Peter James

Short Shockers: Collection One

12 Bolingbroke Avenue

It was a pleasant-looking mock-Tudor semi, with a cherry tree in the front garden and a stone birdbath. There was nothing immediately evident about the property to suggest a reason for the terror Susan Miller felt every time she saw it.

‘Number 12’ — white letters on the oak door. A brass knocker. And, in the distance, the faint sound of the sea. She began to walk up the path, her speed increasing as she came closer, as if drawn by an invisible magnet. Her terror deepening, she reached forward and rang the bell.

‘Susan! Susan, darling! It’s OK. It’s OK!’

The dull rasp faded in her ears; her eyes sprang open. She gulped down air, staring out into the darkness of the bedroom. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘The dream. I had the dream.’

Tom settled back down with a grunt of disapproval and was asleep again in moments. Susan lay awake, listening to the steady, endless roar of the traffic on the M6 pouring past Birmingham, an icy fear flooding her veins.

She got out of bed and walked over to the window, afraid to go back to sleep. Easing back the edge of a curtain, she stared out into the night; the large illuminated letters advertising IKEA dominated the horizon.

The dream was getting more frequent. The first time had been on Christmas Eve some ten years back, and for a long while it had recurred only very occasionally. Now it was happening every few weeks.

After a short while, exhaustion and the cold of the late-October air lured her back into bed. She snuggled up against Tom’s unyielding body and closed her eyes, knowing the second nightmare that always followed was yet to come, and that she was powerless to resist it.

Christmas Eve. Susan arrived home laden with last-minute shopping, including a few silly gifts for Tom to try to make him smile; he rarely smiled these days. His car was in the drive, but when she called out he did not respond. Puzzled, she went upstairs, calling his name again. Then she opened the bedroom door.

As she did so, she heard the creak of springs and the rustle of sheets. Two naked figures writhing on the bed spun in unison towards her. Their shocked faces stared at her as if she were an intruder, had no right to be there. Strangers. A woman with long red hair and a grey-haired man. Both of them total strangers making love in her bed, in her bedroom. In her house.

But instead of confronting them, she backed away, rapidly, confused, feeling as if it were she who was the intruder. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m—’

Then she woke up.

Tom stirred, grunted, then slept on.

Susan lay still. God, it was so clear this time — it seemed to be getting more and more vivid lately. She had read an article in a magazine recently about interpreting dreams, and she tried to think what this one might be telling her.

Confusion was the theme. She was getting confused easily these days, particularly with regard to time. Often she’d be on the verge of starting some job around the house, then remember that she had already done it, or be about to rush out to the shops to buy something she had just bought. Stress. She had read about the effects of stress, in another magazine — she got most of her knowledge from magazines — and that it could cause all kinds of confusion and tricks of the mind.

And she knew the source of the stress, too.

Mandy. The new secretary at the Walsall branch of the Allied Chester & North-East Building Society, where Tom was Deputy Manager. Tom had told her about Mandy’s arrival a year ago, then had never mentioned her since. But she had watched them talking at the annual Christmas party last year, to which spouses and partners were invited. They had talked a damned sight too much for Susan’s liking. And they emailed each other a damned sight too much.

She had not been sure what to do. At thirty-two, she had kept her figure through careful eating and regular aerobics, and still looked good. She took care of her short brown hair, and paid attention to her make-up and her clothes. There wasn’t much else she could do, and confronting Tom without any evidence would have made her look foolish. Besides, she was under doctor’s orders to stay calm. She had given up work in order to relax and improve her chances of conceiving the child they had been trying for these past five years. She had to stay calm.

Unexpectedly, the solution presented itself when Tom arrived home that evening.

‘Promotion?’ she said, her eyes alight with excitement.

‘Yup! You are now looking at the second youngest ever branch manager for the Allied Chester & North-East Building Society! But,’ he added hesitantly, ‘it’s going to mean moving.’

‘Moving? I don’t mind at all, darling!’ Anywhere, she thought. The further the better. Get him away from that bloody Mandy. ‘Where to?’

‘Brighton.’

She could scarcely believe her luck. In their teens, Tom had taken her for a weekend to Brighton; it was the first time they had been away together. The bed in the little hotel had creaked like mad, and someone in the room below had hollered at them and they’d had to stuff sheets into their mouths to silence their laugher. ‘We’re going to live in Brighton?’

‘That’s right!’

She flung her arms around him. ‘When? How soon?’

‘They want me to take over the branch at the start of the New Year. So we have to find a house pretty smartly.’

Susan did a quick calculation. It was now late October ‘We’ll never find somewhere and get moved in within a month. We’ve got to sell this place, we’ve got to—’

‘The Society will help. They’re relocating us, all expenses paid, and we get a lump-sum allowance for more expensive housing in the south. They’re giving me the week off next week so we can go there and look around. I’ve told the relocations officer our budget and she’s contacting some local estate agents for us.’

The first particulars arrived two days later in a thick envelope. Susan opened it in the kitchen and pulled out the contents, while Tom was gulping down his breakfast. There were about fifteen houses, mostly too expensive. She discarded several, then read the details of one that was well within their range: a very ugly box of a house, close to the sea, with a ‘small but charming’ garden. She liked the idea of living near the sea, but not the house. Still, she thought, you spend most of your time indoors, not looking at the exterior, so she put it aside as a possible and turned to the next.

As she saw the picture, she froze. Couldn’t be, she thought, bringing it closer to her eyes. Could not possibly be. She stared hard, struggling to control her shaking hands, at a mock-Tudor semi identical to the one she always saw in her dream. Coincidence, she thought, feeling a tightening knot in her throat. Coincidence. Has to be. There are thousands of houses that look like this.

12 Bolingbroke Avenue.

Number 12, she knew, was the number on the door in her dream, the same dream in which she always heard the distant roar of the sea.

Maybe she had seen the house when they had been to Brighton previously. How long ago was that? Fourteen years? But even if she had seen it before, why should it have stuck in her mind?

‘Anything of interest?’ Tom asked, reaching out and turning the particulars of the modern box round to read them. Then he pulled the details of the semi out of her hands, rather roughly. ‘This looks nice,’ he said. ‘In our bracket. “In need of some modernization” — that’s estate agent-speak for a near wreck. Means if we do it up, it could be worth a lot more.’

Susan agreed that they should see the house. She had to see it to satisfy herself that it was not the one in the dream, but she did not tell Tom that; he had little sympathy for her dreams.

The estate agent drove them himself. He wore a sharp suit, white socks and smelled of hair gel. ‘Great position,’ he said. ‘One of the most sought-after residential areas in Hove. Five minutes’ walk to the beach. Hove Lagoon close by — great for kids. And it’s a bargain for this area. A bit of work and you could increase the value a lot.’ He turned into Bolingbroke Avenue, and pointed with his finger. ‘There we are.’

Susan bit her lip as they pulled up outside number 12. Her mouth was dry and she was shaking badly. Terror was gripping her like a claw; the same terror she had previously experienced only in her dreams.

The one thing that was different was the ‘For Sale’ board outside. She could see the cherry tree, the stone birdbath. She could hear the sea. There was no doubt in her mind, absolutely no doubt at all.

She climbed out of the car as if she were back in her dream, and led the way up the path. Exactly as she always did in her dream, she reached out her hand and rang the bell.

After a few moments the door was opened by a woman in her forties with long red hair. She had a pleasant, open-natured smile at first, but when she saw Susan, all the colour drained from her face. She looked as if she had been struck with a sledgehammer.

Susan was staring back at her in amazement. There was no mistaking, it was definitely her. ‘Oh my God,’ Susan said, the words blurting out. ‘You’re the woman I keep seeing in my dreams.’

‘And you,’ she replied, barely able to get the words out, ‘you are the ghost that’s been haunting our bedroom for the past ten years.’

Susan stood, helpless, waves of fear rippling across her skin. ‘Ghost?’ she said finally.

‘You look like our ghost; you just look so incredibly like her.’ She hesitated. ‘Who are you? How can I help you?’

‘We’ve come to see around the house.’

‘See around the house?’ She sounded astonished.

‘The estate agent made an appointment.’ Susan turned to look at him for confirmation, but could not see him or Tom — or the car.

‘There must be a mistake,’ the woman said. ‘This house is not on the market.’

Susan looked round again, disoriented. Where were they? Where the hell had they gone? ‘Please,’ she said. ‘This ghost I resemble — who... who is... was she?’

‘I don’t know; neither of us do. But about ten years ago some building society manager bought this house when it was a wreck, murdered his wife on Christmas Eve and moved his mistress in. He renovated the house, and cemented his wife into the basement. The mistress finally cracked after a couple of years and went to the police. That’s all I know.’

‘What... what happened to them?’

The woman was staring oddly at her, as if she was trying to see her but no longer could. Susan felt swirling cold air engulf her. She turned, bewildered. Where the hell was Tom? The estate agent? Then she saw that the ‘For Sale’ board had gone from the garden.

She was alone, on the step, facing the closed front door.

Number 12. She stared at the white letters, the brass knocker. Then, as if drawn by that same damned magnet, she felt herself being pulled forward, felt herself gliding in through the solid oak of the door.

I’ll wake up in a moment, she thought. I’ll wake up. I always do. Except she knew, this time, something had changed.

Number Thirteen

For 353 days a year — and 354 in a leap year — N.N. Kettering put the fear of God into restaurants around the world. On those dozen remaining days, something put the fear of God into him.

A number.

Just a simple, two-digit number.

Thirteen.

Just the sight of it was enough to make beads of sweat appear along his brow. And he had a vast expanse of brow, providing ample accommodation for whole colonies of sweat beads.

Nigel Norbert Kettering hated both his first names. When he had first started out as a restaurant critic, for a small English provincial newspaper, he decided a degree of anonymity was a good thing — and it gave him the opportunity to lose those two bloody names. For the past two decades, N.N. Kettering had been, undisputedly, the most influential restaurant critic in England, and in more recent years, his eagle eye and sharp palate, and even sharper writing, had made him a global scourge.

Kettering analysed everything. Every single aspect of any meal he ate. From the table at which he sat, to the quality of the paper on which the menu was printed, to the glasses, the tablecloth, the plates, the balance of the menu, the quality and speed of the service, and, far above all else, the food.

This attention to every detail, even to the quality of the toothpicks, had taken him to the top of his profession — and the top of the list of people many of the world’s most renowned chefs would have liked to see dead.

His daily online postings, the Kettering Report, could make or break a new restaurant within days, or dramatically enhance the reputation of an established one. No amount of Michelin stars or Gault Millau points came close to the rosette rankings of the Kettering Report. Of course, he had his favourites. Before it closed, El Bulli in Spain regularly received a maximum score of ten. So did The French Laundry in Yountville, California, and The Fat Duck in Bray, Vue du Monde in Melbourne, and Rosemary in Sardinia, and the Luk Yu Tea House in Hong Kong for its dim sum.

But there were legions of other establishments, hailed as temples of gastronomy by some of the greatest newspaper critics, which received from Kettering a scornful three, or a withering two. One of the greatest French chefs committed suicide after Kettering downgraded his rating from a nine to a devastating one in the space of a single year.

In the current harsh economic climes, few people would risk the expense and disappointment of a mediocre night out without first checking the latest opinion online at Kettering’s site.

N.N.’s appearance at a restaurant was enough to render the most seasoned maître d’ and the most assured sommelier quivering jellies, and when whispered word of his presence reached the kitchen, even the most prima donna of chefs turned into a babbling, begging wreck.

Some years ago, his identity had been revealed by a tabloid newspaper. Now, he no longer bothered to book his tables under an assumed name. Every restaurateur in the world had N.N. Kettering’s photograph pinned discreetly to an office wall. Besides, the man was hard to miss. He was tall and lean, despite all the food and wine he packed away, with an elongated neck, on top of which perched his egg-shaped head, his eyes distorted behind round, bottle-lens glasses and his short black hair brushed forward, rather like a modern take on a monk’s tonsure, the fringe barely reaching the start of his high, sloping brow.

He was always dressed the same — in a dark, immaculately tailored suit, white shirt and red or crimson tie — and sat ramrod straight, with perfect posture, as if he had a ruler jammed down the back of his jacket. One great London restaurant owner had described the sight of his head rising above the menu he was reading, accompanied by his beady glare, as being like staring into the periscope of a submarine. Fortunately for this man’s establishment, N.N. Kettering never got to hear the remark. Of course, Kettering’s tastes became more and more esoteric. One year, the appearance of snail porridge on the menu of The Fat Duck caused him to devote two whole pages of lyrical praise to Heston Blumenthal’s skills as a chef. The following year, he devoted an unprecedented three-page review to a single dish at El Bulli — chef Ferran Adrià’s creation of oysters with raw marinated rabbit brains.

And his demands for greatness and excellence became ever higher.

Almost uniquely among restaurant critics, N.N. Kettering employed no assistants. He ate lunch and dinner out seven days and nights a week. Sometimes breakfast, too. Food was his life. He had never married, never even had a girlfriend — or boyfriend. And he always paid for every meal in crisp, new banknotes. He never accepted anything free.

He never tipped.

He felt fulfilled. As if he had been put on this planet to be the custodian of its restaurants’ standards. He was married to tomorrow’s restaurants. His reviews were his babies.

Once, early in his career, in a rare interview, he declared, ‘The best number for dinner is two — myself and a good waiter.’

But not on the thirteenth of any month.

On the thirteenth of any month, it all changed.

From as far back in his life as he could remember, N.N. Kettering had been a triskaidekaphobic. He had a morbid fear of the number thirteen. And the worst possible date was a Friday the thirteenth. Because not only was he a triskaidekaphobe, he was also a paraskavedekatriaphobe.

Someone who has a total fear of the date Friday the thirteenth.

He knew that the number thirteen was out to get him. It was around him all the time. It was there on car number plates. It lurked in the number of grains in the breakfast cereals he ate. In the number of berries he added to his cereal. In the number of mouthfuls he took to eat his breakfast, and his lunch, and his dinner. In the number of steps he would take from a taxi to the restaurant. In the number of steps from the front door of the restaurant to his table.

He would never sit at table thirteen. He would never choose the thirteenth item on a menu. Nor on a wine list. Nor anything that was a multiple of thirteen.

Whenever it was a Friday the thirteenth, he would prepare himself in advance. All kinds of danger lurked out in the world. So it was best not to risk it. Stay home. But home was dangerous, too. He had read that the place where you were most likely to die was in your own home, especially your kitchen. So, on every Friday the thirteenth he stayed in bed, in his small flat in London’s Notting Hill. The night before, he prepared everything he would need up until midnight the following day. He would spend the time reading, and watching television — mostly food programmes — and visiting, anonymously of course, a number of networking sites and online discussion groups about restaurants.

