The Nurse(27)

‘The apartment.’ As if he’d no idea what I was talking about.

‘The apartment,’ I repeated. ‘There was an advert on the noticeboard in my local Co-op. Near Bath United hospital.’

‘Right.’

One word followed by a long silence. I thought he’d hung up when I heard him take a deep breath.

‘When do you want to see it?’

‘I don’t want to waste your time.’ Or mine. If it wasn’t convenient for the bus, it wouldn’t be of interest regardless of how cheap it was. ‘It would help to know where it was.’

‘Bathford.’ He sounded surprised at my question. Maybe the advert had been written so long ago, he’d forgotten he hadn’t put the location.

It was so unexpected that for a second, I was unaccustomedly lost for words. Bathford!

‘Well,’ he said, waiting for an answer to his original question.

‘How about now?’ I said, checking my watch. The buses were regular, I could be there in an hour.

‘Now?’

‘Midday?’

‘Right.’ The surprise was even more obvious this time. He reeled off the address. ‘You know where it is?’

‘Yes, I’ll see you there at midday.’ The address he’d given me was on the High Street in Bathford. I’d walked the length of it many a time while I lived there. It was unlikely to have changed much over the years. The bungalow where I’d lived was further out of the village, down a lane off Prospect Place. I hadn’t been back since leaving. Our neighbour, Mrs Higgins, moved to Canada to live with her daughter after her husband died. She sent a Christmas card a few times; I didn’t send one back and hadn’t heard from her for a couple of years.

Bathford is three miles east of Bath. Once outside the horrendous traffic that clogged the city’s streets, the bus trundled along at speed. Twenty-five minutes later, I climbed out and looked around. It had been almost eight years, I expected to feel a twinge of nostalgia, to find everything looking familiar. Instead, it could have been anywhere.

Luckily for me, since the High Street was about a mile long, I reached the address I’d been given after a ten-minute walk. The houses of the village were predominately of Bath stone, the creamy gold stone that made even the most meagre house look pretty. This though, wasn’t meagre: Lily Cottage was a very pretty detached house. I found myself smiling at just how lovely it was, before frowning. Where was the small studio apartment?

Perhaps the advert had been misleading and it was a room in the house that was for rent. No matter how lovely, that wouldn’t suit me.

There didn’t seem any point in standing there, speculating, so I opened the small wrought-iron gate and walked the few steps to the front door. There was a doorbell and a brass knocker. I pressed the bell and when I couldn’t hear it pealing within, I added a couple of raps on the knocker for good measure.

The door was pulled open so quickly that I hadn’t time to take a step backward and found myself too close for comfort to the man who’d opened it. Although he must have been waiting for me to have responded so quickly, he looked startled as if I was an unexpected visitor and held the door as though he might need to slam it in my face.

‘I’m Lissa McColl,’ I hurried to say. ‘I spoke to you earlier. About the apartment.’

There was no change in his expression. Perhaps he wasn’t startled, and always looked oddly pop-eyed. He was a big man, tall and wide. When he remained silent and continued to stare, I shuffled back a step. ‘Is it possible to see it?’

‘Yes.’ He looked me over, not bothering to hide his assessment, his gaze taking in my chunky shoes, my unfashionably baggy trousers, the shirt that didn’t match. ‘You’d better step inside.’

Perhaps he sensed my hesitation and sudden unease, because he stood back, opening the door wide.

I didn’t know anything about this man, not even his name, and nobody knew I was there. I didn’t think I was a stupid woman, yet, instead of running away, I found myself drawn into the house.

The line of a poem I’d learned as a child popped into my head. ‘Will you walk into my parlour?’ said a spider to a fly.

It should have stopped me, should have had me turn on my heel and run away. Instead, I kept going until I was inside.





20





As soon as I was inside, the landlord pushed the door shut, folded his beefy arms, and looked down at me. ‘You’re little. It might suit.’

As a conversation opener, it failed dismally, my mind immediately flitting to coffins and graves, dark holes to hide a body. I might have turned and made an attempt to get away, if he hadn’t suddenly smiled. ‘It might suit you very well indeed.’ He opened the drawer of a hall table and took out a set of keys. ‘Come on, I’ll show it to you.’ But instead of leading the way further into the house or up the stairway behind, he waved to the door behind me. ‘We need to go out again.’

Outside, instead of heading to the garden gate, he turned left and disappeared round the corner of the house. Feeling slightly bewildered, I followed.

A garage was set slightly further back. A wide pathway separated it from the house, a gate at the far end leading, I assumed, to a rear garden. Expecting to be brought through this, I was surprised when he stopped at a doorway set into the side of the garage. ‘Here we are,’ he said, pushing the door open and standing back.