sensors to illuminate her exit route from the building, and successfully startled the security guard who she suspected must have managed to nod off against the cold marble wall of their smart reception area. She wondered how much they were paying him to sleep in the upright position.
The house was pitch-black and, jaw clenched to prevent her teeth chattering, she tiptoed up the stairs. As she stared into the dark of the bedroom she could see that the curtains were still open and the bed was still made. He wasn’t back yet. Her concern was only momentary as her tired memory saw fit to remind her of a message she’d picked up when they’d left the bar. He had another Christmas party.
Relieved that she wasn’t going to have to explain her late return, have sex or yet another conversation about nothing in particular, Rachel flicked the lights on. She cleansed and toned in record time and was dead to the world when her slightly smoked and pickled husband collapsed into bed beside her. The room was quiet as their breathing patterns united and they lay beside each other, together but apart.
chapter 3
George Michael and Andrew Ridgely were crooning away on the radio for the umpteenth December in a row. It never seemed to be their Last Christmas.
Lizzie was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the cacophony of mushy sentiment and sleigh bells to come to an end. It was Saturday morning. Five days before Christmas. No wonder so many people found the festive period depressing. The contrast with the high of the night before was almost too much. But the evening had surpassed all her expectations and now the weekend was just the same as it would have been whether or not she had kissed Matt. It just felt worse. And it certainly wasn’t being helped by the hangover that was starting to roll in from somewhere behind her ears.
Clare must have been watching her from a hidden camera, as she chose this moment to wander in breezily with a cup of tea. As if she had just happened to be passing with a spare mug. Lizzie wondered how many times she had walked past her door in the last couple of hours, desperate for some sign of life.
‘Morning. How was last night, then?’
‘Great…’
It was a unique delivery. Lizzie’s voice rumbled and squeaked into action and her first syllable came out grudgingly. Her tones were definitely less dulcet than normal, and she could only just hear what she was saying. She must have done more shouting in smoky atmospheres than she had realised. She coughed a couple of times in an attempt to restore her more familiar range before continuing.
‘…a lot of fun, actually…’ Her voice was a unique tribute to Eartha Kitt.
‘Really?’ Clare’s voice was laced with expectation. Eager for details, she perched on the edge of Lizzie’s bed just as her flatmate leapt to her feet, impressively grabbing her towel from the chair in one single movement.
‘I’ll fill you in after my shower.’
Lizzie surprised herself with the buoyancy of her tone, especially as her whole body was wobbling with the effort of reaching a vertical position. Heart beating faster than normal, she half-walked, half-skipped to the bathroom just as Macy Gray’s ‘Winter Wonderland’ replaced Wham. She didn’t know why she hadn’t just confessed there and then. For some totally irrational reason she was suddenly embarrassed at her behaviour.
She was standing on the bath mat drying herself when Clare knocked.
‘For goodness’ sake. You never get up after ten on a Saturday. I’ve been pacing up and down in the kitchen, cleaning surfaces, just waiting for you to wake up—and then you decide to have a shower first. Since when have you been so obsessive about your cleanliness? Unless, of course, you’re washing a man right out of your hair…’
Lizzie refused to be goaded into a confession. All in good time. She swapped her now damp towel for her bathrobe, and as she opened the door Clare practically fell into the room. She must have been leaning right up against it.
‘Well, I spoke to all the bosses without saying anything incriminating, boogied the night away with Ben and the team, drank lots of alcohol and then got stuck in the corner with Danny Vincent—possibly the most self-centred, boring, slimy drive-time DJ in the history of broadcasting. It was terrible. To make matters worse my head feels too heavy for my body, and right now I’m not sure whether I’m going to make it through the next few hours without being sick…’ Lizzie didn’t remember being exceptionally drunk at any stage of the evening, but her body was telling a different story. ‘Maybe I’m coming down with something…’
‘Poor you…’ Clare empathised fervently.
This was why, Lizzie mused, she was her best friend.
‘…but I think you’ll find it’s just a good old-fashioned hangover. So, did he make a move?’
Lizzie shuddered at the thought of those whiter than white teeth and tighter than tight trousers.
‘No. Thankfully, just when I thought there was no way out, I was rescued by a different bloke who had spotted my predicament from the bar.’
‘I see.’
Lizzie was being so pseudo-offhand that Clare now knew there was a whole lot more to this than she was being told at the moment. This was typical Ford behaviour. Whenever Lizzie had anything interesting to divulge she just tossed it in ever so casually at the point in the conversation where you had as good as stopped listening. Clare decided to play it cool for now. She knew from experience that this coy moment couldn’t last long. Lizzie meanwhile, freshly energised by her shower, was just burbling on.
‘Anyway, just the usual, really. Lots of drinking, chatting and dancing, and then I got a taxi home. It must have been nearly 2:00 a.m. when we finally found one.’
‘We!’ Clare picked up on the discrepancy at once. Ha! Lizzie had let her guard down. Such a careless mistake. Amateurish, in fact.
Lizzie could have kicked herself. It had all been going so well. But Clare was her best friend. She was entitled to the full story—and besides, it wouldn’t feel real if Clare didn’t know. Yet now she felt sheepish. Since her divorce Clare had been so generally anti-men that Lizzie felt somehow she had let the side down.
‘OK. So I shared a cab with him.’ Lizzie looked at her feet awkwardly.
‘With…’
The intensity of Clare’s stare was currently boring a hole in the side of her head. Lizzie felt sure that Clare would be able to bend spoons if she put her mind to it.
‘With Matt.’ Lizzie looked up. She was going to take this on the chin. She had nothing to be ashamed of. It wasn’t as if she met people every weekend. In fact she couldn’t remember the last time…
‘The guy who rescued you from the clutches of the delightful Danny?’ Clare grinned at her use of alliteration, just in case Lizzie had missed it.
‘Yeah.’
‘You shared a cab all the way to Putney? Does he live round here, then?’
Lizzie hesitated as she realised that she had no idea where he lived. She vaguely remembered Matt telling the driver where to go next, and she even remembered listening, but she had no recollection of what he’d said. Her mind had quite clearly been on other things.
‘I’m not sure…I got out of the cab first.’
‘So the taxi didn’t terminate here, then?’
Clare was now striding back and forth across the landing, casting a cursory glance at Lizzie from time to time. Lizzie attributed this increasingly irritating habit to the surfeit of dog-eared John Grisham novels on their bookshelves and one viewing too many of A Few Good Men, which seemed to be playing on a loop on one of their digital channels.
Clare adopted her best quasi legal tone.
‘Miss Ford, in the early hours of Saturday December twentieth did you, or did you not, bring a Mr Matt to 56 Oxford Road for a night of wild