‘OK yes.’
They’d grinned at each other as Slade had roared out Christmas greetings over the tinny store stereo and the people in the queue had clapped their gloved hands.
When she relayed the tale to Dad and Kitty later, she wouldn’t mention the three little words he’d uttered as a proposal had been more of a sports shoe slogan than anything romantic.
Because however you looked at it, all her dreams were going to come true.
20
NOW
She was in the kitchen when she heard it.
Arriving home to an empty house had been a novelty, and she’d just been revelling in the idea of reading in bed, a comparatively early night. Sleep that her thirty-four-year-old body needed even if her twenty-year-old persona might not.
It had been odd opening the door onto the dark hallway, snapping on the light to drive the shadows to the corners of the room. Then walking to the kitchen and doing the same. The slatted kitchen blind had been left open, and she was aware of the darkness outside, broken by the noise of passing traffic, but somehow deep and eerie in a way it had never felt before.
She’d been about to pop on the kettle and make herself a cup of tea to take upstairs when she heard it. Just a couple of notes at first, enough to make her stop and listen, prick her ears, but not enough for her to be sure exactly what it had been or where it had come from.
It was nothing, she told herself. Just some teenager passing by playing music on her phone, or a notification on her mobile from a little-used app.
Then it happened again; single notes plucked on an acoustic guitar, falling together to form an almost haunting melody. Coming from somewhere close by, above her.
Bella was quite a fan of folk guitar. She’d enjoyed listening to performances in her local pub back in the UK, and always stopped to linger when a busker with talent was playing acoustically.
What she wasn’t a fan of was haunting, human sounds coming from upstairs in an empty house.
Her heart began to race. She didn’t believe in ghosts, didn’t think burglars tended to break into people’s houses then entertain them with guitars. But there was no good explanation for why the music was softly being played in one of the upper rooms.
She switched off the kettle before it began its pre-boil rattle and crept to the hallway, feeling her whole body tingle on high alert. The music was definitely coming from upstairs.
Any thoughts of it being simply a radio left on dissipated when the playing stopped for a moment – the player coughed – then resumed.
It couldn’t be Henri – even if he were unexpectedly back from the bar, she knew he couldn’t play anything. His father had apparently paid for lessons on several different instruments during his childhood. He’d regaled them the other evening about a particularly frustrated saxophone teacher who’d ended up grabbing his instrument and whacking it against the wall on finding out his would-be prodigy had failed to practise for the eighth week in a row.
Odette had said something about playing a little piano. But not a guitar.
Whoever it was had no business being in the house.
Bella began to climb the stairs quietly, thinking how she’d often watched main characters in crime dramas carry out similar investigations and thought how unrealistic it was. In that situation, she would leave the house! Call the police! The only thing missing was the sinister music that would usually accompany this kind of move.
But curiosity overruled anything more sensible. And for some reason, she couldn’t imagine someone playing a guitar could have evil intent. Besides, she wouldn’t know what to say if she called the police anyway. Someone was playing a guitar upstairs and she didn’t know who it was? It sounded ridiculous.
She grabbed hold of a large book as she passed the hall table, just to have something to throw if necessary, and held it slightly in front of herself as if it were a loaded gun that would protect her from anything and anyone. The cover was faded, but she could make out the name ‘Proust’. She hoped it wasn’t valuable.
Reaching the landing, she cocked her head slightly to one side, trying to hear the music again. To her horror, she realised it was coming from her room.
Somehow, the annoyance she felt at her personal space being invaded made her more angry than afraid. She found herself stepping towards her door. The light hadn’t been switched on, but she could see the outline of the gap between the door and its frame due to the street lights outside, perhaps even a little moonlight too.
There was a scent in the air that took her back to her school days, when she’d gathered with fellow rebels behind the bike sheds before they were old enough to realise that rebelling by giving yourself lung cancer wasn’t the best form of subterfuge.
Whoever it was, was smoking –smoking!– in her room. Taking a breath and relying on something she’d read once about the power of surprise, she switched on the light and flung the door wide open and screeched: ‘Que fais-tu dans ma chambre?’What are you doing in my room?
She’d half expected the intruder to leap up, push past her and vanish into the night. Instead, as she stood, brandishingÀ La Recherche Du Temps Perduabove her head, the adrenaline drained from her body, and she became aware of herself. Confronting an intruder, armed only with a book, in a dark, empty house in a strange city. What was she doing?
A man was sitting on her bed – on herbed!– with a guitar resting on his knee, his fingers at the strings. His face was rugged and stubbled, his eyes ringed with dark circles. And as he looked up at her, his expression seemed to register a mixture of confusion, annoyance and amusement. She noticed that it wasn’t a cigarette she’d smelled after all, but some kind of incense stick in a jar. Which was far less cancer-inducing but no less of an imposition.
‘Je ne—’ he began. ‘Je ne—’ He gave a deep sigh and his shoulders slumped. ‘Shoot. Sorry, sweetheart, my French has deserted me. Do you speak English?’ He spoke with a drawling American accent, slurring his words slightly, clearly more than a little worse for wear.