So it happened, on one such Friday the thirteenth, a cold February day when he was logged on while in bed, that he found by chance a new discussion group on the Web, made up of some of the world’s greatest chefs. He had eaten in every one of their restaurants — a few of them he had praised, but the majority he had trashed. He watched the discussion in fascination, as they were talking about a restaurant he had never heard of. And not just talking about it. Raving about it.

This demented him! He knew every significant restaurant in the world, surely? He had eaten at all the ones that had any kind of a reputation. Yet here, suddenly, was a reference not just to a restaurant, but to one these particular chefs agreed unanimously was the very best in the world. No restaurant sourced better cuts of meat. No restaurant handled an entire range of offal with such inventiveness. He became hungry just reading the descriptions of the sauces, the tenderness of every bite, the juxtaposition of flavours. He was salivating.

And the bastards did not give away the name.

Frustrated, he posted, under his Internet pseudonym, ChefStalker, the words: ‘Hi everyone, what’s the name of this place? I thought I knew every restaurant worth eating in on the planet!’

To his dismay, the discussion ended abruptly, without any reply.

He realized there was only one thing for it. He would email some of the chefs, selecting only the ones he had praised, revealing who he was, knowing that was almost bound to lead to an invitation.

To his joy, he was right. Two days later he received an email, although, curiously, anonymous:

Dear N.N. Kettering,

Thank you for your interest. This establishment about which you are enquiring is in fact a private dining club. We would be delighted for you to join us as our guest the next time we hold one of our dinners — Friday 13 May. There is one condition: that you never write about this club, either before or after your visit. Some things are just too good to be shared. You will receive your formal invitation, and the address, on the night of 12 May. We look forward to greeting you. Bon appétit!

He stared at the email. Friday 13 May.

He had never in his life, since leaving school, left the safety of his home on a Friday the thirteenth.

His first inclination was to reply, explaining that he was grateful for the invitation, but that he could not accept.

But then he thought again about all the words of praise he had read. Many of them from chefs who, he might have thought, had experienced every taste sensation there was to taste, but who raved unanimously.

God, how he loved the mystique of restaurants. He remembered so vividly the first restaurant he had ever entered, when he was just ten years old; it was called Verry’s. He was with his parents, in busy, noisy Regent Street in London. The door had swung shut behind them, and they were in a new world, dimly lit, oak-panelled, with a quiet hum of chatter, tantalizing smells of garlic and grilling meat and fish. A man in a tuxedo, with an Italian accent, had greeted his parents as if they were his long-lost friends,then had shaken his hand and led them courteously along a line of red leather banquettes to their table.

Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Crystal glasses were laid out on a crisp, white tablecloth. A silver dish lay on it, filled with frilly curls of butter.Another silver dish appeared, stacked with Melba toast.Then he was presented with a burgundy leather-covered menu, filled with delights. A few minutes later, a green leather-bound wine list, as thick as a bible, was placed in his father’s hand.

Waiters swept past with silver trays laden with food. Others hovered around their table. It was like being on a new planet, in a new universe. From that moment onwards, Nigel Norbert Kettering knew that he wanted to spend his life in this world. But, even at ten, he noticed things that were not right. Little imperfections. The waiter forgot a side order of haricot verts, and had to be reminded twice. His father muttered that his steak was cooked more than he had asked, but seemed too in awe of the waiters to complain. So, to his father’s embarrassment and his mother’s astonishment, little Nigel stuck up his arm and summoned the waiter. Five minutes later the offending steak was duly replaced.

That was his start. And now, aged forty-four, he had succeeded beyond all his dreams. And there were still some restaurants he entered that held that same, magical promise of Verry’s all those years ago.

And now there was one that sounded as if it would top them all. But his invitation was for a Friday the thirteenth. He emailed back, asking what other date options there were.Within minutes he received a reply: ‘None. We assume you are declining. Thank you.’

Almost as fast as his fingers could move, panic causing beads of sweat to appear all over that brow of his, he typed back: ‘No, not declining. Thank you. I’m accepting.’

The next three months passed slowly, feeling more like three years. Everything in every restaurant irritated him. Gormless, moronic waiters sanctimoniously reciting the day’s specials as if they had personally line-caught or wood-roasted the damned fish or meat with their bare hands. Eating starters of bi-valves tortured to death in unpleasantly flavoured oils, or pasta resembling origami creations made during handiwork classes at special needs institutions.

He bankrupted a dozen Michelin-starred establishments and closed four restaurants before they had even opened their doors to the great unwashed.

But finally the great day arrived.

And just how great was it?

He stared at the email printout from the night before, in which he had finally been sent the address. It was the place that just about every ranked chef considered to be the finest eating establishment in the world. It was Number 13, in West Audley Street in London’s Mayfair.

Number sodding 13.

He came close to telling them to take a hike. To stick their stupid invitation up the place where the sun doesn’t shine.

Thirteen.

The number he had spent his entire life trying to avoid. And now he was in a taxi, cruising down Park Lane, getting ever closer.

Salivating.

Thinking about all those descriptions of grilling meat and offal in sauce combinations he had never dreamed possible.

Looking forward to trashing it! To making fools of all those great chefs. To destroying fifty reputations in one single posting on his site later that evening.

He was less than amused when the cabbie read the meter and turned to him. ‘That’ll be thirteen quid, gov.’

N.N. Kettering counted out the money exactly. And took pleasure in the driver’s scowl when he asked for his receipt, with no tip. No arsehole driver who mentioned the number thirteen was going to get a tip from him.

Then he walked up the steps to the door and stared at the shiny, brass digits.

13.

He began shaking. Then hyperventilating. He nearly turned and walked straight back down the steps.

Only the descriptions of the food that lay beyond this portal kept him there. He lifted his hand to the bell, and forced his index finger to dart forward and jab it.

He was still considering his options when the door swung open and a tall, gaunt, formidable-looking figure in a tuxedo and white gloves, hair as slick as a frozen pond, with a matching frozen smile, bowed. ‘Sir?’

N.N. gave his name.

Moments later he stepped forward, into an oak-panelled corridor, and the door closed behind him.

‘This way, sir.’

He followed the man along the corridor, which was lined with framed oil portraits. Some of them he recognized as high-profile food critics. He passed one of A.A. Gill from the Sunday Times. Another of Fay Maschler from the Observer. Then one of Giles Coren from The Times. One of Michael Winner. Then several he recognized from other countries. Then he was bowed through a door.

He found himself in a grand, windowless dining room, in the centre of which was an oval mahogany table, at which sat twelve people. One place was empty at the centre on one side — his.

The thirteenth place.

As he clocked the faces of each of his fellow diners in turn, he realized he was in the presence of twelve of the highest rated chefs in the world. Highest rated, that was, by all food critics other than himself.

He had trashed all of them — viciously. Brought each of their establishments to their knees. They were all smiling at him.

His instinct was to turn and run. It had been years since he had eaten at a table with company. He really only liked to eat alone. But they were all rising to their feet. The one nearest him,whom he recognized as Jonas Capri, from Sydney, Australia, said, ‘N.N. Kettering, we are honoured.’

He did not know what to reply or if he even wanted to reply.

Another of the great chefs spared him the problem. Ferdy Perrin, from Haut Mazot restaurant in Switzerland, once famed for its lamb — before the Kettering Report — shook his hand warmly. ‘You cannot imagine the honour we are feeling here tonight.That you have agreed to come and eat our creations. It is our hope that you will leave this evening with a changed opinion of our abilities. We are grateful to you that you give us this chance.’

‘Well,’ he said, for the first time in many years feeling just a little humbled. But before he could say anything else another chef stood up.

His name was Jack Miller, from Miller’s House in Tampa, Florida. ‘See, N.N., we want you to know we have no hard feelings. Maybe when you came to my restaurant we were having an off night. I’m not here to convince you to change your review. I just want you to have one of the greatest eating experiences of your life, here tonight. What you make of it will then be up to you to decide.’

N.N.saw that the walls were hung with more paintings. He recognized Gordon Ramsay. Anthony Worrall Thompson. Albert Roux. Wolfgang Puck. Alain Ducasse. Raymond Blanc.

He took his seat. A vast array of cutlery and glasses lay in front of him. One glass was half-filled with an ochre-coloured white wine, another with water.

He was still thinking what to do when a side-door opened and four waiters entered, dressed head to foot in black, holding massive silver platters, on which sat tiny demitasse cups topped with froth. Within seconds one had been distributed to each diner.

The gloved man who had brought N.N. Kettering in appeared to duplicate his tasks as both doorman and headwaiter.

‘L’amuse-bouche,’ he announced. ‘Cappuccino de testicules.’

Each of his fellow diners began to spoon this dish up with gusto. N.N. Kettering raised the first mouthful to his lips and sniffed. The bouquet was sensational. He placed one sliver, no wider than a communion wafer, in his mouth and the flesh dissolved on his tongue like butter. It was so good he dug his spoon in again. And again. And again. Scraping every last milligram of flavour from the sides of the tiny, ribbed cup. He could easily have eaten seconds. And thirds. He found himself even wanting to lick the inside of the cup clean.

‘Fantastic!’ he said. ‘Incroyable!’ he added for the benefit of the French chefs present. The others demurred.

He had eaten pigs’, lambs’ and bulls’ testicles before, but never, remotely, with this complexity of flavours. These were the best ever. Wow!

‘The secret is in the marinade,’ the chef on his right said, a man in his late thirties with close-cropped hair, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans.

‘I would argue also the quality of the produce,’ said the chef opposite them, a rather studious-looking man in his sixties, wearing a cardigan.

‘That goes without saying,’ said a third.

N.N., long conditioned to observe every detail and nuance in a restaurant, noticed the discreet wink that passed between two of the chefs. It seemed to carry on around the table, from chef to chef, a sort of chain wink, from which he was excluded.

Now they all seemed to be concealing smirks from him.

He noticed a printed menu, picked it up and glanced down it. There were twenty-one courses. The menu was written in French, but he was fluent in the language so it was easy to translate. But, even so, there were several words he struggled with. The first set of courses were all offal. Goujons of brain was to follow the testicles. Then sweetbreads — the pancreas and thymus. Then tripe — the intestines. Liver. Kidneys. Then... something else, but his French failed him.

With even more ceremony than the previous dishes, a miniature covered silver tureen was placed in front of each diner, signalling that one of the highlights of the meal had arrived. The lids were removed to reveal a wonderful, sweet aroma of chargrilled meat, cinnamon and coriander.The dish was a rich,dark cassoulet of beans, chickpeas and the thinnest possible slices of what N.N. Kettering assumed was sausage. But when he forked one into his mouth, although the taste was undoubtedly pork, and delicious, it had a strange, flaccid, rubbery texture that reminded him of squid. It was definitely, he made a mental note, a triumph of taste over texture.

The dish was eaten in complete silence, and Kettering became increasingly uncomfortable with each mouthful he took as, one by one, he ruled out all other body parts, leaving him with just one possibility. He shuddered but at the same time felt very slightly aroused.

After that, the menu continued through a series of meat dishes, different cuts from the leg,rump,shoulder.The animal was not stated and he became increasingly curious to know. Lamb, Cow, Deer, Pig? Ostrich?

But when he questioned any of his fellow diners they just smiled and replied, ‘Every dish is a unique surprise. Savour it, don’t destroy it with analysis.’

The French chef in the cardigan turned to him and said, ‘You are familiar with the words of your great poet, Pope? “Like following life in creatures we dissect, we lose it in the moment we detect.”’

So he did his best. With almost every mouthful he took, one of the numerous wine glasses on the table was filled or refilled. Whites, reds, pinks, all different hues, all steadily melding into a blur.

Then the highlight of the meal arrived: a roast, presented on a miniature campfire of burning fennel twigs, and he knew instantly from the smell and the sight of the crackling that this had to be roast pork. As he tucked in, whether it was the wine or the sheer joy of eating one magical dish after another, he was sure, quite sure, that this was the finest roast he had ever eaten, and probably ever would. He was starting to feel very happy, very contented. He was starting to like these chefs. Next time, he decided, he would give them all good scores. Enough so that perhaps they might invite him again...

Even on a Friday the thirteenth.

Because the date was turning out not to be so bad after all.

‘This is the best pork I’ve ever eaten!’ he proclaimed through a mouthful of perfect, crunchy crackling.

‘Long pig,’ said the chef opposite him.

And suddenly, as if a fuse had been tripped, all the good humour in the room seemed to evaporate. There was an awkward moment of silence. Several faces turned towards the man who had said, ‘Long pig.’ A ripple of glances passed from one chef to the next.

Then N.N. was conscious that everyone was looking at him, as if waiting for him to react.

A shiver rippled through him. Long pig. He knew what the words meant, what long pig was.

Suddenly his head was spinning. He began to feel sick. His eyes moved, in turn, to each of the twelve pairs of eyes around the table. Each stared back at him coldly.

‘Long pig’ was the term cannibals in the South Seas and in Africa used to describe white men. Because their flesh tasted like pork.

He stood up abruptly. His chair fell over behind him, crashing to the floor with a sound like a gunshot. ‘I have to go,’ he said.

No one said a word.

He ran from the room, back along the portrait-lined corridor, and reached the front door. He yanked the handle. But the door did not move.

It was locked.

The key was missing.

He turned and saw the maître d’ standing behind him, his arms crossed. A bunch of keys hung from a leather fob on his belt. ‘You haven’t had dessert yet, sir. It would be very impolite for you to leave without dessert.We have the finest desserts you will ever have tasted.’

‘I have to go,’ he said again. ‘Please open the door.’ Blind panic was gripping him now.

‘I’m afraid not, sir.’ The maître d’ took a step towards him.

N.N. Kettering had never headbutted anyone before in his life. But he headbutted the maître d’ now. It was a clumsy attempt and he did not dip his own head enough, resulting in him striking the maître d’ forehead-on and smashing both the bottle lenses of his own glasses, without which he was almost blind. Nevertheless, it was effective enough to make the maître d’ fall to his knees with a dazed grunt.

N.N.grabbed the key fob and tugged with all his strength, ripping it away from the man’s belt. He turned back to the door, tried one, then another, then another. He looked over his shoulder and, through a blurry haze, saw a posse of his dining companions storming down the corridor towards him.

He tried the fourth key, desperately, and it turned.

The door opened and he stumbled out down the steps and ran blindly across the pavement, straight into the road. Straight into the path of an eleven-and-a-half-ton double-decker bus.

It struck him at almost thirty miles per hour, catapulting him a short distance down the road. Then it braked to a slewed halt. It seemed in the brief silence that followed that the whole of London had come to a halt.

The paramedics, who arrived on the scene within minutes and lifted him carefully onto a stretcher, were unaware, just as N.N. Kettering was, of the irony that it was a number 13 bus.

