Someone Else's Shoes(98)

Sam had flinched, but Andrea had just laughed and said she was probably right. “Yeah, you don’t want Gollum in a police line-up. Just wait till my eyebrows grow back, and I’ll be like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible.”

Nisha and Sam still eyed each other warily. There was a kind of boundarylessness around Nisha, a suggestion of fearlessness that made Sam nervous. She had always felt most comfortable around people who followed the rules as she did. She sensed that something about her made Nisha uneasy too. They were perfectly polite, but perhaps the circumstances of their meeting were too weird and too laden with baggage to allow them to be properly warm with each other.

It didn’t matter. Sam had lost Nisha’s shoes: therefore she had to help her recover them. It’s the right thing to do, at a time when nothing else is clear. It is the only thing she can do. Once she’s got that out of the way she’ll clear the decks, and start worrying about getting another job.

The door is unlocked when she and Kevin arrive home, the roads slowly clogging with traffic, the speculative Sunday shoppers already up and out. She walks into the kitchen and experiences a small jolt when she discovers Phil is up, making a cup of coffee with his back to her, already dressed in a hoody and his old tracksuit bottoms. He turns a fraction and nods as she enters, the most he can bring himself to do in greeting, these days. To hide the stomach-flopping dismay it gives her, she mutters something about taking a shower before he says anything else and leaves him to feed Kevin.

She showers, and dries her hair, conscious, as she moisturizes her face, how the corners of her mouth seem to have settled into tight, downward grooves. She is pretty sure those are new. She stops staring at her face in the magnifying mirror—honestly, they should be banned to all women over the age of thirty—and pulls on a black T-shirt and black jeans, as instructed by Jasmine, then puts a gray jumper and her navy blue parka over the top.

She is just tripping down the last two stairs when he appears in the hallway.

“Can we . . . talk?”

She blinks at him.

“Now?”

“Yes. Now.”

She glances at her watch. “I—It’s not great timing, Phil. I—I have to get to work.”

“Work,” he says. His eyes are dead when he speaks to her. “On a Sunday.”

“It—it’s a special job. I can’t really—Look, can we talk when I get back? I’ll be a bit late this evening but we can definitely—”

He is staring at her like she’s someone he has never met. Just then her mobile phone rings. She glances down, expecting it to be Nisha or Jasmine, but it’s Joel. His name flashes, like a grenade going off. She stares at it, color rising to her cheeks, willing him to go away.

“Take it,” says Phil, who has seen everything.

“I really—”

“Take it.”

She answers the call, looking away from Phil, though she can feel his eyes burning into the back of her head. Her voice, when she speaks, is too high, too false. “Joel!”

Joel’s voice is low, conspiratorial. “Sorry to bother you on a weekend, Sam. But, look, it’s a bit weird but some Israeli guy came to the office on Friday. Asking questions about you.”

“What? . . . Israeli?”

“Yeah. I didn’t really get it. He spoke to Martin, who said you’d left and then he was off. I don’t know what questions he asked, I just—I got a bad vibe off him. Martin only just told me—I don’t want to freak you out—but he says there was something off about it. Just thought you should know.”

“That’s odd. Okay. Thanks.”

There is a short silence.

“And I wondered if—”

“Got to go,” she says brightly. “I’ll—see you at work! Thanks for passing that on!”

She rings off before Joel can say anything else. She stuffs her phone into her pocket and tries to rearrange her face into an expression that is not guilty, not slightly flustered.

“So, we’ll—we’ll talk later?”

Phil looks at her and his whole bearing suggests he is under a weight that is almost unbearable.

“We will, Phil. We’ll talk when I’m back. I just—I have to do this.”

“I’m going away,” he says, turns and walks back to the kitchen.

Sam goes very still. “What?”

“I’m going away. I can’t—I can’t deal with this any more. I need to get my head straight.”

She walks down the hallway so that she can see him, standing, his back against the worktop. “What do you—where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Phil, this is ridiculous! You can’t just walk out. Please don’t. We have to—Look, I’ll be back later and we’ll talk, okay? Just let me get past today and we’ll sort this.”

He shakes his head. And when he speaks, he seems genuinely bewildered. “Twenty-three years, Sam. What is there to talk about?”



* * *



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Michelle on Reception has always liked Jasmine, so when she offers to look after the front desk for ten minutes, so that Michelle can take a cigarette break, she clearly regards it as just another extension of Jasmine’s kindness, her generosity to other members of the Bentley staff. Plus, Michelle happily leaves the desk empty most days while she sneaks a Marlboro Light and this way she’s less likely to get into trouble with Frederik. The desk is one of the few areas in the lobby not monitored by CCTV.