night, or you could come to my house.’
‘Here,’ he said. ‘This is our place, it always was.’
She had known he would say that – it was how she felt, too. This was their place, their secret hiding place. Nobody else ever came there and almost no traffic ever went past. Only the trees knew where they were.
‘Give me your phone number, Johnny, in case I need to talk to you. I always have to wait for you to ring me.’
‘I don’t have a phone of my own.’ He wrote down the number of his magazine. ‘They’ll pass the message on to me; I call in every day. And this is my address. It’s just one room, though, a bedsit – until I sell this house I won’t have the money to get myself a place of my own. This is just a room in a run down old place divided into a dozen bedsits. I haven’t been there long and I can’t wait to get away.’
Huskily, she said, ‘You could come and live with me, Johnny – why not? I have plenty of room.’
He shook his head, his face obstinate. ‘I won’t live in your house, Annie, it has to be a place we share. As soon as I’ve sold this house we’ll find a place where we can be together.’
An idea hit her and her eyes lit up. ‘I could buy this house, Johnny!’ She wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. ‘I could buy fifty per cent of it – that way, you would have some money, and we would each own half the house!’
He flushed with excitement. ‘That never occurred to me! I’ve had it valued at a hundred and fifty thousand – could you raise seventy-five thousand to buy half of it? But it does need a lot of work, Annie. I know it’s fun camping out here now, but if we were to live in it we’d have to have the roof seen to, and a number of windows need to be replaced, not to mention that every single room needs to be redecorated. We wouldn’t be able to move in for months.’
‘It would be fun, though, seeing it come back to life!’ Her eyes were like candle-flames at the very thought of it. ‘We would have a wonderful time doing it, Johnny.’
He dropped her off at her home half an hour later; they were still talking eagerly about what they would do to the house once the legal problems had been sorted out. She kissed him goodnight reluctantly and got out, hurrying across the pavement to her house.
It was only as Johnny’s car accelerated away that Sean woke up. He had fallen asleep, his head on the wheel of his car, his mind almost at burn-out after weeks of stress. Blinking and red-eyed, he sat up, yawning, stretched his weary body, and looked around, dazed, until he remembered where he was and saw that the front door of Annie’s house was now open. Annie had let herself in, and was going through the usual routine of switching off the burglar alarm and putting on the light.
As she turned to close the front door, someone hurled himself at it, forcing it open again. She stumbled backwards with a cry of alarm, then saw it was only Sean.
‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ she breathlessly accused.
‘What am I doing? That’s the question I’ve been waiting to ask you! You were supposed to go to my place with Harriet – but you ran out on her.’
She bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry, Sean. I didn’t mean to vanish – Harriet went off to her office and I got bored waiting. When my driver turned up, I decided to go on ahead.’
‘You’d no right to do that! It isn’t the first time, is it? You keep vanishing without a word. Do you realise how worrying it is? You know how much rides on you – if anything happened to you, it could be the end of the whole series.’
She made a weary gesture and he snapped at her angrily.
‘Oh, you may not care about that, but what about the rest of us? Me and Harriet and the rest of the cast, and the camera crew, and everyone on the team? All those jobs would go whistling down the wind, just because you got bored waiting for Harriet!’
‘Oh, all right, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again – I just thought, while I was waiting I might as well visit my mother.’
His face was unrelenting. ‘I know you saw her, I rang the hospital – you only stayed ten minutes. Where have you been since?’
She looked away. ‘I was with Johnny.’ She walked away into the house and Sean shut the door and followed her.
‘I’ve been checking up on him.’
She looked round at him, stiffening, and his eyes bored into her.
‘Did you know he’d been in prison for eight years for attempted murder?’
He saw from her unsurprised face that she had known. ‘How dare you pry into my affairs!’ was all she said.
He laughed angrily. ‘How many affairs are you juggling at the moment?’
She almost slapped his face. Through clenched teeth she muttered, ‘That’s pretty cheap, isn’t it, Sean? Cheap and nasty. Why don’t you just mind your own business.’
Sean curtly said, ‘You are my business. The whole series depends on you. I need to be sure you aren’t in danger – and with this guy I’d say you were asking for trouble. Do you know what he did? He attacked a policeman who stopped his car. No reason at all – hit him so hard he was off work for a year. I take that very personally, Annie. It could have been me.’
She looked at him with slight shock, never having seen it in that light before. She should never forget that Sean had been a policeman.