The Big Five O. Jane Wenham-Jones
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Название: The Big Five O
Автор: Jane Wenham-Jones
Издательство: HarperCollins
isbn: 9780008278687
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Amy had pouted. ‘Granny said she never minds helping – if only you were a bit more grateful. She said when she gave you the deposit for this house you barely said thank you.’
‘Nice of her to be so supportive,’ Roz had said tartly as Amy had banged out of the room.
One of the things Roz resented most about her mother was her total lack of loyalty and her indiscretion. When Amy went on her twice-annual visit to Carshalton to stay beneath her parent’s well-appointed mock Tudor beams, she came back with a new set of clothes and a fresh tale of Roz’s ingratitude.
‘She wanted me to abort you,’ Roz felt like saying. ‘Because they thought a single woman in her thirties getting accidentally pregnant was too low-rent for words.’
Instead she tried to explain the difficult nature of her interactions with the woman to whom her status at the Rotary and Golf Clubs was everything and who had never forgiven Roz for being the one two hours away when her sainted brother had emigrated, when it would have suited her so much better had the geography been reversed.
Roz used words like ‘beholden’ – not wanting to be – and ‘self-sufficient’, something she’d hysterically promised herself in the hospital when her mother had brought a shawl and a stiffly-signed cheque for a thousand pounds and her father hadn’t been allowed to come at all. But Amy barely listened, increasingly resentful of Roz’s low-income and her own fatherless state that she blamed for money being so tight.
‘Terrible teens,’ Roz added to Charlotte now.
‘Nightmare, I remember it well.’ Charlotte looked at Roz harder. ‘Everything else OK?’
Roz nodded, her stomach churning.
‘So I’ll text you about getting together so I can show you round both places and give you the keys, and we’ll talk dosh. I was thinking an hourly rate.’ Charlotte hugged her. ‘I’ll pay well as it’s you, love.’
Roz squeezed her back, touched and terrified. The extra earnings would be good but she needed the job for more than that. For a moment she felt lightheaded as bile rose in her throat. Charlotte was the best sort of friend. Roz dug her nails into her palms to stop her feelings of panic overtaking her. Charlotte trusted her to complete exactly what was required. What would Charlotte say if she knew what Roz was really going to do …
‘I really don’t know what I’m going to do.’
Charlotte sat at her super-sized kitchen table, hands clasped around her empty mug, and stared at the piece of paper she’d been looking at for at least an hour before Fay had arrived.
Fay picked it up. ‘In itself it’s not exactly conclusive, is it?’ she said, raising her precision-plucked eyebrows.
‘There was the message as well.’
‘And are you sure that was the same number?’ Fay enquired.
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I think it had seven, nine, five in it.’
‘So do half the mobile numbers in the country.’
Charlotte sighed. ‘I called you because you have an analytical mind and will take a practical approach. What shall I do?’ Charlotte said again, a plaintive note in her voice. ‘It doesn’t feel right.’
Fay ran a hand thoughtfully through her short dark hair and pulled her chair a little closer to the table. ‘OK. Let’s go through it again. Roger was looking shifty and then he got a phone message …’
Charlotte twisted the mug around again. ‘No, he wasn’t looking anything. His phone was plugged into the charger over there. I was right by it when the message came in and I could see the first line of it as a notification on the screen. There was a smiley face and ‘I’ll put you through your paces on Wednesday when …’ I couldn’t read any more without unlocking it. And I couldn’t do that because he was in the doorway as it beeped and the next thing he’d shot across the room and picked it up and read it. And put the phone back in his pocket.’
‘Which isn’t actually an admission of guilt,’ put in Fay.
‘So later,’ Charlotte went on, ignoring her, ‘when he’d left it on the side again, I tried to unlock it and it isn’t the same code any more! Why would he change the number, unless it was because he didn’t want me looking in his phone?’
‘Well, why are you looking in his phone?’ Fay fixed her with a searching look. ‘Why not just say: who was that from?’
‘I did – and he said it was someone from work.’
‘Well, maybe it was. You know, a bit of banter. You should hear the way my blokes go on. They–’
‘Well it clearly wasn’t,’ Charlotte interrupted hotly. ‘Because later still, I asked to use his phone – saying I wanted to WhatsApp Becky and I’d left my phone upstairs and couldn’t be arsed to go and get it – and–’
‘He didn’t want you to?’
‘He handed it over as smiley as anything!’
Fay frowned in confusion. Charlotte’s face was grim. ‘And guess what? The message had gone. He’d fucking deleted it.’
Charlotte’s voice rose. ‘And it wasn’t someone from work anyway, cos their number would be stored wouldn’t it? It would say Fred or Dick. This was just a number … It’s some woman he’s met in a chat room.’
‘Oh come on!’ Fay’s eyebrows had risen further. ‘That’s going nought to ninety a bit quick. Could be a colleague he rarely deals with–’
‘Why the banter then?’
‘Or someone he usually speaks to in person so they’re not in his phone. OR–’ Fay looked inspired, ‘– it was simply a wrong number. Which is why he deleted it. And he came across quickly because he was expecting someone from work …’
‘You’re not listening!’ Charlotte said tetchily. ‘He said ‘someone from work’, which is also odd because usually he’d say the name.’
‘Why don’t you just ask him again?’
‘Because if he is up to something, I’m going to catch him at it. I’m not going to be made to feel paranoid this time.’
Privately, Fay thought it might be a trifle late for that. She frowned again. ‘This time?’
Charlotte hesitated, still turning the mug round and round on the table. ‘There was this girl in his office,’ she said. ‘Hannah. Bit of a bunny boiler. She had a crush on him and he was lapping it up till I found out.’
‘Most men would. Did anything happen?’
‘He СКАЧАТЬ