Читать книгу The Detection Collection - Филлис Дороти Джеймс, Филлис Джеймс, Simon Brett - Страница 10

Eileen had done everything she could to change his mind. ‘Michael,’ she’d said, ‘anywhere else, okay? Anywhere but there.’ Michael Sandler, not his real name, not even close. But in the end she’d caved in, just as he’d known she would.

Thirty-three by not so many months and going nowhere; thirty-three, though she was still only owning up to twenty-nine.

When he’d met her she’d been a receptionist in a car showroom south of Sheffield, something she’d blagged her way into and held down for the best part of a year; fine until the head of sales had somehow got a whiff of her past employment, some potential customer who’d seen her stripping somewhere most likely, and tried wedging his podgy fingers up inside her skirt one evening late. Eileen had kneed him in the balls, then hit him with a solid glass ashtray high across the face, close to taking out an eye. She hadn’t bothered waiting for her cards. She’d been managing a sauna, close to the city centre, when Michael had found her. In at seven, check the towels, make sure the plastic had been wiped down, bottles of massage oil topped up, the come washed from the walls; once the girls arrived, first shift, ready to catch the early punters on their way to work, she’d examine their hands, ensure they’d trimmed their nails; uniforms they took home and washed, brought back next day clean as new or she’d want the reason why.

‘Come on,’ Michael had said, ‘fifty minutes down the motorway. It’s not as if I’m asking you to fucking emigrate.’ Emigration might have been easier. She had memories of Nottingham and none of them good. But then, looking round at the tatty travel posters and old centrefolds from Playboy on the walls, he’d added, ‘What? Worried a move might be bad for your career?’

It hadn’t taken her long to pack her bags, turn over the keys. Fifty minutes on the motorway. A house like a barn, a palace, real paintings on the walls.

When he came home earlier than usual one afternoon and found her sitting in the kitchen, polishing the silver while she watched Richard and Judy on the small TV, he snatched the cloth from her hands. ‘There’s people paid for that, not you.’

‘It’s something to do.’

His nostrils flared. ‘You want something to do, go down the gym. Go shopping. Read a fucking book.’

‘Why?’ she asked him later that night, turning towards him in their bed.

‘Why what?’

‘Why am I here?’

He didn’t look at her. ‘Because I’m tired of living on my own.’

He was sitting propped up against pillows, bare-chested, thumbing through the pages of a climbing magazine. Eileen couldn’t imagine why: anything more than two flights of stairs and he took the lift.

The light from the lamp on his bedside table shone a filter of washed-out blue across the patterned quilt and the curtains stirred in the breeze from the opened window. One thing he insisted on, one of many, sleeping with at least one of the windows open.

‘That’s not enough,’ Eileen said.

‘What?’

‘Enough of a reason for me being here. You being tired of living alone.’