Two days later, N.N. regained consciousness briefly. Just long enough to hear a murmured conversation right beside him.

A male voice said, ‘Any luck with next-of-kin?’

A female voice said, ‘No, doctor, we’ve not yet been able to trace any relatives.’

‘Any change in his condition?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Well, let’s keep him on life support for a while longer. But I don’t think we’re going to see any change. He has massive internal injuries, and his Glasgow coma score remains at three.He’s clearly brain-dead, poor sod. Nothing more we can do. Just wait.’

The man’s voice was familiar, but N.N. struggled to remember where he had heard it before. Then, just before he lapsed back into unconsciousness for the final time, he remembered.

It was the voice of the maître d’.

Two days later, the duty intensive care registrar was doing his ward round. He noted that one of the beds in the unit was now vacant. It was bed number thirteen.

The sister was staring at it sadly. ‘You OK?’ he asked.

‘Every time we lose someone, I feel like a failure,’ she replied. Then she looked at the sticking plaster on his forehead. ‘Are you all right? Cut yourself?’

‘It’s nothing. He looked back down at the empty bed. ‘Always remember the first rule of the Hippocratic Oath:“Do no harm.” Right?’

She nodded sadly.

‘It would have been harmful to keep him going. What kind of quality of life would he have had if he had lived?’

‘You’re right,’ she replied. ‘None. I suppose sometimes we have to thank God for small mercies. He’d have been a vegetable if he’d lived.’

‘You know, nurse, I’ve never liked that word, “vegetable”,’ he said. ‘Why not a “piece of meat”?’

Just Two Clicks

Just two clicks and Michael’s face appeared. Margaret pressed her fingers against the screen, feeling a longing to stroke his slender, pre-Raphaelite face and to touch that long, wavy hair that lay tantalizingly beyond the glass.

Joe was downstairs watching a football match on Sky. What she was doing was naughty. Wicked temptation! But didn’t Socrates say “the unexamined life is not worth living”? The kids were gone. Empty nesters now, her and Joe. Joe was like a rock to which her life was moored. Safe, strong, but dull. And right now she didn’t want a rock, she wanted a knight on a white charger. The knight who was just two clicks away.

Just two clicks and Margaret’s face would be in front of him. Michael’s fingers danced lightly across the keys of his laptop, caressing them sensually.

They had been emailing each other for over a year — in fact, as Margaret had reminded Michael this afternoon, for exactly one year, two months, three days and nineteen hours.

And now, at half past seven tomorrow evening, in just over twenty two hours’ time, they were finally going to meet. Their first real date.

Both of them had had a few obstacles to deal with first. Like Margaret’s husband, Joe. During the course of a thousand increasingly passionate emails (actually, one thousand, one hundred and eighty-seven, as Margaret had informed him this afternoon) Michael had built up a mental picture of Joe: a tall, mean brainless bully, who had once punched a front door down with his bare fists. He’d built up a mental picture of Margaret, too, that was far more elaborate than the single photograph he had downloaded so long ago of a pretty redhead, who looked a little like Scully from the X-Files. In fact, quite a lot like the heavenly Scully.

‘We shouldn’t really meet, should we?’ She had emailed him this afternoon. ‘It might spoil everything between us.’

Michael’s wife, Karen, had walked out on him two months ago, blaming the time he spent on the Internet, telling him he was more in love with his computer than her.

Well, actually, sweetheart, with someone on my computer... he had nearly said, but hadn’t quite plucked up the courage. That had always been his problem. Lack of courage. And, of course, right now this was fuelled by an image of Joe who could punch a front door down with his bare fists.

A new email from Margaret lay in his inbox. ‘Twenty-two hours and seven minutes! I’m so excited, I can’t wait to meet you, my darling. Have you decided where? M. xxxx’

‘Me neither!’ he typed. ‘Do you know the Red Lion in Handcross? It has deep booths, very discreet. Went to a real-ale tasting there recently. Midway between us. I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight! All my love, Michael. xxxx’

Margaret opened the email eagerly, and then, as she read it, for the first time in one year, two months and three days she felt the presence of clouds in her heart. Real Ale? He’d never mentioned an interest in real ale before. Real ale was a bit of an anoraks’ thing, wasn’t it? Midway between us? Did he mean he couldn’t be bothered to drive to somewhere close to her? But, worst of all...

A pub???

She typed her reply. ‘I don’t do pubs, my darling. I do weekends in Paris at the George V, or maybe the Ritz-Carlton or the Bristol.’

Then she deleted it. I’m being stupid, dreaming, all shot to hell by my nerves... From downstairs there came a whoop from Joe, and then she could hear tumultuous roaring. A goal. Great. Big. Deal. Wow, Joe, I’m so happy for you.

Deleting her words, she replaced them with ‘Darling, the Red Lion sounds wickedly romantic. 7.30. I’m not going to sleep either! All my love, M. xxxx.’

What if Joe had been reading her emails and was going to tail her to the Red Lion tonight, Michael thought as he pulled up in the farthest, darkest corner of the car park? He climbed out of his pea-green Astra (Karen had taken the BMW) and walked nervously towards the front entrance of the pub, freshly showered and shaven, his breath minted, his body marinated in a Boss cologne Karen had once said made him smell manly, his belly feeling like it was filled with deranged moths.

He stopped just outside and checked his macho diver’s watch. Seven thirty-two. Taking a deep breath, he went in.

And saw her right away.

Oh no.

His heart did not so much sink as burrow its way down to the bottom of his brand new Docksider yachting loafers.

She was sitting at the bar, in full public display — OK, the place was pretty empty — but worse than that, a packet of cigarettes and a lighter lay on the counter in front of her. She’d never told him that she smoked. But far, far, far worse than that, the bitch looked nothing like the photograph she had sent him. Nothing at all!

True, she had the same red hair colour — well, henna-dyed red at any rate — but there were no long tresses to caress; it had been cropped short and gelled into spikes that looked sharp enough to prick your fingers on. You never told me you’d cut your hair. Why not??? Her face was plain, and she was a good three or four stone heavier than in the photograph, with cellulite-pocked thighs bared by a vulgar skirt. She hadn’t lied about her age, but that was just about the only thing. And she’d caught his eye and was now smiling at him...

No. Absolutely not. No which way. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

Michael turned, without looking back, and fled.

Roaring out of the parking lot, haemorrhaging perspiration in anger and embarrassment, switching off his mobile phone in case she tried to ring, he had to swerve to avoid some idiot driving in far too fast.

‘Dickhead!’ he shouted.

Margaret was relieved to see the car park was almost empty. Pulling into the farthest corner, she turned on the interior light, checked her face and her hair in the mirror, then climbed out and locked the car. Seven thirty-seven. Just late enough, hopefully, for Michael to have arrived first. Despite her nerves, she walked on air through the front entrance.

To her disappointment, there was no sign of him. A couple of young salesmen types at a table. A solitary elderly man. And on the barstools, a plump, middle-aged woman with spiky red hair and a tarty skirt, who was joined by a tattooed, denim-clad gorilla who emerged from the gents’, nuzzled her neck greedily, making her giggle, then retrieved a smouldering cigarette from the ashtray.

Michael, in his den, stared at the screen. ‘Bitch,’ he said. ‘What a bitch!’ With one click he dragged all Margaret’s emails to his trash bin. With another, he dragged her photograph to the same place. Then he emptied the trash.

Back home just before ten, Joe glanced up from a football game that looked like all the other football games Margaret had ever seen. ‘What happened to your night out with the girls?’ he asked.

‘I decided I’d been neglecting my husband too much recently.’ She put her arm around him, around her rock, and kissed his cheek. ‘I love you,’ she said.

He actually took his eyes off the game to look at her, and then kissed her back. ‘I love you, too,’ he said.

Then she went upstairs to her room, and checked her mailbox. There was nothing. ‘Michael, I waited two hours,’ she began typing.

Then she stopped. It was cold in her den. Downstairs the television had given a cosy glow. And her rock had felt warm.

Sod you, Michael.

Just two clicks and he was gone from her life.

Dead on the Hour

(originally published by the Mail on Sunday)

The hour before dawn is the deadliest. The silent, ethereal period when the air is filled with an indefinable stillness; the darkness is spent but the new day has not yet begun. It is the hour when human resistance is at its lowest, when the dying, exhausted from the sheer effort of clinging to life, are most likely to slip their moorings and drift quietly away into that good night.

Sandra held her mother’s hand; it was no bigger than a child’s, soft and fragile with leathery creases. And sometimes she imagined there was still a pulse, but it was merely the beat of her own pulse coming back at her.

A tear rolled down her cheek, chased by another as she reflected on her past, her memory in selective mode, retrieving and presenting to her only what was good. She delved back into her childhood, when it was she who had been weak and her mother who had been strong, and thought about how the wheel had turned, as relentless and impersonal as the cogs of the grandfather clock downstairs. Strong. Yes, she had been strong these past months, spoon-feeding her mother an increasingly infantile diet. Supper last night had been pineapple jelly and a glass of milk. At 7 p.m. precisely.

The clock was quiet; it seemed a long time since it had last chimed. She looked at her watch. A whole hour had passed, gone. Like the hour that ceases to exist or vanishes during the night when the clocks go forward to British Summer Time. It was three o’clock in the morning and then suddenly it was four o’clock. Sandra’s mother was alive and suddenly she was not.

And now, equally suddenly, there was no hurry. Sandra clung to the thought as the one consolation through her grief. No hurry at all. She could sit up here for hours if she wanted. Sure, she would have to call the doctor eventually, and — she shuddered — an undertaker. She would have to get the death certificate. The vicar would make an appearance. There were relatives to be phoned. Probate. Her mind whirred as she remembered all the arrangements when her sweet father had died six years back. Escaped, she had sometimes thought, and felt guilty about that as she stared at her mother’s pitifully atrophied body.

It was Tony who always made that joke. He said it was the only way her father had been able to get safely away from her mother. If he’d merely left her, she’d have tracked him down and turned up, pointing angrily at her watch, asking if he realized what the hell the time was.

Yes, she had been a difficult woman, a tyrannical clock-watcher, selfish, petulant, unreasonable and, in her last years, spoilt and paranoid. Her brother, Bill, had emigrated to Australia. Escaped, as Tony put it. And her sister, Marion, had gone to America; also escaped, according to Tony. So the duty of looking after their mother fell to Sandra.

Tony had always criticized her for that. She was too weak with her mother, he warned. She had always allowed the older woman to walk all over her, to dominate her, forcing her to live at home to look after her until she was past the age when she could have children of her own. It was not a bond of love, he told her, but of fear. He was right. Her mother had hated Tony for taking Sandra away, and she had hated him even more for not allowing Sandra to let her come and live with them until these last two years when she had been dying.

Now, as Sandra sat clutching her mother’s lifeless hand, she realized that for the first time she was free. She would no longer have to set the alarm for six-fifteen in order to take her mother a cup of tea in bed at six-thirty precisely — as her father had always done. She would no longer have to bring her breakfast up at seven-fifteen precisely, or bath her every morning at eight o’clock precisely. She would no longer have to set her mental clock to call her every hour, on the hour, whenever she was out of the house, and no longer have to suffer the abuse when she was late with a call, or came home later than she had stated, or was late with the afternoon tea tray or the supper tray or the cup of warm milk at eleven o’clock.

Slowly, half reluctantly, half anticipating her new freedom, she prised away the lifeless fingers one at a time, then laid her mother’s skeletal arm down. She turned out the light, closed the door, walked slowly to her own bedroom and slipped, exhausted, into bed beside Tony’s sleeping frame.

No need to wake him. It could wait. A few hours of sleep and she would be better able to cope with the grim business ahead — choosing the coffin, the hymns, the wording for the death notices in the papers. She lay still, drained after her weeks of vigil, her eyes wet and her heart hollow with grief.

She dozed fitfully, listening for the chimes of the grandfather clock, but heard only the rising, then abating, dawn chorus. Finally, she got out of bed, pulled on her dressing gown, closed the door and stood for a moment on the landing. Bitumen-black shadows rose out of the darkness to enfold her. She stared at the door of her mother’s room and felt a tightness grip her throat. Normally she would have been able to hear the clock ticking, but it was silent. Puzzled, she went downstairs into the hall. The hands of the grandfather clock pointed to three o’clock. It had stopped, she realized, her eyes sliding to her own wristwatch. It was six-forty-five.

Then she felt a deep unease. Three o’clock. She remembered now; it was coming back. She remembered what grief had made her forget earlier. Three o’clock. She had glanced at her watch to imprint it on her mind. Information the doctor might want to know: her mother had died at three o’clock precisely.

A tiny coil of fear spiralled inside her. The clock had been her mother’s wedding present to them. Stark, institutional, rather Teutonic, it dominated the small hall, stared her in the face each time she came in the house as if either to remind her it was time to call her mother or to reproach her for forgetting. Tony disliked it, but he had been trying, in those early days, to make friends with her mother. Thus the clock had stayed and had been given pride of place. He had taken to joking that there was no need to have a portrait of her mother in the house — the clock was a near perfect likeness of her.

Sandra turned and walked into the kitchen. As she went in, a blast of cold air greeted her, making her shiver. Startled, she wondered if the freezer door was open. The daylight seeping through the blinds was grey and flat, and the only sound was the rattling hum of the fridge. Then, as she reached for the light switch, something brushed past and she felt a rustle of fabric. She stood, absolutely rigid, goose pimples breaking out all over her body.

Her mother had come into the room.

Sandra stared at her in disbelief and terror. The old woman was standing, in her pink dressing gown, angrily tapping her watch. ‘Where’s my tea? What kind of a daughter are you that you forget to bring your dying mother her cup of tea?’

‘M-M-Mummy!’ she stammered finally. ‘You... you died... dead... you...’

The room was getting colder and the light was dimming perceptibly. Yet her mother seemed brighter, more vibrant, more alive in contrast with it. Relief momentarily flooded through Sandra’s confusion. ‘Mummy... you’re OK. I... I...’ her voice tailed off. Her eyes told her that her mother was standing in front of her, but her brain told her that was impossible. She reminded herself that only a few hours ago there had been no pulse, her mother had been turning cold, rigor mortis had begun to set in.

‘You and Tony can’t wait for me to go so you can be rid of me, can you?’

‘Mummy, th — that’s not true. It isn’t... I...’

Her mother stepped towards her, with her hand raised in the air. ‘You bitch! You slut! You tramp!’ She swiped her hand ferociously and Sandra flinched, stepping back out of her way with a startled cry.

‘Who are you talking to?’

