressing onto my chest, so I could feel each of her knuckles grinding into my skin. Even though it hurt, it was so exhilarating and unexpected I found myself unable to hold back after a few moments.
‘Ah, sorry,’ I said sheepishly. She stopped moving and leaned down, kissing me tenderly on the bruised place on my lip.
‘No need to be,’ she said. ‘I was almost there before you came into the room. I was having a very hot dream.’ She paused. ‘And then there you were.’
‘I’m glad I was,’ I murmured and, as she turned round, I pulled her in towards me and let my sore, happy body melt into the bed.
The sound of smashing glass woke us at three am.
The first thing I did, half asleep, was flail an arm under the bed, still programmed to reach for that baseball bat of my youth. But as I properly woke up, I leaped out of bed so fast I cracked my knee – the other, non-injured one – against the bedpost. Swearing, I stumbled out of the room in the T-shirt and boxers I slept in, then crashed down the stairs, almost falling on the way.
Bursting into the living room, I couldn’t see anything unusual, so I walked into the kitchen, wincing at the cold tiles beneath my bare feet. The cold air, laced with rain, was the first thing I noticed, right before I almost stood on the broken glass.
The brick lay in the middle of the kitchen floor. Standard red house brick. My first, strange, thought, was that would have come from the house a few doors down that was currently having a loft conversion. But who would do this?
‘Oh my God.’ Anya was behind me now, her face ashen.
‘Right?’ I said, my jaw tight. I was suddenly picturing Lee Bennett and his smirking face. As if on cue, my grazed hand throbbed and I discovered I was clenching my fist.
Could it really be him? Surely not?
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m calling the police.’
‘Wait!’ said Anya, grabbing hold of my arm. Her hand felt hot against my goose-pimpled skin. ‘And tell them what?’ she added, her face creased with disapproval. ‘That a bunch of kids threw something through the window? What do you expect them to do? Send in Special Branch?’
‘What if—’ then I bit off the end of the sentence.
‘What?’
I felt stupid even saying it out loud.
‘What if it’s that Bennett bloke from school?’ I said, with heat. ‘What if he tried to knock me off my bike too?’
She gave me a strange look. Obviously thought I was being ridiculous. I was probably being ridiculous.
‘Ell,’ she said, ‘if it’s him, then I think you’d need more evidence before you start accusing him.’ I was surprised, having expected her to dismiss my paranoia.
She went on, gently placing her hand on my arm. ‘But look, you know how stretched the police are round here. You’ve seen the same reports I have. Let’s just assume it was kids and get the window fixed, yeah?’
I hesitated, knowing she was right. The local paper had been covered in screaming headlines a few weeks back about the low rates of arrest for robberies around here. Apparently, the police had almost stopped investigating minor crimes like that. This wasn’t even that serious. I had no real reason to think Bennett was behind this anyway. I was probably putting two and two together and coming up with a paranoid five.
Anya left the room, coming back in with my trainers in her hand. She had her sandals on now.
‘Well, we can sit here and wait with the wind blowing through the window, or we can clear it up and sort out a glazier.’
We got to work.
The glazier took hours to come. I insisted Anya go back to bed, which she reluctantly agreed to, then set up camp in the living room, with my iPad on my lap and the sound turned low.
It took no time to find Lee Bennett’s Facebook page. It was pretty much exactly what I’d expected. Selfies with his shirt off; posts with such gems of wisdom as ‘Mourinho really has fucking lost it now. Time to go’ and a couple of pictures with Tyler in them, mainly at football matches. He hadn’t made much effort over his settings, so I delved back a bit until I found some with a woman in them.
She was blonde, and delicate-looking with a pointy chin and large eyes. She and Bennett together, clearly on holiday, with tall cocktails, tans, and lots of flesh on show. Only one with her and Tyler, where he was sitting on her lap on a train and clearly reaching for something out of shot.
The thought of anything happening to Anya caused a tight feeling in my throat, not unlike the sensation just before you throw up. What if, for whatever reason, he was going after me and putting my wife in danger? He thought he knew me. Maybe he was incubating some perceived slight based on mistaken identity.
I must have dozed a little because when my phone started to ring from the floor next to me, I leapt from the chair in shock. It was the glazier, telling me he was outside.
It was almost four thirty am when he was finally done. He was a taciturn Eastern European man, who had barely said a word the whole time he was here. I presumed he was usually called out to deal with robberies and the aftermath of fights in bars. I was a bit surprised to discover that all he was prepared to do was board up the thing. Seems you had to pay all over again to have the actual window replaced, at a sensible hour.
He was probably wondering why we didn’t patch the window up ourselves, just for the night. But there was no way we could have gone back to sleep; it wasn’t a huge window, but it was quite big enough to allow someone in who had any kind of malign intent. I had, after all, hoped my days of sleeping with a baseball bat next to the bed were long gone.
Anyway, I didn’t imagine the man was complaining, judging by the eye-watering amount of money he charged before I was wearily able to send him on his way.
In the bedroom, Anya was sleeping deeply and making small, endearing sounds through