‘I’ll be fine. Two break-ins in a day would be unlucky even by my standards.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘At least you know Martin only wants to wave to you now. I’ll call tomorrow morning when I’ve got a carpenter.’
She stood inside the doorway and listened to his footsteps. Once he reached the pavement, they faded quickly and silence engulfed the house again. Did she feel comforted, knowing the truth about Martin? No. It wasn’t just the way they’d got in there that had left a bad taste in her mouth. It was unkind, she knew she should feel sympathy for him and she did, but at the same time, she admitted to herself, he’d made her uncomfortable. The juxtaposition of the childish mind with his ultra-adult body, the developed muscles – perhaps he’d started weight training as part of his physiotherapy and got hooked on it. She thought about his broad chest and ham-hock arms. With the damage to his leg, of course, that inward-turned foot, he wouldn’t be able to run easily.
The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Martin was the man in the window, yes, but he couldn’t be the one in the garden. That man had been slight and nimble: there had been nothing awkward about the way he’d moved.
Waves of cold ran down her back. Shit: the door. In daylight, with Cory here, the arrangement with the chair had felt secure enough, but not at night, alone in the house. She needed to make a real barricade, pile furniture in the doorway so that even if someone did try their luck – even if they got in – there’d be noise, advance warning . . .
But just as she reached the kitchen, the phone rang in the hallway overhead, startlingly loud. She turned then stopped. Was it a trick? Was someone watching the house? Had they seen Cory leave and now they were calling her away so that they could force the door, get in on the ground floor before she blocked it properly? She wavered, paralysed by indecision, then pulled herself together: was he a mind-reader, this guy? Had he known about the barricade the moment she’d had the idea? For God’s sake.
Before the phone could ring out, she ran upstairs and picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’ She tried to sound calm but the anxiety in her voice was unmistakable.
‘Rowan?’ said a man’s voice.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Adam.’
Twenty-eight
At the northern point of the narrow island made by the two prongs of Magdalen Street stood the Martyrs’ Memorial. It was a monstrosity, spitefully Gothic, an intensely carved spike blackened with soot that, whenever she saw it, put Rowan in mind of the charred, skyward-pointing finger-bone of one of the men it commemorated, burned at the stake around the corner on Broad Street.
A flight of shallow steps, incongruously plain, had been built around the base. She crossed the road and climbed them. She was four or five feet above the pavement, if that, but it was enough to give her a view across Magdalen Street and in through the lit windows of the Randolph Hotel’s formal dining room.
At the end of her first year at university, when she called to tell him she’d got a First in the Mods exams, her father, just back from an extended stint in South America, said he wanted to take her out to lunch. To celebrate, he’d said.
Punctuality had always been a big deal with him and when she’d arrived, stepping in out of the dazzling sunshine from a pavement already starting to radiate the day’s heat, he was waiting for her at the desk in the lamp-lit reception area, the heavy staircases climbing away Escher-style over his head, illuminated – as much as they ever were – by pointed Gothic windows. The carpet was blood red, enhancing her impression of finding herself suddenly, Jonah-like, on the inside of an enormous beast.
‘You look well.’ He’d pressed his cheek briefly against hers. ‘I expected you to be white as a sheet after all that studying.’
‘I finished three weeks ago,’ she said and, hearing how he might infer criticism or resentment, quickly added, ‘The weather’s been great so I’ve spent a lot of time outside since.’