A knock at my door woke me from my dream. My confused brain couldn’t work out whether it was part of it or not. By the time it had realised it wasn’t, I was absolutely exhausted.
‘Well, lazy bones, I gave up waiting for you to make the coffee.’ Marvin wandered in with a cup of black coffee for me in one hand and a pint of milk in the other with Henry Halliday’s probably very expensive sugar bowl and its silver spoon balanced precariously on top. ‘That Elaine at the shop’s a funny old bird, isn’t she? I haven’t been there often, and when I have I think it must have been her husband serving me. I went to get this.’ He jiggled the milk, nearly tipping the sugar bowl onto the floor. ‘I half expected her to say “This is a local shop, for local people!” and not let me buy anything.’
‘Do you mean Eleanor?’ I asked, wondering if Eleanor had a sister I hadn’t met.
‘That’s the one! I grabbed this and paid before I found myself locked in and forced to watch her feeding a piglet or something.’ He shuddered dramatically. I reached out and rescued the sugar bowl and put it down on the bedside table before anything happened to it. ‘I didn’t know how you liked it.’ He put the coffee down and the milk next to it. ‘It might be a bit strong.’
‘Thanks, that’s very kind of you.’ I was glad my T-shirt was thick. It felt a bit … not uncomfortable exactly, but there was something rather bizarre about sitting in a bed I wasn’t supposed to be in, while a man I’d only met a few hours ago brought me coffee. Alex would have had a fit. Huh! I pushed that thought aside as it was his fault I was here in the first place, and he had no business having an opinion on anything I did any more. In fact, I wished he could see me here. ‘That would show him,’ one half of my brain said, while the other half asked, ‘Show him what, exactly?’
‘Anyway, I’ll leave you to it.’ Marvin turned to go, got as far as the door, and said, ‘I suppose you have to go to work today?’
‘Yes, of course I do, and actually,’ I glanced at the little clock on the bedside table, ‘I’ll need to get going soon.’ Would he take the hint and leave me to go and have a quick shower?
‘Well, do you have any plans for tomorrow, Beth? You know,’ he grinned, ‘other than pretending not to be here?’
‘Well …’ I was embarrassed to admit my not very exciting plans for a Saturday. ‘It’s my weekend to be on duty, although it’s not busy. I have a few cats to feed at some point during the morning – their owners are all away, so there’s no fixed time. And one dog to walk. Then I was thinking of going into Wintertown. I was going to call some of my friends from work and see if they wanted to meet up for lunch, then I thought I’d find out what was on at the cinema, and then pop in on the cats again in the evening and give the dog a walk on my way back here …’
‘So, apart from some hungry cats and a dog wanting a walk, there’s nothing that can’t wait until next weekend?
‘Well,’ I hedged, wondering what on earth he was going to suggest. The fact that he’d thought my recent bout of borrowing other people’s sofas while they were away was ballsy and worthy of some sort of admiration was a rather worrying barometer of what he might think was a fun way to spend a Saturday. He wasn’t going to ask me to don a Margaret Thatcher mask and help him rob a building society, was he? Or break into a medical laboratory to rescue a load of test rats?
‘How do you fancy the Isle of Wight?’ His question came as something of an anti-climax. Unless he’d been in the middle of organising a jail break from Parkhurst and just waiting for the perfect accomplice to come along, which happened to be me.
‘What?’ He had just asked me to go to the Isle of Wight with him, hadn’t he?
‘I need to take Lizzy over to Yarmouth for a few hours. Got some bits and pieces to do there. I was going to do it today, but tomorrow would do just as well. We could have a nice lunch, go for a walk, take a look around …’
‘Isn’t it a bit cold for sightseeing?’ I asked, hoping I didn’t sound ungrateful for the offer. And anyway, this Lizzy might not want me tagging along.
‘Cold?’ he laughed good naturedly. ‘Don’t you walk dogs in all weathers for a living? You don’t tell the poor little mutts they have to hold it in because it’s snowing out and you don’t want to get your little tootsies cold, do you?’
‘Well, that’s true,’ I laughed. He had a point – when a dog had to go, it had to go, there was no waiting until the weather got a bit nicer. I’d walked my charges round parts of the New Forest through howling gales, rain, snow, and sleet. I’d slid along icy paths while they’d sniffed at frost-covered trees, waiting for them to do their business. The only type of weather that got in the way of our walks was thunder and lightning. If anybody who did my job wasn’t quickly toughened up to a bit of cold then nobody was.
‘So?’ he chivvied me. ‘We’ll go tomorrow, then? We can have a bit of toast or something for breakfast, feed your cats and give the mutt a quick walk on the way, and be there by lunchtime. Then we can do the same on the way back. What do you think?’