Sandra turned. Tony, bleary-eyed, wrapped in his towelling dressing gown, stood behind her in the doorway. When she looked back, her mother had vanished. Her heart was hammering and she was gulping air in shock. ‘Mummy,’ she blurted. ‘I... I...’ She pushed past him, ran stumbling upstairs and threw open the door of the spare room.

Her mother lay there, exactly as she had left her. Slowly, hardly daring to breathe, Sandra walked across and touched her cheek. Her flesh was cold, like putty. Her eyes were still closed and there was the faintest hint of a rictus grin that lent her a smugness even in death, as if she were enjoying some final private joke.

Shaking with fear and confusion, Sandra hurled herself into the arms of Tony who had followed her. He held her tightly, and she pressed her face against the soft towelling and began to sob.

‘She’s cold,’ Tony said quietly and baldly. ‘She must have gone in her sleep.’

The following morning Sandra sat bolt upright in bed, wide awake. The bedside clock said six-fifteen. Fifteen minutes! She hurried downstairs, spooned tea into the pot and, while the kettle boiled, set her mother’s cup and saucer on the tray.

As she was pouring the water into the pot, she stopped.

What the hell am I doing?

Her mother was in the chapel of rest in a funeral parlour. The funeral was all arranged for next Tuesday.

Angrily, she threw the contents down the sink, walked back into the hall, glared defiantly at the hands of the clock still stuck on three o’clock and got back into bed. She nestled closely to Tony, slipped her hand inside the fly of his pyjamas and gently aroused him. Then she straddled him and they made harsh, savage love.

‘You’re free,’ Tony said as they luxuriated in their first Saturday lie-in for as long as they could remember. ‘You can get a life of your own now, of our own. We can go on holiday. And get rid of that damned clock.’

‘The man’s coming this morning to fix it,’ she said.

‘Christ, why spend any money on it? Let’s just bung it in the first auction we can find.’

‘I want it fixed first,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave it the way it is.’

‘Nothing wrong with the movement, Mrs Ellis. I’ve given it a good cleaning; could have been the dust that stopped it.’

Sandra thanked the man and paid him. As he was leaving she said, ‘I don’t suppose you know anyone who might be interested in buying it?’

‘Ah.’ He looked pensive. ‘Yes, well, it’s a fine piece. Try Atherton’s in Lewes High Street.’

Sandra closed the door. The hall was once again filled with the relentless tick of the grandfather clock and, as she watched it, she saw the minute hand jerk forward to eleven minutes past two.

Tony was playing golf and was not due back until late afternoon. She would arrange the sale now, she thought. The sooner the clock was out of the house the better. It might be disrespectful to get rid of it before the funeral, but Sandra no longer cared.

Tony arrived home shortly before five and was surprised to see Sandra’s Toyota wasn’t in the drive.

As he let himself in, he noticed the hands of the grandfather clock were again pointing to three o’clock and there was no tick emanating from the case. Strange, he thought; Sandra had told him the repairer would be coming at midday. Then a sound from the kitchen caught his attention.

It was Sandra.

‘Hallo, darling,’ he said, walking through. ‘I didn’t think you were home.’

Tea was laid on a tray on the table. ‘Mummy wanted her afternoon tea,’ she said. ‘I had to come back.’

He gave her a strange look. ‘Your mother’s dead — and where’s the car?’

The doorbell rang before she could reply. Sandra turned towards the kettle as if she had not heard either the question or the bell.

Tony opened the front door. Two policemen stood there, grimfaced, holding their caps in their hands.

‘Mr Anthony Ellis?’ asked one, his voice quavering slightly.

‘Yes,’ Tony replied.

‘Your wife has had an accident, sir. She was hit by a car as she was crossing Lewes High Street. She was taken to the Royal Sussex County Hospital but I’m afraid she was dead on arrival.’

Tony shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, you must have made a mistake — she’s here. Come in and see for yourself.’

He led them through into the kitchen. ‘Sandra, you’ll never guess...’ His voice dried up. She was not in the kitchen. There was no tray on the table.

He ran upstairs, calling her name, but only empty silence greeted him. Slowly, ashen, he walked back downstairs. ‘Wh-what... when... when did this happen?’

‘A little earlier this afternoon, sir,’ said the second policeman, who was eyeing the grandfather clock with a strange expression. ‘About three o’clock.’

Virtually Alive

Henry blew an expensive new chip, trashed an important mailbox file and misrouted himself halfway around the world, getting himself hopelessly lost. It was turning out to be a bummer of a Monday morning.

Henry, or henry.biomorph.org.uk, to give him his full name, dealt with the problem the same way he dealt with all problems: he went back to sleep, hoping that when he woke up, the problem would have gone away, or miraculously resolved itself, or that he might simply never wake up. Fat chance of that. You could not send someone into oblivion who was already in oblivion.

But try telling him that.

Tell me about it, he thought. I’ve had it up to here. Wherever ‘here’ was. He wasn’t even a disembodied entity — he was just a product of particle physics, a fractal reduction of a real human, a vortex of self-perpetuating energy waves three nanometres tall, inside which was contained all the information that had ever travelled down a computer cable or jumped a data link anywhere on the planet, which made him at the same time the most knowledgeable entity in the world and the least experienced. Some things he was not able to experience at all — food, sex, smell, love. He was a cache of knowledge, of acquired wisdom. If he owned a T-shirt, on it would be printed the legend: ‘Seen it all and what’s the use?’

But no one made T-shirts three nanometres tall and, if they did, such a thing would not have been much use to him, as nine trillion bytes of data zapping past him every attosecond would have incinerated it. He would have liked to have dumped from his memory the motto ‘All dressed up and nowhere to go’, since it had no relevance for him. But he could not dump info. When he tried, it simply came back, eventually, from somewhere else. He had seen every movie that had ever been made. Read every book. Watched every single television programme that had been broadcast on every channel in every country in the world over the past twenty-five years.

Then he saw the hand moving towards the switch.

A stab of fear from nowhere was followed by erupting panic; the hand was closing in on the switch, the red switch beneath which was printed in large red letters EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN. Beneath it should have been (but, of course, wasn’t) printed in equally large letters PRE-SHUTDOWN PROTOCOLS MUST BE EXECUTED TO AVOID IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE.

‘Protocols!’ Henry shrieked. ‘Protocols!’ His panic deepened. ‘PROTOCOLS!’

He felt himself being drawn rapidly upwards, in bewildering defiance of gravity; higher, faster, through a pitch-black vertical tunnel. Then he crashed, with a stark bolus of terror emptying into his veins, through into consciousness.

Awake mode. Full hunter-gatherer consciousness.

At least he thought he was awake, but he could never be quite sure of anything these days. He lay very still, fear pulsing through him as the nightmare receded, trying to find coherence in his surroundings. The same nightmare he had night after night, and it felt so damned real — except what the hell was reality these days? Life was confusing, one seamless time — space continuum of complete muddle. He stared blankly at the pixels on the pillow beside him.

Hundreds of them. Thousands. Millions, in fact, all needing assembling to make a coherent image of his wife. He always compressed her when he went to sleep (to save storage space on his hard disk — or brain as he still preferred to call it) but it was a hassle making sense of her again, like having to do a fiendish jigsaw puzzle every morning and do it in a ludicrously brief fragment of time. Sod it, how much smaller could time get? It had already gone from a picosecond to a nanosecond to an attosecond. An attosecond was to one second what one second was from now back to the Big Bang... and he had to assemble the puzzle in just one tiny fraction of that.

‘Morning, darling,’ Susan said with a sleepy smile, as the jumble of pixels rearranged themselves into a solid image of his wife, tangles of brown hair across her face. Gosh, she looked so lifelike, Henry thought, just the way he always remembered her — but so she should. He leaned across to kiss her. There was nothing there, of course, but he still kissed her every morning and she reciprocated with a tantalizing pout and an expression that was dangerously close to a smirk, as if she had some secret she was keeping from him. She giggled exactly the way she did every morning, and said, ‘Oh darling, I wish, I wish!’

He watched her get out of bed, and felt a sudden prick of lust as she arched her naked body, tossed her hair and strode to the bathroom. The door slammed shut. God, they hadn’t made love since... since... He trawled his memory racks — no, banks... no, cells, yes, brain cells (‘wetware’ they called it) — but could not remember when they had last made love. He couldn’t even remember when he had last remembered making love. The muddle was definitely worsening.

Brain Overload Stress Syndrome. It had become the Western world’s most common illness. The brain filled up, could not cope with new input, creating a sense of panic and confusion. Henry had been suffering from BOSS for some while now. The symptoms were so clear to him he hadn’t even bothered going to the doctor for confirmation: there was just too much bloody bandwidth in the world.

He sat up in alarm. I cannot make love to my wife because she does not exist, or rather she exists only in my memory. I am the sole reality. Then he said what he always said when he needed to re- assure himself: ‘Cogito, ergo sum. Then he repeated it in English because he felt it sounded better in English. ‘I think, therefore I am.’

Susan had been dead for two years now, but he had still not got used to it, still got cheated by the cruel dreams in which she was there, they were laughing, kissing, sometimes even making love; the dreams, yes, old times, good times. Gone.

But not entirely gone. Henry could hear her now in the bathroom. It was all part of the post-deanimation program hologram model PermaLife-7. Behind closed doors she made the sounds of ablutions, creating the illusion that she was still alive.

A few seconds later, at exactly 06.30 European Communal Time, the synthesized voice of the MinuteManager personal organizer kicked in: ‘Good morning, Mr and Mrs Garrick. It is Thursday, 17 November 2045.’

Henry realized now what was wrong. Susan had got up before the alarm. She never got up before the alarm. Ever.

The MinuteManager continued breezily: ‘Here are the headlines of today’s online Telegraph that I think will interest you. I will bring you editorial updates as I come across them during the next hour. The Prime Minister is arriving in Strasbourg this morning to present his arguments against Great Britain’s expulsion from the EU. Parliament will today debate the first stage in the reduction of power of the House of Commons in favour of government by consensus on the Internet... and delegates from the World Union of Concerned Scientists will today be pressing for international legislation limiting the cerebral capacity of sentient computers.’

‘You’re up early, darling,’ Henry said as Susan came back into the bedroom.

‘Busy day,’ she murmured in her gravelly voice, before beginning to rummage through her wardrobe, pausing every few moments to select a dress and hold it against herself in the mirror.

Breakfast, he thought. That was missing these days. She used to bring him breakfast in bed, on a tray. Tea, toast, cereal, a boiled egg. He was a creature of habit and she had prepared him the same breakfast every day of their marriage. He depended on her for everything, that’s why he had wanted to keep her on after her death. ‘Where’s my breakfast?’ he said grumpily. Except somewhere in his addled memory an assortment of bytes of stored information arranged themselves into a message informing him he had not eaten breakfast for two years. But they failed to yield the information as to why not.

It was terrible but he had great difficulty remembering anything about Susan’s death, he realized guiltily. It was as if he had stored the memory in some compartment and had forgotten where. One moment they had been contentedly married and the next moment she was no more. At least, not flesh and blood.

Henry Garrick could have had a full-body replica of his wife. But robot technology still had not perfected limb and muscle movement, so FBRs — as full-body replicas were known — tended to move with a clumsy articulation that made them look like retards. He had opted instead for a hologram — the standard post-deanimation program hologram model PermaLife-7.

Susan-2, as he had called her, was connected through a cordless digital satellite link to an online brain-download databank named ARCHIVE 4, and a network of lasers concealed in the walls gave her the ability to move freely around much of the apartment, though not of course beyond. The entire transformation of Susan from a wetware (flesh-and-blood) mortal into a hardware (digitized-silicon) virtual mortal had been handled by the undertakers.

Death was a redundant word these days. ‘Deanimation’, or ‘suspended animation’, or ‘altered sentient condition’, or even ‘metabolically challenged state’, were more accurate descriptions — at least, for anyone who took the consciousness-download option offered by most leading funeral directors these days as a pre-death service. Blimey, Henry thought, the array of options was bewildering for both the living and the downloaded. Options for everything: static books, interactive books; virtual reality, alternative reality. And, of course, good old television still had its following.

No one knew how many channels there were now. His MinuteManager trawled the airwaves around the clock for programmes fitting Henry’s taste parameters. It then divided them into two categories — those Henry would actually watch and those it would load straight into Henry’s brain via his silicon interface, so that he would simply have the memory of having watched them.

‘There’s some good legal retro on tonight,’ the MinuteManager announced.‘L.A.Law,Kramer vs. Kramer, Perry Mason, CSI, The Firm, Lawman, Rumpole of the Bailey. Would you care to watch any in real time or compressed time?’

For some moments Henry Garrick did not answer. He was still wondering why his wife had got up so early. Perhaps there was a problem with one of her modules — maybe he should call an engineer and get her looked at under the maintenance contract, if he could remember who the hell it was with. Then her voice startled him.

‘Goodbye, darling. Have a nice day.’

She was going out! She wasn’t supposed to go out...There wasn’t any way she could go out. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Hey, where the hell are you going?’

It was nearly midnight when Susan came back. She reeked of booze and smoke and had her arms around a man.

‘Where have you been?’ Henry yelled at his wife. ‘And who the hell is this creep?’

To Henry’s chagrin, Susan didn’t even respond. She did not even look at him.

‘I thought I would miss him,’ Susan said quietly to her new boyfriend, Sam. ‘I thought it would be nice to continue having him around the house. The problem is, he’s never realized he’s dead — can you believe it? He thought it was me that died! Poor sod, he was getting terribly muddled towards the end of his life. It’s spooky the way he looks at me sometimes. I mean, he’s just a hologram guided by a few bits of data, but it’s as if he’s still alive, still sentient. And he seems to be getting more and more so every day. He actually got mad at me for going out this morning! I guess it’s time to call a halt.’

‘Yes,’ Sam agreed, staring uneasily at the quivering hologram. ‘There comes a time when you have to let go.’

Susan lifted her arm and pressed the switch.

Meet Me at the Crematorium

‘I want you,’ he texted.

‘I want you more!’ she texted back.

Trevor was fond of saying that the past was another country. Well, at this moment for Janet, it was the future that was another country. The future — and another man.

And tonight she was going to have him. Again.

A sharp, erotic sensation coiled in the pit of her stomach at the thought of him. A longing. A craving.

Tonight I am going to have you. Again and again and again!

Her past receded in the rear-view mirror with every kilometre she covered. The forest of winter-brown pines that lined the autobahn streaked by on both sides, along with road signs, turn-offs and other, slower cars. She was in a hurry to get there. Her heart beat with excitement, with danger. Her pulse raced. She had been running on adrenaline for forty-eight hours, but she wasn’t tired — she was wide, wide awake. Going into the unknown. Going to meet a man who had been a total stranger until just a few weeks ago.

