Digging Deeper (31 page)

Waiting unopened in an empty house.

They were all at work. So she could go over there, break in and get it back. Why bother? He already hated her. How much worse could the letter make things? A lot worse for her. She didn’t want him to know how she felt. That was the whole bloody point of her box. It was the way Flick opened and emptied her heart but not for others to see.

She couldn’t let herself be hurt anymore.

Couldn’t stand it.

She’d break into the house.

What was she thinking?

She couldn’t do that.

Then she thought about what she’d said in the letter.

Yes, I can.

Celia headed straight for him, her face bright red with excitement.

“Alexander, Alexander!”

Beck sat in the entrance to the tent, sweltering in the heat, writing furiously in his notebook. He was in such a bad mood no one dare speak to him. Any little thing that had gone wrong he’d treated as a major catastrophe. He’d snapped at Isobel when she’d made a joke about him misidentifying an artifact. He’d told Dina she was an idiot and she’d burst into tears. He’d poured scorn on Matt after he’d announced he also had phobias about frogs and flip-flops. He’d decided to keep out of everyone’s way and write a new murder scene—a stripper strangled with her rubber snake.

“Alexander? There you are. Such wonderful news.”

He’d been dreaming since Thursday night? Maybe it was only Wednesday. He’d never laid eyes on Felicity Knyfe? He was in Italy instead of Rich? Beck waited. Celia would get there in the end. If she didn’t, he doubted he’d have missed much. On the other hand, if she didn’t shut up soon he might have to throttle her. If he’d had a rubber snake handy, he might have tried.

“I’ve had the most fascinating telephone conversation. It’s such thrilling news I had to rush straight down here to tell you. Yorkshire Television is coming to do a news item about the dig.”

She waited—presumably for him to scream in excitement. He didn’t. Sadly it didn’t put her off.

“They want to interview me too. I’ve always thought I’d be a natural on the screen. Good bone structure, you see. I’d have been a perfect partner for that good-looking chat show chappie, had he not married the walrus in a suit. Anyway, they’re coming this afternoon and you, of course, have the starring role.”

“Isobel can do it.”

“Isobel can do what?” Isobel asked as she came back to the tent carrying a tray of dirt-encrusted pottery.

“A TV interview,” Beck said.

“Not in my job description. You’re in charge, you’re the boss, as you so clearly let us know earlier today. You can bloody well do it.”

Beck chewed at his lip. He started to speak and Isobel glared at him.

“Don’t bother trying. I’m not going to do it,” she said.

“Somebody has to.” Celia stared at him.

Beck clenched his fists. If he hadn’t lost his temper with Isobel, she’d have done the interview, now he’d have to.

“They’ll be here around four thirty. Perhaps you ought to go and change Alexander, darling,” Celia suggested, looking in a pointed way at the rings of perspiration on his shirt. “And maybe have a shave?”

———

Flick parked well away from Hartington Hall and crept through several fields in order to reach Giles’ house unseen. On the way she snapped a branch from a small tree and stripped off the side shoots and leaves as she walked. She was chewing a whole packet of bubble gum, watermelon flavor, because she was going to copy an idea she’d seen on TV. Stick the gum to the end of a stick, push it through the letterbox and poke it down to the pile of post. Letter gets stuck. Pull it up. Run away. Couldn’t fail.

Except when she got there, the letterbox sat at ground level. Sprawled flat on her stomach, her eye pressed against the opening, Flick could see nothing on the mat. On the other hand, peering through the frosted glass in the top half of the door, something on the hall table looked like her letter. She stuck her arm through the letter box and tried poking the stick up toward the table but couldn’t reach far enough.

Flick walked round the house. No windows open at ground level. The good news—one small first floor window at the back stood ajar. The bad news—a shiny new box on the front of the house said Adamson Alarms. Disappointing but not disastrous. If it was like the security system at Timble, the motion detectors would be confined to the downstairs rooms and maybe one on the landing with nothing in the bedrooms. She could at least get inside upstairs without setting bells ringing. In theory.

A dangerous assumption. It was quite possible Giles had gold bullion on the upper floor and the alarm would sound as soon as she pushed open the window. Flick paused to think for a moment or two. How important was this? Very. What if she got into trouble with the police? Since she was already on their naughty list that hardly seemed relevant.

