A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [116]
‘Shall I pull him tonight?’ Wallis asked.
Roper glanced at his watch and shook his head. ‘Doubt he’ll be in on a Friday night. Leave it till tomorrow.’
Chapter thirteen
When Dan hadn’t come home by six, Fifi thought there must have been some delay on the tube, or his boss had kept him back to discuss something, but by the time it got to seven o’clock she was annoyed. Emergency – Ward 10, her favourite television programme, was on at eight, and she’d expected that by then dinner would be cleared away so she could relax.
At eight, because the dinner was getting dried up, she dished it up and put Dan’s over a saucepan of boiling water, then ate her own.
The fish pie was absolutely awful, and that made her even angrier because she’d tried so hard to make something special. And still Dan hadn’t come home.
The combination of worrying about where he was, the disappointment about the fish pie and thinking about the man in the red Jaguar, had stopped her enjoying watching Emergency – Ward 10. When Dan finally turned up at nine, she didn’t wait to hear his explanation, and shouted at him that his dinner was ruined.
‘That’s probably just as well,’ he grinned, making a comic display of sniffing the air. ‘It stinks. I could smell it as soon as I opened the front door. What was it?’
‘Fish pie, which I spent hours making,’ she retorted, getting more annoyed by the second because he was so unconcerned about her feelings. ‘I wouldn’t have made anything if you’d told me you were going to the pub. It’s a waste of my time and money.’
His grin vanished. ‘I haven’t been down the pub. I went to see a flat. I wouldn’t have bothered, if I’d known you were going to be so crabby.’
‘What flat, where?’
He shrugged. ‘There’s no point in telling you, I didn’t get it. The landlady must’ve been to the same charm school as your mother, took one look at me and told me she’d already let it.’
The sarcastic reference to her mother on top of the ruined dinner was too much for Fifi. She looked scathingly at Dan. His hands and face had been washed, but his work clothes were covered in bits of cement, there was a jagged tear in his trousers with his knee showing through, and his boots were filthy.
‘It wouldn’t occur to you that maybe it would be a good idea to get cleaned up before going to see a flat? Nobody in their right mind would want to let a place to someone as dirty as you!’ she shrieked at him.
‘God, you sound worse than your mother,’ Dan said, and wheeling round went out on to the landing. He took the plate of dinner off the saucepan and tipped it into the bin, plate and all. ‘And you can stick your bloody fish pie,’ he called back. ‘I’ll go and get something decent to eat where people don’t judge me by my clothes.’
The moment the front door slammed behind him, Fifi wished she hadn’t been so nasty. She was also embarrassed by the fish pie, because it really was stinking the whole house out. She retrieved the plate from the bin and washed it up, then took the rubbish down to the dustbin, hoping the smell would disperse.
When she came back up the stairs, she saw he’d left the small canvas satchel he took his sandwiches to work in out on the landing, so she opened it to take his sandwich box and flask out to wash them. With them was a page torn from a newspaper, one advertisement circled.
‘Two-bedroom self-contained garden flat in Barnes. Low rent for married couple in exchange for routine maintenance jobs in apartment block. Pleasant tree-lined avenue near river. Good references required.’
Fifi gulped hard. She understood Dan’s reasoning now. As the landlady wanted maintenance work done, he had thought it would be fine to appear in his work clothes. He’d probably rushed over there full of hope, with the intention of giving her a lovely surprise if he got it. And she’d belittled him for it!
All at once she felt very ashamed of herself. He’d been at work since seven o’clock, but getting them somewhere better to live was more important