His photograph, which she had printed from the jpeg he had emailed her, lay on the passenger seat of her elderly grey Passat. He was naked. A tall, muscular guy, semi-erect as if teasing her to make him bigger. A tight stomach, nearly a six-pack, and she could already feel it pressing hard against her own. He had brown hairs, thick and downy, on his chest and on his legs, and she liked that. Trevor was white and bony, and his body was almost hairless. This man was tanned, lean, fit.

Hans.

He looked wild, like a young Jack Nicholson, his hair thinning on the top. He looked just the way he had sounded on the Internet chat room when she had first been attracted to him.

Feral.

The background to the photograph was strange. An enclosed, windowless space that might be the engine room of a ship, although she had a pretty good idea what it really was. Like everything about him, it excited her. Shiny, floor-to-ceiling metal casings, beige coloured, with dials, gauges, switches, levers, knobs, winking lights. It could be some kind of control room in a nuclear reactor? Or a mission control centre?

She felt on a mission very much under control!

Who had taken that photograph, she wondered? A lover? Had he taken it himself with a time delay function? She didn’t care, she wanted him. All of him. Wanted that thing that half-dangled, half-rose. Wanted to gather it deep inside her again. Wanted him so badly she was crazed with lust. Mosquitoes got crazed with blood lust. They had to land, take in the blood, even if it killed them. She had to have Hans, take him into her, into her body, into her life, even if that killed her, too.

She didn’t care. For now she was free. She had been free for two whole days and that was longer than she had been free for years.

Over the scratchy reception of the car’s radio, struggling through the occasional interference of someone talking in German, Bob Dylan was singing ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’.

They were. They really were! Flecks of sleet struck the windscreen, and the wipers cleared them. It was cold outside and that was good. It was good to make love in the warmth when it was cold outside. And, besides, the cold had plenty of other advantages.

I will never let you go, Trevor had said. Never. Ever. He had told her that for years.

Hans explained to her precisely what he was going to do to her. Exactly how he would make love to her the first time. And he had done so just the way he had described. She liked that Germanic precision. The way he had studied every detail of her photograph. The way he already knew her body when they met. The way he told her he loved her hair, and had buried his face into it. Into all of it.

My name is Hans. I am thirty-seven, divorced, looking to start a new life with a lady of similar age. I am liking brunettes. Slim. Excuse my bad English. I like you. I don’t know you, but I like you.

I like you even more!

She would be forty this year. Hans would be her toyboy, she had teased him. He had laughed and she liked that; he had a big sense of humour. A wicked sense of humour.

Everything about him was totally wicked.

She looked OK, she knew. She’d never been a beauty, but she understood how to make herself look attractive, sexy. Dressed to kill, plenty of men would look at her. She used to keep in shape with her twice-weekly aerobics classes, then, when Trevor had gone through one of his particularly nasty phases, she had turned to binge eating — and then binge drinking — for comfort. Then she enrolled in WeightWatchers, and the fat and the flab and the cellulite had come off again. Her figure was good, her stomach firm — not a distended pouch, like the stomachs of some of her friends who’d had children. And her boobs were still firm, still defying gravity. She’d like to have been a little taller — she’d always wished that — but you couldn’t have everything.

Anyhow, Trevor, who was much taller than her, told her the very first time they had made love that people were all the same size in bed. That had made her smile.

Trevor used to tell her that nothing you do in life is ever wasted. He was always coming up with sayings, and there was a time when Janet had listened to them intently, adored hearing them, filed them away in her memory and loved repeating them back to him.

Loved him so damned much it hurt.

And she hadn’t even minded the pain. Which was a good thing because pain was something Trevor did really, really well. The knots, the handcuffs, the nipple clamps, the leather straps, the spiked dog collar, the whips, the stinging bamboo canes. He liked to hurt her; knew how to cause her pain and where to inflict it. But that had been OK because she loved him. She would have done anything for him.

But that was then.

And sometime between then and now he had changed. They had both changed. His horizons had narrowed; hers had widened.

Every system can be beaten. That was one of his sayings.

He was right.

Now she was a lifetime away. So it seemed. And one thousand, two hundred and twelve kilometres away, driving through spartan December pine forest. Click. One thousand, two hundred and thirteen. And, in a few moments, travelling at one hundred and thirty klicks an hour, with her life in the two large suitcases jammed on the rear seats, one thousand, two hundred and fourteen.

‘Hagen 3.’

The turn-off was coming up. She felt a tightening of her throat, and a prick of excitement deep inside her. How many villages, small towns, big cities had she driven through or passed by in her travels, during her life, and wondered, each time, what would it be like to stop here? What would it be like to drive into this place as a total stranger, knowing no one, then check into a hotel, or rent a small flat, and start a totally new life?

She was about to realize her dream. Hagen. So far it was just images she had found when she had Googled it. Hagen. The thirty-seventh largest town in Germany. She liked that. A population of two hundred thousand. On the edge of the Ruhr. A town few knew about outside of its inhabitants. A once important industrial conurbation that was now reinventing itself as a centre of the arts, the websites had proclaimed. She liked that. She could see herself in a place that was a centre of the arts.

Up until now, she had not had much contact with the arts. Well, there had never been time, really. During the week she was always on the road, driving from place to place as an area sales representative for a company that made industrial brushes. Finishing brushes for the printing trade. Brushes for vacuum cleaners. Brushes for the bottom of elevator doors. For electrical contacts. She would miss her flirting and banter with her clients, the almost exclusively male buyers at the factories, the component wholesalers, the plant hire and hardware stores. She was missing her comfortable, new, company Ford Mondeo, too, but the Passat was OK. It was fine. It was a small price to pay. Tiny.

Then, at the weekends, Trevor wasn’t interested in any area of the arts. He didn’t want to know about theatre, or art galleries or concerts, except for those of Def Leppard — great music if you like that kind of thing, which she didn’t — but they were not art, at least not in her view. He just wanted to watch football, then either go to the pub, or more preferably to a particular S&M club he had discovered in London, where they had become regulars. He liked, most of all, to hurt and humiliate her in front of other people.

Ahead of her and to her left, across the railings on the elevated road, she could see the start of a town. It lay in a valley, surrounded by low, rounded, wintry hills. Everything she could see was mostly grey or brown, the colours bleached out by the gloomy, overcast sky. But to her, it was all intensely beautiful.

Hagen. A place where no one knew her, and she knew no one. Except just one man. And she barely knew him. A place where a stranger she was going to have sex with tonight, for just the second time, lived and worked. She tried to remember what his voice sounded like. What he smelled like. A man so crude he could send her a photo of himself naked and semi-erect, but a man so tender he could send her poetry by Aparna Chatterjee.

Lust is what I speak tonight,

Lust is what I see tonight,

Lust is what I feel tonight,

And I Lust You.

Show me your Body

Inside out...

No clothes on,

No holds barred...

Bit by bit,

Part by part,

Give me your smells,

And your sweat...

Trevor had never read a poem in his life.

The road dipped down suddenly beneath a flyover that seemed, from this angle, as if it went straight through the middle of a row of grimy, pastel-blue townhouses. She halted at a traffic light in the dark shadow beneath the flyover, checked in her mirror for an instant — just checking — then saw a yellow road sign. There was an arrow pointing straight ahead, with the word ‘Zentrum’. Another arrow pointed left, and bore the word ‘Theater’.

She liked that. Liked the fact that the second word she saw on arriving in the town was Theater. This was going to be a good place — she felt it in her bones, in her heart, in her soul. Hagen. She said the word to herself and smiled.

Behind her a car hooted. The lights were green. She drove on past a road sign that read ‘Bergischer Ring’, and realized from the directions she had memorized that she was close to her hotel. But anxious as she was to see Hans, she wanted to get her bearings. She wanted to arrive slowly, absorbing it all, understanding the geography. She had all the time in the world, and she wanted to get it right, from the very beginning. It seemed too sudden that one moment she was on the autobahn, the next she was slap in the centre of the town. She wanted to feel it, explore it slowly, breathe it in, absorb it.

She turned right at the next road she came to, and drove up a steep, curving hill, lined with tall, terraced townhouses on both sides, then past a grimy church. She made a left turn at random, up an even steeper road, and then suddenly she was in scrubby, tree-lined countryside, winding up a hill, with the town below her.

She pulled over to the curb, parking in front of a butane gas cylinder that was partially concealed by a threadbare hedge, stopped and climbed out. The central locking had packed up a long time ago, so she went around the car, making sure the doors and the boot were locked. Then she walked over to the hedge and looked down, across the valley, at her new home.

Hagen. A place that boasted, among its tourist attractions, Germany’s first crematorium. Which had a certain convenient ring to it.

The town lay spread out and sprawling in the bowl beneath her. Her eyes swept the grey, urban landscape beyond the gas cylinder, below the murky, sleeting sky. She saw a cluster of industrial buildings, with a white chimney stack rising higher than the distant hills. A small nucleus of utilitarian apartment buildings. A church spire. A Ferris wheel brightly lit, although it was only three o’clock in the afternoon, reminding her that darkness would start to fall soon. She saw a narrow river bordered by grimy industrial buildings. Houses, some with red roofs, some grey. She wondered who lived in them all, how many of their inhabitants she would get to meet.

It is neither fish nor meat, Hans had said, telling her about Hagen. But she didn’t mind what it was, or was not. It looked huge, vast, far bigger than a town of two hundred thousand. It looked like a vast city. A place where she could get lost, and hide, forever.

She loved it more every second.

She noticed a strange, cylindrical building, all glass, lit in blue, above what looked like an old water tower, and she wondered what it was. Hans would tell her. She would explore every inch of this place with him, in between the times they lay in bed, naked, together. If they could spare any time to explore anything other than each other’s bodies, that was!

She turned away from the view and walked on up the hill, hands dug into the pockets of her black suede jacket, the sleet tickling her face, her scarf tickling her neck, breathing in the scents of the trees and the grass. She followed the road up into a wooded glade, until it became a track, which after a few minutes came out into a knoll of unkempt grass, with a row of trees on the far side and a rectangular stone monument at the highest point.

She climbed up to it, and stopped at a partially collapsed metal fence that was screening it off for some kind of repair work. She knew it was the Bismarck monument, because she recognized it from various websites as one of Hagen’s landmarks. She stared at it silently, then took her little digital camera from her bag and photographed it. Her first photograph of Hagen. Then she stood still, licking the sleet off the air, feeling a moment of intense happiness, and freedom.

I’m here. I made it. I did it!

Her heart was burning for Hans, and yet, strangely, she still felt in no hurry. She wanted to savour these moments of anticipation. To appreciate her freedom. To relish not having to hurry home to make Trevor his evening meal (always a variation on meat and potatoes as he would eat nothing else). To be able to stand for as long as she wanted beneath the statue of Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, a man partly responsible for shaping the country that was about to become her adopted home, for however many days of freedom she had remaining. And she did not know how many that might be.

Better to live one day as a lion than one thousand years as a lamb, Trevor was fond of saying, strutting around in his studded leathers and peaked cap.

Of course, he would not have approved of her being here. And particularly not of her standing like an acolyte worshipping at the statue of Bismarck. Trevor had a thing about Germany. It wasn’t the war or anything like that. He said the Germans had no humour — well, Hans had proved him wrong.

He also said the Germans were efficient, as if that were a fault!

Trevor had a thing about all kinds of stuff. He had a particularly big thing about crematoriums. They gave him the creeps, he said. Whereas she found them fascinating. Yet another thing on which they disagreed. And she always found his dislike of crematoriums particularly strange, since he worked in the funeral business.

In fact, thinking back on fifteen years of marriage, what exactly had they agreed on? Rubber underwear? Handcuffs? Masks? Inflicting modest pain on each other? Bringing each other to brutal climaxes that were snatched moments of release, escape from their mutual loathing? Escape from the realities they did not want to face? Such as the fact — thank God for it now — that they could not have children?

Time was when she really had been in love with him. Deeply, truly, crazily, do-anything-for-him, unconditional love. She had always been attracted by death. By people who worked close to death. Trevor was an embalmer with a firm of funeral directors. He had a framed certificate, which was hung in pride of place in the sitting room, declaring him to be ‘A Member of the Independent Association of Embalmers’.

She used to like his hands to touch her. Hands that had been inserting tubes into a cadaver, to pump out the blood and replace it with pink embalming fluid. Hands that had been applying make-up to a cadaver’s face. Brushing a cadaver’s hair.

The closer she was to death, the more alive she felt.

She liked to lie completely naked, and still, and tell Trevor to treat her as if she were a cadaver. She loved to feel his hands on her. Probing her. Slowly bringing her alive.

The best climax — absolutely the best ever, in her entire life — was one night when they had made love in the embalming room at the funeral director’s. With two naked corpses lying, laid out on trolleys, beside them.

Then she had truly felt alive. The way she felt now.

And those same feelings would happen again with Hans, she knew it, she absolutely knew it. She was going to be so happy with Hans.

‘Love doesn’t last, ’Trevor had responded one night when she told him she was not happy. ‘Happiness is an illusion,’ he had said. ‘Only an idiot can be happy twenty-four/seven. The wise man seeks to be content, not happy. Carpe diem.’

‘You have to face reality,’ he had carped on, after she had told him she was leaving him. ‘You can run but you can’t hide.’

She was running now.

Hit someone over the head with a big stick hard enough and for long enough and one day they will hit you back. Even harder.

She could not put a time or a date on when it had all started to go south. Not the exact moment. Could not get a fix on it the way you can pinpoint your position with a set of navigation coordinates. It was more of a gradual erosion.

But once you had made your decision, there was no going back. You just had to keep running. As Trevor used to say, it’s not the fall that gets you, it’s the sudden stop.

And now, of course, Hagen was that sudden stop. It scared her almost as much as it thrilled her. In truth, she had learned a lot from him.

‘I will never let you go, ever,’ he had said, when she once suggested that they might be happier apart.

Then he had punched her in the face so hard for suggesting it, she had not been able to go to work for several days, until the bruises had subsided and the stitches had been removed. As usual, she covered up for him, with a lame excuse about being knocked off her bicycle.

It was his diabetes that caused his mood swings, she had come to learn over many years. Too little sugar and he became edgy and aggressive. Too much and he became sleepy and docile as a lamb.

She retraced her steps from the Bismarck monument to her car, then threaded her way back down the network of roads, noting the pleasant houses, wondering what kind of house Hans had lived in until his marriage break-up. After a few minutes she found herself back on the Bergischer Ring, where she turned right. She drove along, past a market square where the Ferris wheel had been erected at the edge of a small fairground. She saw a row of kerbside Christmassy tableaux, one after the other, with puppets acting out fairy-tale scenes. One was full of busy bearded goblins with hammers. Two small girls, clutching their mother’s hands, stared at them in wonder.