Before too much thinking talked her out of it, Flick put the stick between her teeth and climbed on top of the wheelie bin. From there she scrambled onto the flat roof of the kitchen extension. The window frame was reachable with one hand but it would leave her dangling while she brought over the other hand. It would still be difficult to pull herself up, despite her legendary skills as Cat Woman. Fortunately the window opened away from her so she could knock it back before she leaned across. If the alarm went off, she’d run. If she fell, she’d run, barring the intervention of a broken ankle or death.

Flick reached over with the stick and pushed the window ajar. She’d expected the stick to stay in her hand so she almost fell when it stuck to the window. The bubble gum idea had worked, sort of. The stick now hung down from the glass like some defunct wind chime. Flick grabbed the frame with one hand, letting herself swing out so she could reach up with her other hand. So far so good. She hung onto the wooden sill with both hands but when she tried to pull herself up, she couldn’t.

The words of the letter jumped into her head. Pig-headed bastard who couldn’t see the truth if it was tattooed on his penis. She scrabbled against the wall with her trainers and tried to walk herself up. To her intense relief, her toes caught on the brickwork and she rose about a foot. It was far enough for her to get her elbows on to the window ledge. She panted heavily, more from fear than exertion.

Wedging one arm inside, Flick grabbed the internal sill with her fingers and forced her shoulders through the gap. For a few moments she feared she’d get stuck with half of her inside and half out. This was too hard.

So it’s okay to leer at women’s breasts so long as you don’t know them? You pathetic, hypocritical wanker.

Flick flinched as she remembered what she’d written. She exhaled deeply to collapse her chest and little by little squirmed through. Only when she lay in a quivering heap on the bathroom floor did Flick realize she couldn’t go out the same way. No possibility of her swinging back to the roof and too far to drop.

New plan.

Rush downstairs, grab the letter, hope she could open the front door and then leg it. If she couldn’t open the door, she’d try the back door. If she couldn’t get out that way, she’d break the kitchen window with a saucepan. A plan, not a good plan but Flick didn’t waste more time.

She bolted downstairs, slipped on the last but one step and careered into the hall table, sending a vase of flowers crashing to the floor. As she scrambled through the debris she took in two things. One—what she’d thought was a letter was a flyer from “Clean as a Whistle” and two—the alarm was not deafening her. Her heartbeat returned to a thousand beats a minute.

Flick stopped moving and looked for the motion detector. It winked at her from the corner of the hall. So the system was either confused by her speed of light descent or not armed. She waited until she was breathing normally and then stood up. The little white box winked again. Armless. Flick groaned at her joke.

No sign of her letter in any room downstairs so she went up. She opened the door to Giles and Willow’s room and closed it. No need to look in there. Beck’s room was neat and tidy. The bed made. No socks or pants littering the floor. All his clothes hung in the wardrobe, his shoes lined up below. Anally retentive. Perhaps it had been a lucky escape after all. But he was reading a book by Mo Hayder and Flick loved her.

She grabbed Beck’s pillow and pressed her face into it, inhaling traces of soap, aftershave, er…sweat. She could have been in that bed with him. She could have lain there while his fingers touched every part of her. She wondered what he’d do if he came back and found her lying in his bed like Goldilocks, only naked. Would he eat her in a nice way? Flick thrust the pillow back in place and stared in disbelief as a glass of water toppled over the book.

“Fuck.”

She rushed to the bathroom and returned with armfuls of toilet tissue, leaving a trail behind her like the puppy in the advert. When she pulled open the top drawer of the bedside table to make sure no water had gone inside, she found her letter.

Flick picked it up with shaking hands. Sealed. She never sealed the special letters. Maybe Kirsten had. That’s what Flick would have done, if she’d been stupid enough to take a letter that didn’t belong to her and send it to someone who was never intended to receive it.

Beck hadn’t read it.

He wouldn’t have read it and then sealed it, would he? Her heartbeat slowed to five hundred beats a minute. Flick pushed the envelope in her back pocket, realizing she hadn’t thought this through. If the envelope had gone, he’d know who’d taken it. Did it matter? She’d prefer that he didn’t know.

