Читать книгу The Manhattan Puzzle - Laurence O’Bryan - Страница 8

Isabel closed her eyes, willing herself to be calm.

They were going to have a wonderful weekend. Romantically speaking, the Franklin Roosevelt Hotel was about a million miles from Fulham, from working every spare minute helping people to find endless lost or deleted files on their computers and making sure Alek was dressed and fed and not wasting his life watching too much TV. And looking after Sean too, when he came home. She listened, and willed a faint noise to be the front door opening. She waited for him to bound up the stairs, for her life to go back to normal.

But all she heard was the freezing wind battering at the window.

And now the house felt different, as if she was in it for the first time again, even though the cream Edwardian armchair was in its corner, and the white rug – the snow carpet as Sean called it – was still in front of the dressing table, a little askew, the way she liked it.

Sean’s things stood out as she looked around. His books in a tottering pile under his bedside table. His watch collection in a row on top of it. His navy Macy’s dressing gown hanging on the back of the door. His silver pen on the dressing table.

She went to check Alek. ‘I love you,’ he’d whispered sleepily, looking up at her the evening before as she’d tucked him in. Alek, named after Sean’s friend who’d died in Istanbul, could make fuzzy feelings glow inside her just by smiling.

That morning he looked like a sleeping waif, his hair all over the place, his skin shining, ruddy from the warmth of his duvet.

She should have told Sean to skip the stupid merger celebrations.

She stared out at the back garden, shivering at the thought of how cold it had to be out there.

In the far corner there were remnants of the inch of snow that had fallen the day before. This winter was shaping up to be the worst in the city in years.

It reminded her of Decembers in Somerset, before her mother died. She shook her head. Those days were long gone. And anyway, they used to get proper snow then, a winter coat of it, not a thin veil like they did in London. At the bottom of the garden there was a snowdrift piled up against the six-foot-high red-brick wall at the back.

Something tightened around her, as if a ghost had hugged her.

Yesterday, as the afternoon light had been fading, she’d been out in the garden. In the corner, by the back wall, there’d been a mound of pristine whiteness. Now it all looked trampled.

Her nose twitched. That faint lemony smell was in the air again.

She glanced around the kitchen for anything else out of place.

Then she remembered the creak that had woken her during the night, the feeling that there’d been someone in the house.

She hadn’t experienced anything like that in a long time.

The buzz of the landline sent her flying to the phone. She held it to her ear, ready to scream at Sean as soon as he opened his mouth.

There was no one else she could think of who’d be ringing at this time.