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then Brian turned to him.
“Why the hell would Kal top himself? Especially after such a cracking party
like that.”
“Fucked if I know.”
“You don’t think someone …” Brian’s voice trailed away as he turned to flip
over the door wedge.
“I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
It had crossed Doug’s mind too, but Kal was just too popular for anyone to bear
that kind of grudge. Doug opened the fridge, rummaged amongst his flatmates’
stale leftovers for a moment and removed two eggs from the back. Giving them a
quick sniff, he cracked them simultaneously into Brian’s pan. He and Brian
seemed to eat as much as the other seven guys put together. He was constantly
amazed at how little food they seemed to need, as indeed were they at the
quantities he and Brian consumed. Doug washed a couple of plates from the
festering pile on the draining board and set them on the table so Brian could
empty the fatty contents of the pan.
“Best cure for a hangover,” said Brian, carefully easing his bulk into one of
the plastic moulded chairs, testing its integrity before committing all his
weight. “I heard you talking to Cindy in the kitchen this morning. What do you
reckon?”
Doug looked at Brian’s face. He obviously didn’t know. “Cracker!” Doug replied.
“You two must have been banging all night.”
“Like a barn door in a hurricane!” Brian said with a self-satisfied grin. “I do
have a confession to make though.”
You have a confession to make, thought Doug.
“Well, you see, last night at Kal’s flat, I had just gone into the kitchen to
grab a couple of beers, when in walks Cindy. I’m just staring at her ‘cos she’s
so tasty, you know. Anyway she eyes me up and down, as though she recognises
me, walks up and says, “You must be Doug,” like you’re famous or something. I
was about to say no, Doug’s the drunken fart in the corner with a bottle of
whiskey in his lap, but instead I say, ‘Who wants to know?’ With that she
flings her arms around my neck and says, ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’ Then she
kisses me. After that we come back here and well, you can guess the rest.”
“You bastard! So she thought you were me.”
“Up until this morning. When I woke up, she was sitting at my computer
searching through my files. She said she was just checking her email, but I
know she wasn’t ‘cos she had Windows Explorer up on the screen. Anyway, she
switched it off - at the switch instead of shutting it down properly, which
pissed me off, and then she went off to the kitchen to make some coffee. I
think that’s when she twigged I wasn’t you and when she came back in, she got
all bitter and twisted about it.”
“Well in that case, I’ve got a slight confession to make too,” Doug ventured
hesitantly. “Shortly after that, I met her in the shower and – well - after she
left your room she came straight round to mine.”
“No shit!…You bastard!”
“We didn’t get very far though. Just as things were getting interesting…”
“Kal!”
“Yeah that’s right. We went over there and I saw him.”
“Shit! Are you OK?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t a pretty sight.”
The two friends finished their breakfast in silence, each trying to make sense
of it all. Doug put his plate back on the pile and started for the door.
“Hell of a girl though,” said Brian.
Doug turned to look at him, grunted and went back to his room.

CHAPTER
3
    Sitting at the large oak
desk, Peter swivelled round on the high-backed leather chair to survey his
work. With the floor clear of debris, books returned to shelves, and papers
piled neatly, there seemed twice as much space as before. The large airy room,
painted in a fresh creamy white, was fitted, on two of the walls, with
dark-wood bookshelves from floor to ceiling, while a selection of watercolour
landscapes adorned the remaining wall-space. It was the sort of study of which
he had always dreamed.  Over