Diwa watched him with his mouth pressed into a line.
Colin put the strip in his mouth. He chewed. He waited for the chilli to ambush him, but the pain didn’t come. There was a sharp clean edge of vinegar against the richness of the beef, and underneath it, a slow gentle warmth that built at the back of his tongue and settled there without any drama.
It was annoyingly good.
He didn’t say so. He stabbed the next strip and brought it to the jar, and this time he held it under for a proper count of two, letting the vinegar coat the meat and one of the chilli seeds drift loose against it. Diwa’s chewing slowed. He tipped his chin in a small approving nod, and Colin felt the back of his neck go warm in a way that had nothing to do with the chilli.
The heat reached him on the second bite. It came up the sides of his tongue, settled at the roof of his mouth, and his eyes watered a fraction, but it wasn’t unpleasant. It made the whole mouthful, with a heaping forkful of garlic rice, sing. Diwa, the smug bastard, had been right.
Colin did not give him the satisfaction of saying so. He just kept eating.
He cleared his plate in the time it took Diwa to get halfway through his own, and ran the last of the rice through what was left of the yolk because leaving it on the plate would have beena crime. He sat back on the stool, looked at the smear where his breakfast had been, and felt sorry it was gone.
“I’ve got a job to head off to.”
“Now?”
“Yup. An end-of-lease clean in Knightsbridge. I’ve got to get there in an hour.”
He took the plate to the sink and rinsed it before Diwa could tell him to just leave it. His jacket was on the back of the sofa where he’d dropped it last night, and he shrugged it on as he walked back through the hallway, picking up his bag from the floorboards.
Diwa had followed him out and was leaning in the doorway with his hair still sticking up at the back and his bare feet on the cold boards.
“I’ll see you,” Colin said as he let himself out. The cold morning air came up off Ledbury Road to meet him, and he walked towards the bus stop with the taste of chilli vinegar still on his tongue and the promise of those three words sitting warm in his chest.
Chapter Ten
Thetop deck of the 94 was nearly empty at this hour, and Colin had the front window seat to himself. His work bag sat between his feet, the strap looped once round his ankle the way he’d done it for twenty years on buses. London was sliding past his window, bathed in the cold blue light of a March morning. The plane trees on Holland Park Avenue were still bare, and the pavements wet from a rain that had come and gone before he’d been awake to notice it.
He kept catching himself smiling at the back of the seat in front of him for no reason at all. Then he’d school his face flat, and a stop later he’d be smiling again.
He thought of the eight cloves of garlic, and the way Diwa had tipped a second mountain in on top, and the dimples coming out at full force when Colin had scowled. His mobile buzzed against his thigh.
Colin’s hand was already moving for it before his brain had quite caught up, and he was halfway to a smile, thinking it’d be Diwa with some daft message about something he’dremembered to add to Colin’s Friday task list. He thumbed the screen on, and the first thing he saw was the notification for twenty-three missed calls.
The smile dropped off his face. The notifications were stacked the length of the screen, and they were all from Stephen, going back to half six that morning. The most recent had come in four minutes ago. There were messages threaded under the calls, the previews truncated, but he saw the wordsdaddyandpleaseandanswerbefore his eyes refused to read any further.
His thumb pressed Stephen’s name and he brought the mobile to his ear. The bus engine droned underneath him, and his heart had set up a hard quick beat against his ribs that he could feel in his throat.
It barely rang.
“Daddy.”
Not since he’d ended up in the hospital after a stalking incident had Colin heard his son’s voice breaking like this. “What’s the matter, Stephen? Talk to me, love. Is it Lysander?” There was a wet, ragged sigh from the other end of the line, and Colin gripped the edge of the seat in front of him with his free hand and held on.
“Where’ve you been, daddy?”
“I’m here, love. I’m on the bus on my way to a job in Knightsbridge. Talk to me.”
“I came round.” Stephen’s breath caught wetly. “I came round before work. I had a coffee for you and one of those pastries from the Portuguese place, the one you like. And you weren’t there. You weren’t in the flat, and I knew you weren’t on a night shift, because you always send me your schedule. So I let myself in and I checked the bedroom, and the bed hadn’t been slept in!”
Stephen took in a great gasping breath, as if he were still stuck in that moment of terrified realisation.
“And then I rang you. I rang and I rang. I started thinking about whether to call the police, and then I thought, no, give him an hour, he might be in the loo at a job somewhere that he forgot to tell me about. Might have come up sudden. So I waited. And you still weren’t picking up—”
“Love.”
“I was about to ring them. I had the number up on my screen. I was going to ring them and I was going to drive over to the flat again and wait outside until they came.”