So Flick did the only thing she could come up with and began to trash the room. Not really trash it, but she pulled the covers off the bed and pushed the mattress askew. She tossed Beck’s shoes around and threw his clothes on the floor. As a final flourish, she tilted each picture on the wall to imply she’d been checking for a safe. Flick thought that a clever touch.

If she left now it would look as though a burglar had come, been disturbed and left without taking anything. Except the letter. Umm. Not such a good plan. Better if she actually took something valuable. She tried to pluck up enough courage to steal. Maybe if she removed all his socks the police might think it was someone with a fetish.

A door slammed and Flick fled to the bathroom before she remembered she couldn’t get out that way. She looked through the window sporting the stick and bubblegum. It was still too far to drop, even though she was desperate. She didn’t really want to die, although she’d thought about it plenty since Friday night. So she got into the bath and hid behind the shower curtain.

———

Beck saw the flowers all over the floor and the broken vase and thought—burglar. He glided through the downstairs rooms, but there were no other signs of disturbance. The front door had been locked and the back door still secure. The alarm was off but he hadn’t been the last one to leave that morning. Reassured to see Giles’ laptop sitting on the kitchen table, Beck felt more confident he was alone in the house. Maybe the vase had tipped over when Giles or Willow had slammed the door. He cleaned up the mess before he went upstairs. He went straight to the bathroom and reached behind the curtain to turn on the shower. He’d let the water warm up while he picked out some clean clothes.

Flick yelped as the jet of freezing water hit her in the face.

Beck dragged back the curtain and stared at her in astonishment. “What the hell are you doing here?”

She leaped out of the bath before she got soaked. Beck turned off the shower.

“I asked you a question. How did you get in?” His eyes darkened.

Flick opened her mouth. Nothing came out so she shut it again.

“Well?” he demanded.

How could she still like him when he was so furious with her? His brow was furrowed in anger and he needed a shave but he looked so wonderful—only he hated her and if he’d read the letter he worse than hated her, whatever that was.

“The window,” she admitted.

“You didn’t tell me burgling was up there with drystone walling and stripping.”

“I’m a pole dancer, not a stripper and I haven’t taken anything that doesn’t belong to me,” she managed to say.

Flick wanted to go. She took a step toward the door.

Beck grabbed her arm. “Not so fast.”

She twisted to get out of his grasp and Beck grabbed the letter from her pocket.

“I thought you said you hadn’t taken anything that wasn’t yours?”

“It is mine.”

“That’s my name on the envelope.”

“But I didn’t write it for you. I wrote it for me. Kirsten took it from my room and brought it here without my knowing.”

“I’ll read it first.”

He’d not read it? “No,” Flick said. “Please, just give it back to me and let me go.”

“What don’t you want me to read? What have you said that you’re ashamed of?”

“It’s my letter. It’s personal.”

“I think when you decided it was acceptable to let men pay to see you dance naked, there was nothing personal left.” He waved the letter in front of her. “Begging me to forgive you?”

The look on his face made her feel as though she’d fallen on a sword.

“Want me to forget it ever happened?” Beck said. “Want me think about how I’d feel if the situation was reversed?”

“Fuck you,” Flick muttered, now knowing he’d read it.

“Yeah, I think you did.” Beck released her arm as though he’d been holding something dirty.

“So it’s okay to pay to watch, is it?” Flick asked. “How am I worse than you? It was a well-paid job. I needed money. End of story.”

“One thing you did get right. It is the end of the story. At least I got a shag out of it.”

Flick bit back her whimper, snatched the letter from his hand and fled. She thought he’d come after her but he didn’t. As she wrenched open the front door she heard him yell and guessed he’d seen his room.

———

By the time Flick got back to Timble she no longer felt hurt, she felt angry. Being angry always made her hungry. She needed energy to fuel her fury. She needed energy so she could kill sanctimonious Beck. She grabbed the tub of coconut ice cream from the freezer and wrenched off the lid, breaking her favorite nail. She swore and slammed a spoon into the ice cream. The spoon ricocheted across the table. Flick picked it up and forced it into the container, bending it in the process until it twisted so far, it snapped.