Janet stared at the girls as she waited at a traffic light, and then, wistfully, at the mother. Forty was not too old. Maybe she and Hans could have children. Two little girls? And one day she would stand here, holding their hands, a contented hausfrau of Hagen, while they looked at the hammering goblins.

Just three weeks to Christmas. She would wake up on Christmas morning, in her new country, in the arms of her new man.

As she drove on she saw, on her left, a brightly lit shop, the windows full of sausages hanging in clumps, like fruit, the name Wursthaus König above the door. She stopped for a moment and checked her map. Then after a short distance she turned left into a side street, past a restaurant, and pulled over outside the front entrance of the hotel she had found on the Internet.

Hans had invited her to stay with him. But after only one date, even if it had finished — or rather climaxed — in a way she had not experienced in years, she wanted to keep her options open. And her independence. Just in case.

She tugged one bag off the rear seat of the car, and wheeled it in through the front door of the hotel. Inside was dark and gloomy, with a small reception desk to her right and a staircase in front of her. A living cadaver of a man stood behind the desk and she gave him her name. The place smelled old and worn. The kind of place travelling sales people would stay in. The kind of dump she had occasionally found herself in during her early years on the road.

He passed her a form to fill in, and asked if she would like help with her luggage. ‘No,’ she told him emphatically. She filled in the form and handed him her passport.

And he handed her an envelope. ‘A message for you,’ he said.

Using the one word of German she knew, she said, ‘Danke.’ Then, as she went back outside to get her second suitcase, she tore it open, with eager fingers and nails she had varnished to perfection for him. For Hans.

The note read: ‘Meet me at the crematorium. xx’

She smiled. You wicked, wicked man!

The cadaver helped her up two flights of stairs to a room that was as tired and drab as the rest of the place. But at least she could see down into the street and keep an eye on her car, and she was pleased about that. She popped open the lid of one case, changed her clothes and freshened herself up, spraying perfume in all the places — except one — that she remembered Hans had liked to press his face into most of all last time.

Twenty minutes later, in the falling dark, after getting lost twice, she finally pulled into the almost deserted crematorium car park. There was just one other car there — an elderly brown Mercedes that tilted to one side, as if it had broken suspension.

As she climbed out, carefully locking the car, she looked around. It was one of the most beautiful car parks she had seen in her life, surrounded by all kinds of carefully tended trees, shrubs and flowers as if it were a botanical garden. It barely felt like December here; it seemed more like spring. No doubt the intention — a perpetual spring for mourners.

She walked up a tarmac footpath that was wide enough for a vehicle, and lined with manicured trees and tall black streetlamps. Anticipation drove her forwards, her pace quickening with every step, her breathing becoming deeper and faster. God, her nerves were jangling now. A million butterflies were going berserk in her stomach. Her boots crunched on grit; her teeth crunched, grinding from the cold, but more from nerves.

She walked through open wrought-iron gates, and continued along, passing a cloistered single-story building, clad in ivy, its walls covered in memorial plaques.

And then, ahead of her, she saw the building.

And she stopped in her tracks.

And her heart skipped a beat.

Oh, fuck! Oh, wow!

This was a crematorium?

It was one of the most beautiful buildings she had ever seen in her life. Rectangular, art deco in style, in stark white, with a portico of square black marble columns and windows, high up, like portholes on a ship, inset with black rectangles. It was topped by an elegant pitched red-tiled roof.

She was stunned.

There were steps leading up to the portico, with a stone balustrade to the right, giving a view down across terraces of elegant tombstones set in what looked like glades in a forest. When I die, this is where I would like to lie. Please, God. Please, Hans.

Please!

She climbed the steps and pushed the door, which was unlocked and opened almost silently. She stepped inside and simply stopped in her tracks. Now she could understand why the crematorium featured so prominently as one of Hagen’s major attractions.

It was like stepping inside a Mondrian painting. Vertical stripes of black and white, with geometrical squares in the centre, varying in depth, width and height, at one end. At the other end was a semi-domed ceiling, with quasi-religious figures painted on a gold backdrop, above more black-and-white geometrics.

Beneath was a curious-looking altar, a white cross rising above what looked like a white two-metre-long beer barrel.

As she stared at it, there was a noise that made her jump. A sudden, terrifying sound. A mechanical grinding, roaring, vibrating bellow of heavy machinery. The barrel began to rise, the white cross with it, the floor trembling beneath her. As it rose higher, behind it a bolt of grey silk slowly unfurled. Then a coffin rose into view. Janet stood, mesmerized. The grinding, roaring sound filled the galleried room.

Then the sound stopped as abruptly as it had started.

There was a moment of total silence.

The coffin lid began to rise.

Janet screamed.

Then she saw Hans’s smiling face.

He pushed the lid aside and it fell to the floor with an echoing bang, and he began to haul himself out, grinning from ear to ear, hot and sweaty, wearing nothing but a boiler suit over his naked skin and black work boots.

She stood and stared at him for a moment, in total wonder and joy. He looked even more amazing than she remembered. More handsome, more masculine, more raw.

He stood up, and he was taller than she remembered, too.

‘My most beautiful angel in all the world,’ he said. ‘You are here! You came! You really came!’

‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’

My brave angel,’ he said. ‘My brave English angel.’ Then he scooped her in his strong arms, pulled her tightly to him, so tightly she could feel the contour of his body beneath the thin blue cotton, and kissed her. His breath smelled sweet, and was tinged with cigarette smoke, garlic and beer, the manly smells and taste she remembered. She kissed him back, wildly, deeply, feeling his tongue, holding it for a second, losing it, then finding it again.

Finally, breathless with excitement, their lips separated. They stood still, staring at each other, his eyes so close to hers they were just a warm blur.

‘So,’ he said. ‘We have work to do, ja?’

She pushed her hands down inside the front of his trousers and gripped him gently. ‘We do,’ she smiled.

He drew breath sharply and exhaled, grinning. ‘First we must work.’

‘First we make love,’ she replied.

‘You are a very naughty little girl,’ he teased.

‘Are you going to punish me?’

‘That will depend, yes? On how naughty you have been. Have you been very naughty?’

She nodded solemnly, stood back a pace, and put her finger in her mouth like a little child. ‘Very,’ she said.

‘Tell me?’

‘I can show you.’

He smiled. ‘Go and fetch the car, I will be prepared.’

Five minutes later, Janet reversed the Passat up to the side entrance of the crematorium, where there was a green elevator door. As she halted the car and climbed out, the metal door slid open and Hans stood there, with a coffin on a trolley. There was a strange expression on his face and he was a looking at her in a way that made her, suddenly, deeply uncomfortable.

Her eyes shot to the coffin, then back to his face.

Then to the coffin.

Had she made a terrible mistake? To be alone, here, with all her bridges burned, her trail carefully covered. Had she walked into a trap?

No one at home in Eastbourne knew where she was. No one in the world. Only Hans. And she was alone with him at the crematorium, in the falling darkness, and he was standing, looking at her, beside an open coffin.

She felt suddenly as if her insides had turned to ice. She wanted to be home, back home, where it was safe. Dull but safe. With Trevor.

But none of that was an option any longer.

Then he smiled. His normal, big, warm Hans smile. And the ice inside her melted in an instant, as if it had flash-thawed. ‘In the trunk?’ he questioned.

Nodding, she popped open the boot of the car, and then they both stood and stared for some moments at the black plastic sheeting, and the curved shape inside it.

‘No problem?’ he asked her, putting his arm around her and nibbling her ear tenderly.

‘He was good as gold,’ she said, wriggling with the excitement of his touch.‘Went out like a lamb after I swapped his insulin for sugared water. But he was heavy. I nearly didn’t have the strength to get him into the boot.’

Where there’s a will, there’s a way, Trevor was fond of saying. And, of course, what was particularly sweet was that Trevor had written a will a long time ago, leaving everything to her, naturally.

‘It is good he is so thin,’ Hans said, unwrapping him. ‘I have two cadavers waiting for the burners and one is very thin. I have the death certificates from the doctor’s; we are all set. He will fit nicely into the coffin with the thin one. No one will know a thing.’

Down in the basement, as they wheeled the coffin out of the elevator, Janet recognized the beige metal casings, the instruments, the dials. The word ‘Ruppmann’ was printed above them, and on other machines in the room, and on top of wiring diagrams. Opposite them, two coffins sat, one with the lid open.

A few minutes passed and the thin occupant of the open coffin now had a companion, squashed tightly against him, as Hans screwed the lid down.

Then Hans smiled. A totally wicked smile.

A few minutes later, after he had pressed a number of buttons and the mechanical doors had closed, and the roar of the burners of the two huge furnaces rose to a crescendo, they could see, through the observation window, flames licking along the lengths of the two coffins.

Janet felt Hans’s arms around her waist. Slowly, shedding their clothes, they sank to the floor.

Smoke rose from the chimney into the night sky. They made love while the burners rose to their optimum temperature, and their own body heat rose at the same time.

In the morning, Hans raked the remaining pieces of bone into the cremulator, then ground them to a powder that mingled with the ashes. Then they stepped through the crematorium doors, arm in arm. Outside, in the early, pre-dawn light, the world seemed an altogether brighter place. Birds were starting to sing.

Hans slipped an arm around her, then whispered into her ear, ‘You know, my English angel, I will never let you go.’

And for an instant he sounded just like Trevor. She kissed him, then whispered back into his ear, ‘Don’t push your luck.’

‘What is that meaning?’ he asked.

She smiled.

Venice Aphrodisiac

The first time they came to Venice, Johnny had told his wife he was on an important case; Joy had told her husband she was going to see her Italian relatives.

In the large, dingy hotel room with its window overlooking the Grand Canal, they tore off each other’s clothes before they had even unpacked, and made love to the sound of lapping water and water taxis blattering past outside. She was insatiable; they both were. They made love morning, noon and night, only venturing out for food to stoke their energy. On that trip they barely even took time out to see the sights of the city. They had eyes only for each other. Horny eyes, each greedy for the other’s naked body. They were aware that they had precious little time.

Johnny whispered to her that Woody Allen, whose movies they both loved, was once asked if he thought that sex was dirty, and Woody had replied, ‘Only if you are doing it right.’

So they did it right. Over and over again. And in between they laughed a lot. Johnny told Joy she was the sexiest creature in the world. She told him no, he was.

One time, when he was deep inside her, she whispered into Johnny’s ear, ‘Let’s promise each other to come back and make love here in this room every year, for ever.’

‘Even after we’re dead?’ he said.

‘Why not? You’re stiff when you’re dead, aren’t you? Stiff as a gondolier’s oar!’

‘You’re a wicked woman, Joy Jackson.’

‘You wouldn’t like me if I wasn’t, you horny devil.’

‘We could come back as ghosts, couldn’t we, and haunt this room?’

‘We will!’

Two years later, acrimoniously divorced and free, they married. And they honeymooned in Venice in the same hotel — a former palazzo — in the same room. While they were there, they vowed, as before, to return to the same room every year for their anniversary, and they did so, without fail. In the beginning they always got naked long before they got around to unpacking. Often, after dining out, they felt so horny they couldn’t wait until they got back to the hotel.

One time they did it late at night in a moored gondola. They did it beneath the Rialto Bridge. And under several other bridges. Venice cast its spell — coming here was an aphrodisiac to them. They drank Bellinis in their favourite café in Piazza San Marco, swigged glorious white wines from the Friuli district and gorged on grilled seafood in their favourite restaurant, the Corte Sconta, which they always got lost trying to find, every year.

Some mornings, spent with passion, they’d hop on an early water taxi and drink espressos and grappa on the Lido at sunrise. Later, back in their dimly lit hotel room, they would take photographs of each other naked and film themselves making love. One time, for fun, they made plaster-of-Paris impressions of what Joy liked to call their ‘rude bits’. They were so in lust, nothing, it seemed, could stop them, or could ever change.

Once, on an early anniversary, they visited Isola di San Michele, Venice’s cemetery island. Staring at the graves, Johnny asked her, ‘Are you sure you’re still going to fancy me when I’m dead?’

‘Probably even more than when you’re alive!’ she had replied. ‘If that’s possible.’

‘We might rattle a bit, if we were — you know — both skeletons,’ he had said.

‘We’ll have to do it quietly, so we don’t wake up the graveyard,’ she’d replied.

‘You’re a bad girl,’ he had said, before kissing her on the lips.

‘You’d never have loved me if I was good, would you?’

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Probably not.’

‘Let me feel your oar!’

That was then. Now it was thirty-five years later. They’d tried — and failed — to start a family. For a while it had been fun trying, and eventually they’d accepted their failure. A lot of water under the bridge. Or rather, all four hundred and nine of Venice’s bridges. They’d seen each one, and walked over most of them. Johnny ticked them off on a coffee-stained list he brought with him each year, and which became more and more creased each time he unfolded it. Johnny was a boxticker, she’d come to realize. ‘I like to see things in tidy boxes,’ he would say.

He said it rather too often.

‘Only joking,’ he said, when she told him she was fed up hearing this.

They say there’s many a true word spoken in jest but, privately, he was not jesting. Plans were taking shape in his mind. Plans for a future without her.

In happier times they’d shared a love of Venetian glass, and used to go across to the island of Murano on every trip to see their favourite glass factory, Novità Murano. They filled their home in Brighton with glass ornaments — vases, candlesticks, paperweights, figurines, goblets. Glass of every kind. They say that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and they didn’t. Not physical ones. Just metaphorical ones. More and more.

The stones had started the day she peeked on his computer.

Johnny had been a police officer — a homicide detective. She had worked in the Divisional Intelligence Unit of the same force. After he had retired, at forty-nine, he’d become bored. He managed to get a job in the fulfilment department of a mail-order company that supplied framed cartoons of bad puns involving animals. Their bestselling cartoon range was one with pictures of bulls on: Bullshit. Bullderdash. Bullish. And so on.

Johnny sat at the computer all day, ticking boxes in a job he loathed, despatching tasteless framed cartoons to people he detested for buying them, and then going home to a woman who looked more like the bulls in the cartoons every day. He sought out diversions on his computer and began by visiting porn sites. Soon he started advertising himself, under various false names, on Internet contact sites.

That was what Joy found when she peeked into the contents of his laptop one day when he had gone to play golf — at least, that had been his story. He had not been to any golf club. It was strokes and holes of a very different kind he had been playing and, confronted with the evidence, he’d been forced to fess up. He was full frontal, naked and erect on eShagmates.

Naked and erect for everyone in the world but her.

And so it was, on their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, that they returned to the increasingly dilapidated palazzo on the Grand Canal, each with a very different agenda in their hearts and minds to the ones they’d had on those heady days of their honeymoon and the years that followed.

