Lie With Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

said.
    She kept my gaze. ‘Why?’
    ‘Go on.’
    A small smile. ‘No.’
    ‘It’s got rabbit ears, hasn’t it?’
    I made a quick movement – as if to put my hand into her pocket. She jerked away, giggling, then with a childish petulance, pulled it out and threw it at me. ‘Go on then. Feast your eyes. Laugh all you like.’
    I turned it over in my lap where it had landed and said flatly: ‘Your iPhone cover is in the shape of a blue rabbit.’
    ‘My son, Frank, gave it to me. It was a present!’
    ‘Do you take it to work, you big-shot lawyer you, to your very important meetings?’
    She was grinning. I noticed then why her mouth was lopsided. A tiny puckered arrow pointed up at one corner, a small scar.
    The feeling came from nowhere. She hadn’t flirted. She was not my type – about twenty years too old for one thing. So I don’t know what it was – Boo’s bra maybe, or the thought of Alice’s hip warm beneath her jeans pocket. Or something quicksilver about her movements. Or maybe, even then, I had subliminally registered the prospect of an empty room in a comfortable house. But when I saw that scar I had a sudden desire to lick it.

Chapter Three
    I rang Andrew for Alice’s number the following morning. If he was surprised, he hid it well. He said, ‘Of course, hang on,’ and then blustered for a few seconds, muttering, ‘Sorry . . . stupid me . . . wait a sec . . .’ He was, he said, a ‘technical idiot’ – couldn’t work out how to access his contacts list while remaining on the phone. ‘Tina!’ he shouted. Then, finally, ‘Right, here we are. Alice Mackenzie. Work, home, or mobile – or maybe all three?’
    ‘Mobile,’ I said. I was rolling the Christmas bauble from his hedge between my fingers, feeling the glitter turn to grit.
    ‘OK.’ He paused. ‘You going to ring her now, or after your work trip?’
    ‘What work trip?’
    ‘New York.’
    ‘Oh yes.’
    He paused again, and then said: ‘Look, I know I’m being an arse. But I can’t help being protective. Ali’s had such a tough time – Harry’s death was so awful for her. She’s kept it all so brilliantly together and her kids are fantastic, but she’s still vulnerable. She is special to me, to Tina, to both of us. I don’t want her to be hurt, or to be messed about, or . . . There – I’ve said enough. Lecture over.’
    Would a better man have said, ‘Fair cop. My intentions are purely dishonourable. Your words have made me see sense, and I will respectfully back off.’ Frankly? Would anyone have listened to his self-serving, conceited little speech and said that?
    I wanted to say, ‘I’ll do whatever I like, you interfering little twerp,’ but instead I made all the right noises. So credible was my claim to decency, I half believed in it myself.
    The number was duly delivered, recited slowly, each digit apparently wrenched from Andrew against his better judgement.
     
    I arranged to meet Alice in ten days’ time, on a Tuesday night: an odd choice, but her diary was packed with university visits and appeal deadlines and parents’ evenings, ‘unbelievably complicated’. It was too long a wait. As the days went by, I began to go off the idea. By the time the night in question arrived, I had forgotten what I had seen in her in the first place.
    Still, a date’s a date and I am nothing if not gallant. Andrew Edmunds, a small intimate restaurant in Soho, was my go-to venue in those days. It was perfect for such occasions: candle-lit, quirkily arty. I liked to think it said something about me that I was so at home there. Plus, I got a discount: thirty per cent off in exchange for having tutored the manager’s daughter. GCSE English Literature: Othello . (She got an A.)
    I was early, and disconcerted to find Alice already there, drinking a glass of wine and sifting through some papers. When she saw me, she stuffed them into a voluminous leather bag, along with a thick alligator-skin A3 desk diary,