72

All the structural work had been completed now. The balconies were fixed, the windows had been reglazed, the kitchen and bathrooms were done, the front path had been relaid, the plumber had been, the electrician had been and the plasterers had been. All that was left now was the fun stuff. Painting, carpets, gardening, curtains.

Toby decided that some retail therapy was needed. He’d been in his bedroom pretty much continuously since Thursday evening, nursing the open sores of his self-orchestrated humiliation. He couldn’t bear even to peer through his curtains in case he saw her or, worse still, in case she saw him. But it was Monday morning now. She would be at work. The streets were safe. He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk to get out some cash and gasped.

The drawer was empty.

He pulled open the drawer above, hoping that in some bizarre lost moment, some forgotten corner of time, he’d decided to put it somewhere else.

Over the course of the next ten minutes he applied this theory to every single corner of his room, to every drawer, box, tray, corner, nook and cranny. He upturned everything, looked on top of everything, behind everything, underneath everything. It couldn’t be. It was impossible. Inconceivable. The fact of the nonexistence of £30,000 of his own money could be explained away by only one possibility. Someone he lived with had taken it. He sat on the edge of his ransacked bed and tried to make sense of things. It couldn’t be Con. He’d already promised to lend him all the money he needed. There was no reason for him to steal from him. Equally he was sure it couldn’t be Melinda. She just wasn’t the type. Air hostesses didn’t steal. That just left Joanne, a convicted burglar, an ex-drug addict about to be made homeless, or Ruby, a penniless, self-centred musician who’d left the house on Thursday morning without a forwarding address. It could be either of them. ‘Shit,’ he hissed at himself, ‘shit, shit, SHIT.’