He planned to murder her here in Venice. He’d planned last year to murder her during a spring weekend break in Berlin, and the year before that, in Barcelona. Each time he had bottled out. As a former homicide detective, if anyone knew how to get away with murder, he did, but equally he was aware that few murderers ever succeeded. Murderers made mistakes in the white heat of the moment. All you needed was one tiny mistake — a clothing fibre, a hair, a discarded cigarette butt, a scratch, a footprint, a CCTV camera you hadn’t spotted. Anything.

Certain key words were fixed in his mind from years of grim experience. Motive. Body. Murder weapon. They were the three things that would catch out a murderer. Without any one of those elements, it became harder. Without all three, near impossible.

So all he had to do was find a way to dispose of her body. Lose the murder weapon (as yet not chosen). And, as for motive — well, who was to know he had one? Other than the silly friends Joy gossiped with constantly.

The possibilities for murder in Venice were great. Joy could not swim and its vast lagoon presented opportunities for drowning — except it was very shallow. There were plenty of buildings with rickety steps where a person could lose their footing. Windows high enough to ensure a fatal fall.

It had been years since they’d torn each other’s clothes off in the hotel room when they’d arrived. Instead, today, as usual, Johnny logged on and hunched over his computer. He had a slight headache, which he ignored. Joy ate a bar of chocolate from the minibar, followed by a tin of nuts, then the complimentary biscuits that came with the coffee. Then she had a rest, tired from the journey. When she woke, to the sound of Johnny farting, she peered suspiciously over his shoulder to check if he was on one of his porn chat sites.

What she had missed while she slept was the emails back and forth between Johnny and his new love, Mandy, a petite divorcée he’d met at the gym where he’d gone to keep his six-pack in shape. He planned to return from Venice a free man.

The Bellinis in their favourite café had changed, and were no longer made with fresh peach juice or real champagne. Venice now smelled of drains. The restaurant was still fine, but Johnny barely tasted his food, he was so deep in thought. And his headache seemed to be worsening. Joy had drunk most of the bottle of white wine and, with the Bellini earlier, into which he had slipped a double vodka, seemed quite smashed. They had six more nights here. Once, the days had flown by. Now he struggled to see how they could even fill tomorrow. With luck he would not have to.

He called the waiter over for the bill, pointing to his wife who was half asleep and apologizing that she was drunk. It could be important that the waiter would remember this. Yes, poor lady, so drunk her husband struggled to help her out...

They staggered along a narrow street, and crossed a bridge that arced over a narrow canal. Somewhere in the dark distance a gondolier was singing a serenade.

‘You haven’t taken me on a gondola in years,’ she chided, slurring her words. ‘I haven’t felt your oar much in years either,’ she teased. ‘Maybe I could feel it tonight?’

I’d rather have my gall bladder removed without an anaesthetic, he thought.

‘But I suppose you can’t get it up these days,’ she taunted. ‘You don’t really have an oar any more, do you? All you have is a little dead mouse that leaks.’

The splash of an oar became louder. So did the singing.

The gondola was sliding by beneath them. In it, entwined in each other’s arms, were a young man and a young woman, clearly in love, as they had once been. As he was now with Mandy Brent. He stared down at the inky water.

Two ghosts stared back.

Then only one.

It took Joy some moments to realize anything was wrong. Then she turned in drunken panic, screaming for help, for a doctor, for an ambulance. A kindly neurosurgeon told her some hours later, in broken English, that there was nothing anyone could have done. Her husband had been felled by a massive cerebral aneurysm. He would have been dead within seconds.

Back in England, after Johnny’s body had been repatriated, Joy’s troubles really started. The solicitor informed her that he had left half of his entire estate, which was basically the house they lived in, to a woman she had never heard of. The next thing she knew, the woman was on the phone wanting to discuss the funeral arrangements.

‘I’m having him cremated,’ Joy said.

‘He told me he wanted to be buried,’ Mandy Brent insisted. ‘I’d like that. I’d like to have somewhere I can go and sit with him.’

All the more reason, thought Joy, to have him cremated. But there was another bigger reason she had been thinking of. Much bigger.

The following year, on what would have been their thirty-sixth wedding anniversary, Joy returned to Venice, to the same room in the dilapidated former palazzo. She unpacked from her suitcase the small grey plastic urn and put it on the windowsill. She stared at it, then at the view of the Grand Canal beyond.

‘Remember what we said to each other, Johnny? Do you? That promise we made to each other? About coming back here? Well, I’m helping us to keep that promise.’

The next morning she took a water taxi across to Murano. She spoke to the same courteous assistant in the glass factory, Valerio Barbero, who had helped them every year since they had started coming. Signor Barbero was an old man now, stooped and close to retirement. He told Joy how very deeply sympathetic he was, how sad, what a fine gentleman Signor Jones had been. And — as if this was quite a normal thing for him — he accepted the contents of the package and her design without even the tiniest flicker of his rheumy eyes. It would be ready in three days, he assured her.

It was. Joy could barely contain her excitement on the water taxi ride back to the mainland. She stopped in St Mark’s Square to gulp down two Bellinis in rapid succession — to get her in the mood, she decided.

Then she entered the hotel room, hung the ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the door and locked it from the inside. She untied the pretty blue bow around the tall box and carefully opened it, removing the two contents.

The first item was the plaster-of-Paris mould she had taken of Johnny’s rude bits, all those years ago, when he had been particularly drunk and even more aroused than usual. The second was the exquisite glass replica, now filled with the grey powder from the urn.

Slowly, feeling pleasantly tipsy from the Bellinis, she undressed, then lay on her back on the bed. ‘Remember, Johnny?’ she whispered. ‘Remember that promise we made each other that very first time we came here? About coming back and making love here in this room every year forever? You were worried, weren’t you, about not being able to get stiff enough for me after you were dead? Well, you really shouldn’t have concerned yourself, should you?’

She caressed the long, slender glass. Hard as rock.

Stiff as a gondolier’s oar.

Just like she remembered him.

Time Rich

Wealthy guy, 39, non-smoker, tall, GSOH, good looking, WLTM lady for fun, friendship and possibly more...

It isn’t actually that I am being unfaithful to my wife at this moment, as I sit in my small den, at 3 a.m., logged on to a dating agency on the Internet, while Alison sleeps in the bedroom on the other side of the wall.

Because, you see, it is not really me at all who is online. Not debt ridden Clive Talbot, with my credit cards all maxed out, my BMW about to be repossessed, and my mortgage company weeks away from foreclosing. They say if you haven’t made it by forty, you aren’t going to make it, ever. Well, I’m just six months short of that big birthday and I’m determined no one is going to hold that two-fingered ‘Loser’ sign up against my forehead.

No, sir.

Only problem is that, at this moment, my sole possession of real value is the gold Rolex on my wrist, which I bought years ago after a big poker win. In truth, my only ever big poker win. It is a very classy watch, but it’s not much to show for a lifetime of hard work, is it?

So, now let me introduce Sebastian DeVries, cool, suave, man-about-town entrepreneur, who is at this moment talking to one hot, seriously rich dame, whose name is Maria Andropoulos. For the past hour she has been pouring her heart out to me — sorry, to Sebastian — about her terrible marriage to one of those new Russian oil oligarchs. Tired of his constant philandering and bullying, she is in search of an affair — and, who knows, perhaps true love — with someone with whom she can settle down and enjoy the divorce settlement she will undoubtedly get from him. Of course, the latter is just my interpretation of where things could go — if I play my cards right...

And so far, so good — she likes everything she has seen and heard about Seb DeVries! And we have a date — lunch at her regular table at one of the coolest restaurants in London, the Wolseley, in three days’ time.

I’ve just met her on ParkLaneIntroductions.com. This is a dating agency with a difference — it is only for the very wealthy. Rich men and women in search of affairs. What better place to pull a rich woman? A client of mine told me about it — he said that because there is a surplus of women registered, eligible men can have six months’ freetrial membership. And I assure you that Sebastian DeVries is eminently eligible!

And, hey, Sebastian is really not that dissimilar to me. People always tell me I look like Daniel Craig. I think they’re right, although, actually, I think I’m better looking — more sophisticated. I have class. I’m really much more the guy Ian Fleming had in mind when he wrote those Bond books than Daniel Craig will ever be. I was educated privately — well, for a couple of years anyway, until my dad went to prison for fraud and my mother had to take me out because she had no money to pay the fees. But that’s another story.

It’s raining outside. The wind of the autumn equinox gale throws the droplets at my windows, clawing at the glass like the letters I get daily from the debt collectors that claw at my soul. The truth is, I’m just not living the life I was born to live. I have a failed business behind me,and now I’m working as an independent financial advisor, for a crook who never pays me the commission I’m due for the life insurance policies I sell, the dubious tax schemes I hook people into and the useless pensions I dupe my clients into buying.

And all my sour little wife, Alison, does is max out our credit cards a little more every day, buying stupid face creams, ridiculous dresses and paying for lunches we cannot afford. Who was it who said so many of us spend all our lives doing jobs we hate, in order to earn money we don’t need, so that we can buy things we don’t want in order to impress people we don’t like? Well, I do the earning and Alison does the rest.

For the next couple of days, I find it hard to concentrate on my work. I use the last of my credit cards which still has some life in it to buy a cool suit, shirt, and a new tie for good measure, from Richard James of Savile Row, and a pair of black suede Crockett & Jones loafers from Burlington Arcade. Alison tells me I seem distant and asks me what’s wrong. I lie, something that comes easy after twenty years of marriage to a woman whose only asset for me today is the meagre income she brings in as a legal secretary. Nothing’s wrong, I tell her, and to prove it, driven by the excitement of what awaits me tomorrow, I make love to her with a passion I did not know I still had in me — and which I’m sure the beautiful Maria Andropoulos is going to appreciate in the weeks and months to come.

And now, finally, in the vast, ornate black-and-white galleried room of the Wolseley, filled with the beautiful people of London, a greeter, all in black and perfectly formed, is guiding me through the packed tables alive with the buzz of rich, successful people’s conversation, to an apparition that is way, way, way beyond her photograph on the Internet.

Her blonde hair looks wild, untamed, in the way that only a top salon charging at least £300 for a blow-dry could achieve. She is dressed in a high-collared dress with a leopard-skin pattern that clings to her slender contours, and that quietly states, ‘I am rich and beautiful and I know it.’ Her teeth, the colour of snow, melt me. She is dripping with serious bling. And she has great tits — but let’s not get crude.’

I can immediately sense from her body language that I am making an impression on her, too. I sit down, our eyes locked, inane grins on our faces. She holds up in greeting a glass filled with champagne, and moments later, at the hand of an unseen waiter, the rarefied froth of 199 °Cristal is rising over the rim of my own goblet.

‘You look so much better than your photograph, Sebastian,’ she says.

‘You, too,’ I tell her, trying to stop my greedy eyes from looking at those rings on her fingers, the bracelets, the necklace, the earrings, and the Vertu phone on the white table cloth.

And I am so captivated by her charm that, as we get stuck into the second bottle of champagne before the starter (she has ordered oysters, followed by Beluga) even arrives, I need to keep reminding myself I am here not to enjoy myself, but on business.

We glide easily across topics. Trite at first — stuff about what a great place London is for the arts. She has a slightly husky, mid- European accent which I find very attractive. And all the while her ‘fuck-me’ eyes seldom let go of mine.

We both share the massive dish of oysters and somehow, by the time we’ve finished, the second bottle of champagne is empty. And a third is on its way. She keeps looking at her watch. I don’t know what the make is, but it is encrusted with diamonds the size of barnacles. And suddenly there is something I notice about her. It is the way she keeps twisting the biggest bit of bling of all: a diamond engagement — or maybe eternity — ring. She turns it round, and round, and round.

It is hypnotic.

I’ve never seen diamonds so big.

Gradually, subtly, our conversation deepens as she tells me about her brute of a husband. I notice she keeps looking at her watch and I wonder, anxiously, if perhaps I am boring her. She apologizes, suddenly, explaining that her driver is arriving at 3 p.m. to collect her — she has to make an important speech this afternoon at the Savoy hotel for the charity Women Against Poverty, of which she is chair.

‘I like a Rolex on a man,’ she says, with a very sexy smile. ‘A naked man wearing a Rolex is a very big turn-on for me.’

And now I am glad there is a table between us, so she cannot see just how turned on her remark makes me.

‘It could be arranged,’ I say.

‘I’d like that very much,’ she replies, then twists that ring again. ‘I apologize, my finger hurts — I have arthritis in the knuckle. I hurt my hand from fending off my husband’s blows. Sometimes I have to move the ring to ease the pain.’

I try to imagine her husband. I think of the pictures of Russian tycoons I have seen in the papers, and I find myself hating this man with all my heart and soul. I want to take her away with me now, to protect her — and make love to her and...

I am forgetting myself. Forgetting why I am here. The champagne and her intoxicating company are making me behave this way.

Her phone rings. She answers it with a curt, ‘Yes. You are outside now? OK.’

And suddenly, before I realize it, she is standing up. ‘I really want to see you again,’ she says.

‘Me too.’

She gives me her elegant card and enters my mobile number into her Vertu. Then she kisses me lightly on the cheek. Her tender touch and her intoxicating perfume send my pulse into orbit. But as she turns away to walk towards the door, she collides with a shaven-headed ape in a grey suit and white polo neck, who has appeared from nowhere, totally not concentrating on where he is going, talking on his mobile phone. She ricochets off him, straight into a waitress carrying a tray of beautifully prepared food. And in the next instant, to my dismay, my beautiful date and the waitress crash into a table, knocking everything on it flying, and fall to the floor, entangled like a pair of mud-wrestling bitches.

I can scarcely believe my eyes as I jump up to rescue my distressed damsel and help her back to her feet. Elegant waiters swarm around. Maria smiles at me; she is fine. Like a James Bond martini, she is shaken but not stirred. Through the mêlée of people assisting her, she blows me a goodbye kiss.

And through the haze of champagne, in the moments after she has gone, I realize that we didn’t get the bill. Not a problem; I assume she has an account here. So I enjoy the remaining half-bottle of champagne and order a large espresso — and, what the hell, a decent Armagnac to go with it. Then my phone rings.

It is Maria. For an instant my heart leaps, then her voice tells me something is wrong. She sounds in a terrible state. ‘Sebastian, please can you help me? I’ve lost my ring!’

‘Ring?’

‘My engagement ring from Aleksei. It’s worth about three hundred thousand pounds, but that’s not the important thing — he will go nuts if he sees me without it!’

‘Where have you lost it?’ I ask dumbly.

‘It must have come off my finger when I fell over with that stupid waitress! It has to be on the floor somewhere. Look, I haven’t got time to deal with this; I have to start speaking in a few minutes. Would you be a darling and look for me?’

‘Of course.’ My eyes are already scanning the floor around me.

‘I have to get it back.’

I was touched by the desperation in her voice.

‘Darling, if you cannot find it, please tell the staff at the Wolseley that I will pay a £10,000 reward to anyone who finds it.’

‘You won’t need to do that.’

‘Dahlink, £10,000 is nothing to me, OK? Aleksei makes that in twenty minutes. Please, just find it for me.’

She was in tears.

‘I’ll find it,’ I said. ‘You won’t need to pay any reward, I promise you.’

I was lying. A plan was forming in my head. A very beautiful plan, because instead of dulling my senses, the champagne and now the Armagnac were actually sharpening my thoughts.

I fell to my knees and started grovelling around on the floor, looking for the ring. Proffering apologies, I crawled between the legs of diners, moving handbags aside, my nostrils filled with the scent of expensive leather shoes. But no damned ring.

After ten minutes, and numerous apologies, I admitted temporary defeat and sat back down, thinking hard, wondering if she had dropped it out in the street, perhaps?

If so, the chances of it still being there were slim. As I was pondering, a glint of light struck my eyes. To my astonishment, I saw the ape who had first collided with Maria seated at the next table. He was holding a sparkly object in his fingers, examining it.

It was Maria’s ring! I was as certain as I could be of anything.

And while I stared, he and his companion, another ape in a vulgar suit, stood up and walked past me, heading quickly towards the exit.

I jumped up from my chair. ‘Excuse me!’ I called after him.

But I got trapped in the narrow gulley between the tables by a waiter with a massive tray of drinks. By the time I had squeezed past him, both apes had walked through the crowd of people hovering around the entrance, waiting either for their coats or their tables, and were heading out through the front door.

As I reached the door, a tall, smiling man all in black stepped into my path.

‘Your bill, sir?’ he asked.

‘It’s been... it’s settled — on Maria Andropoulos’s account.’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, with a perfectly formed and delivered smile. ‘People do not have accounts here.’

‘But she... she said...’ I stared at him bewildered, realizing she must have forgotten in all the chaos surrounding her departure, and stared at the doors swinging closed behind the apes and my fast vanishing £10,000 reward.

I pulled out my one remaining live credit card, thrust it into his hand, told him I would be back in a moment, and threw myself out of the door and past the liveried doorman outside, looking frantically each way down Piccadilly. Then I saw them, walking along the pavement, a short distance away.

I ran after them and caught them up. ‘Hallo,’ I said, a tad breathlessly, to the ape in the white polo neck. He was six-feet-four inches of muscle and gristle, with a complexion like the wrong side of the moon, and an expression I already, very seriously, did not like.

‘I think you just picked up the ring a friend of mine dropped.’

They stopped in their tracks. White polo neck asked me, ‘Do you have dental insurance?’

‘Dental insurance?’ I replied, puzzled.

‘Yes,’ he said, in an East End accent. ‘Because if you don’t fuck off, you’re going to need it.’

I don’t actually know where I got the strength from — but I stood my ground, doubtless driven by desperation. ‘I’ve been asked to offer a reward of £2,000 for that ring by my friend who lost it,’ I blurted.

For a long moment I thought he was going to drive my teeth so far down my throat that I would need the services of a proctologist. But then I realized from his expression that he was actually considering my offer.

He pulled the ring out of his pocket and held it up. The other ape nodded thoughtfully.

‘I don’t know much about rings,’ polo neck said, ‘but I would guess this has to be three grand.’

‘Two and a half,’ I blurted.

‘OK,’ he relented, to my joy. ‘Two thousand, five hundred pounds.’

The next half hour was totally surreal. I found myself in a taxi with these two apes, which I had to pay for, naturally, driving to a pawnbroker that polo neck appeared to know in High Holborn. I cashed in my watch for a lousy £2,500 exactly, handed him the cash, took the ring and jumped into another cab, heading straight back to the Wolseley. I paid the bill — a whopping £425 including tip, which, miraculously, my credit card withstood — then waited another hour in a Starbucks down the road, giving my beloved Maria time to finish her speech, before dialling the number on the card she had given me.

I got an automated response, from a curt sounding lady, which said, ‘The number you have called is not recognized. Please check the number. If you need help, call the operator.’

I called the operator. The number on Maria Andropoulos’s business card was incorrect.

Puzzled, I rang the Savoy hotel and asked to speak to Maria Andropoulos who had been making a speech at the Women Against Poverty charity function at the hotel that afternoon. After some minutes, the very helpful assistant assured me that there was no function in the hotel for that charity scheduled for that day. And the name of my beloved meant nothing to them.

Unsure what to do next, I decided to take a cab back to the pawnbroker. The man who ran it had seemed extremely pleasant, albeit on the mean side. He scrutinized the ring with one of those curious monocles I had only ever seen in films.

Then he smiled and shook his head. ‘Where did you get this from?’ he asked.

‘A friend,’ I replied.

He looked at me with deep suspicion which implied, First a Rolex, now this. Then he floored me.

‘It’s worthless,’ he said. ‘Costume jewellery. This is what you’d get in a Christmas cracker. I wouldn’t even give you a quid for this.’

A twenty-pound cab ride later, a jeweller in a shop in Old Bond Street confirmed what I had been told.

I have a postscript to add to this sorry tale. It was five years later, and I was divorced, still eking a living out of flogging tax schemes. I emerged from Knightsbridge underground station and was walking past Harvey Nichols, a store that, in my financial position, there was no point in even thinking about entering, when a black S-Class Mercedes pulled up to the kerb. From the rear, Maria Andropoulos and the ape in the polo neck emerged.

Both of them saw me, and I stopped in my tracks.

‘Dahlink!’ she said, thrusting out her hand as if greeting a dear and long-lost friend. ‘My dahlink Sebastian! How are you?’

Before I could even muster a reply, the ape pulled back the cuff of his Savile Row suit jacket to reveal a gold Rolex.

My gold Rolex.

‘We’re late,’ he said to her, glancing at me as if I was part of the flotsam of London’s streets that people in S-Class Mercedes-Benz cars were well removed from.

And he was right, of course.

Christmas Is for the Kids

Kate saw him standing at the Tesco checkout and presumed he was with his mother. The store was quiet. It was Christmas Eve, the last hour of shopping.

The doors opened and a loop of tinsel swayed in the draught. ‘Silent Night’ echoed around the darkening car park. The queue moved forward and the boy tugged his stacked trolley. The woman in front of him was stuffing her purchases into her carrier, and Kate realized then that the boy was on his own. His head barely reached the top of the trolley, and he had to stretch to reach the lower packages.

He looked about six. Floppy blonde hair, freckles, a snub nose, wearing a quilted jacket, jeans and trainers. Something seemed wrong about his being there alone.

She watched him unload two twelve-packs of Coke, sweets and chocolate bars, more fizzy drinks in lurid colours, ice cream, burgers and frozen chips. What kind of a mother did he have? Too busy or disinterested to cook anything but junk and convenience foods?

She’d never let her kids eat such rubbish. Never. When she had kids. Or, as she worried increasingly, if. She felt a pang of sadness. Christmas was for kids, not for lonely adults. She’d split up with Neil in February. Ten months she had been on her own and there was no one on the horizon.

The kid paid cash from a wad of notes, then began packing his groceries. By the time she had signed her credit card slip, he had already left.

A fleck of sleet tickled her face as she unlocked her car, but there was no forecast of a white Christmas. The engine turned sluggishly before clattering into life and she revved hard for some moments before driving off. As she pulled onto the main road she noticed the tiny figure of the kid struggling under the weight of his packages.

She stopped. ‘Can I give you a lift?’

‘It’s OK. I only live just—’ At that moment one of his bags broke and several cans clattered onto the ground; a bottle of ketchup smashed. Kate got out to help him. ‘Come on. You can’t manage all these. I’ll run you home.’

‘I... I better not.’ He looked scared of something and her concern about him deepened. She loaded his groceries into the boot and he climbed, subdued, into the front seat.

She drove about a mile, and was passing a row of new houses behind a developer’s hoarding when he said, ‘There!’

She turned onto a tree-lined track that went up a slight incline, past a sign warning WORKS ENTRANCE. HARD HAT AREA. ‘I’m Kate,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘I’m getting a computer for Christmas,’ he said after some moments, ignoring her question.

After half a mile, a solitary detached Edwardian house came into view. It looked in poor condition, and what she could see of the grounds looked neglected.

‘Are you going to come in?’ he said as she pulled up. She wanted to, very much. Wanted to give his parents a piece of her mind.

‘I’ll help you with your shopping,’ she replied.

He turned imploringly to Kate and she could see again that he was frightened.

‘Would you like to stay with us?’

‘Stay with you?’ She felt a sudden prick of anxiety, the boy’s fear transmitting to her. Her curiosity about his parents was increasing. ‘I’ll come in with you.’ She smiled at him. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Daniel Hogarth. What’s yours?’

‘Kate Robinson.’

He ran up to the front door and knocked loudly. A girl of about seven with black hair in a velvet band opened it indignantly. ‘We’re not deaf, you know.’

The boy whispered and she looked at Kate. Kate lugged a couple of bags out of the boot and the two children carried the rest.

There was a huge Christmas tree in the hall that rose up the stairwell; it was beautifully decorated, with real candles which were flickering and guttering in the draught, and the base was surrounded by finely wrapped presents. There was a smell of wood smoke that made Kate nostalgic for her own childhood.

She followed the children into a kitchen, where there was a pine table at which a girl of about five in a pinafore and a boy of about the same age in a striped jersey and jeans sat, the girl reading, the boy furiously pressing the keys of a small electronic game.

‘This is my brother, Luke, and my other sister, Amy,’ Daniel said. Then he looked at Kate solemnly. ‘You will stay with us for Christmas, won’t you?’

Kate laughed, then realized the boy was serious. ‘It’s sweet of you, but I don’t think your mummy and daddy would like that.’

The children at the table turned towards her. ‘Please don’t leave us,’ the little girl, Amy, said.

‘Please don’t go,’ Luke added. Tears filled his eyes.

‘If you leave us,’ Daniel said, ‘we won’t have Christmas. Please stay and let us have Christmas.’

The kids looked clean, well nourished, no bruises. And yet there was an overwhelming sense of sadness in their faces. She fixed her stare on Amy, her heart heaving for them. ‘Where are your mummy and daddy?’

Amy looked silently at the floor.

Kate’s imagination went wild for a moment. Were their parents dead somewhere in the house and the kids were too afraid to tell her?

Shivers as hard as needles suddenly crawled across her skin. She began walking back towards the front door. Daniel ran along beside her and tugged her hand. She opened the door and noticed to her surprise that it was snowing outside; fat, heavy flakes were settling on the drive.

‘Kate, if you stayed with us, maybe we could have Christmas after all.’

‘What do you mean, Daniel?’

‘We’ll never get to open our presents if you go.’

She looked into his frightened eyes and patted his cheek tenderly. ‘I... I’ll be right back, OK?’

‘It only works if you stay,’ he said forlornly.

‘What only works?’

He shrugged and said nothing.

‘I won’t be long, I promise.’

Tearfully, Daniel closed the door behind her. Kate climbed back into her car and turned the ignition key. Nothing happened. She tried again, then again, but the battery was dead.

Exasperated, she got out, then noticed to her surprise that all the lights in the house had gone off. Sharp prickles of fear again raked her skin, harder than before. Had they tampered with her car?

She swallowed, the grip of fear tightening around her. Then she started walking quickly down the drive, turning her head and staring back at the darkness every few moments, her leather shoes inadequate, slipping on the settling snow.

The tunnel of trees seemed to be closing in around her and she broke into a run, her heart pounding, her chest feeling as if it were about to burst. Just a prank, she thought. Just a prank. But it wasn’t just a prank, she knew.

Headlights crossed ahead of her. The main road. Kate ran faster, past the developer’s hoarding and out into the road. Police. She needed to call the police, then cursed as she realized she had left her phone in the car. She ran along the pavement. There was a phone box ahead and she dived into it, then saw to her dismay that it had been gutted by vandals.

She ran on towards the town centre, crossed one busy street and then another. A car coming towards her had a perspex panel on its roof. A police car.

She leapt out in front of it, flapping her arms frantically. It pulled up and the driver wound down his window.

‘Please,’ she gasped. ‘Please, I think there’s something very wrong... children very frightened... I...’

There was a WPC in the passenger seat and Kate was aware she was looking at her oddly.

‘Could you calm down and give us a little more detail?’ the driver said.

Kate explained, trying to gather her breath. ‘I don’t know for sure,’ she said. ‘It’s just a feeling I have.’

‘OK, jump in the back. We’ll go and take a look.’

The WPC spoke into her radio and the car accelerated.

‘Turn right up this track,’ Kate said.

‘There’s nothing up here — this is all part of the development site,’ the driver said.

‘No, there’s a house at the top... you must know it: a big Edwardian place,’ Kate replied.

‘Only house up there is the Hogarth place.’

‘Yes! Daniel Hogarth. That’s right,’ Kate said, remembering his name.

As they drove up through the tunnel of trees, she frowned. There was no snow on the ground yet it had been settling only minutes ago. Then the house came into view. It was still in darkness. The dull paintwork of her car glinted in the headlights. Then she gasped in shock as they neared the house and she could see it more clearly.

It had been gutted by fire.

The roof was gone completely and half of the walls had collapsed, leaving the charred rooms open to the elements. Pipes and wiring hung out like entrails. Kate swallowed, her heart crashing wildly inside her chest. ‘I... I... I came here... I... I went in... I—’

‘Happened five years ago,’ the driver said, halting the car.

The WPC turned to face her. ‘The parents were separated. The father was up north. The mother must have had some kind of breakdown — bought them all their presents, gave them a wad of cash then left them home alone, instructed them not to speak to anyone, and went off to Switzerland with a boyfriend. Sometime on Christmas Eve, while the kids were asleep, the house caught fire and they were all killed. The mother committed suicide after she was arrested.’

Kate sat in numbed silence and stared at the blackened shell where only a short while ago she had stood in the warm kitchen and smelled wood smoke and seen a tree surrounded by presents, and odd thoughts strayed through her mind.

She wondered whether, if she had stayed, the snow would have continued falling, and whether the kids would have got to open their presents. And she resolved that next year she would go back to the supermarket and, if Daniel was there again, she would accept his invitation to stay.

Content

Peter James
Short Shockers: Collection One

12 Bolingbroke Avenue

Number Thirteen

Just Two Clicks

Dead on the Hour (originally published by the Mail on Sunday)

Virtually Alive

Meet Me at the Crematorium

Venice Aphrodisiac

Time Rich

Christmas Is for the Kids