Page 55 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club
He laughed and his glasses slid again. ‘You’re very different, is what I mean. You turned down the rehab. It looked like an expensive hotel with specialist equipment that might have helped you back onto your feet faster, and you turned it down.’
I felt the twist inside. It had cost me a lot to turn the offer down. Part of me had looked through the brochure and thought how wonderful it would be to feel cared for. Food delivered to your room, top-class medical attention, a personalised exercise programme – it would have been wonderful. But I would have felt like an embarrassment, tucked away and invisible. Plus, my parents would have laughed themselves stupid at me getting top-notch treatment, and my brother would probably have visited just to call me horrible names and try to get me to extract money from Flynn so he could buy another car he couldn’t drive.
No. Here was where I belonged.
‘I’ve got something to show you,’ Flynn said later. ‘I’ve been trying to think how to bring it up and I can’t come up with anything tactful or non-prejudicial, so I thought I’d show you and let you make your own mind up.’
‘Mmm?’ I’d been dozing, feeling uncannily close to the granny-in-the-care-home that I’d worried I’d become if I went to the rehab facility. Something about the change of air between hospital and the flat, plus the exertion of getting up the stairs, had made me ridiculously tired.
‘It’s… I didn’t want to worry you and it’s probably nothing, but…’
I sighed. ‘Show me, Flynn.’
‘Are you sure you’re up to it?’ He was fussing about with his phone, opening it and closing it again, putting it down on top of the cupboard and then picking it up.
‘As I don’t know whatitis, I really can’t pass judgement.’ I wriggled my way up to sitting properly. My wonky leg wouldn’t push off the floor properly and I performed a strangely sideways sort of flop, using my elbow to correct myself. Having a body that was uncooperative was taking some getting used to.
‘Okay. Here, look.’ Now he had his phone open on the app which played recordings from his security cameras. ‘I set this one up in your hallway when I came over to fit the new door, after your charming ex kicked the old one down.’
‘Oh.’ How did I feel about that? ‘You didn’t tell me you’d put cameras around the place.’ Violated? Spied on? But I’d not been back here after that night, had I? A warmth came over me when I remembered how caring Flynn had been, giving me somewhere to stay and, eventually, half of his bed.
‘Not around the place. Just covering your door. I thought I’d warned him off sufficiently but I couldn’t be quite sure, and I didn’t know that we… that you and I were going to… that you wouldn’t be coming back here,’ he finished, looking a bit pink around the ears. ‘I wanted to make certain you’d be safe. Hence the security door I had put on, too.’
I’d noticed that as I limped in. The big, heavy door that had replaced my old flimsy front door and hung there in the reinforced frame like a Dwayne Johnson ornament. Nobody was going to kick that down, without the strength of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
‘You didn’t have to,’ I said, sounding slightly sulky, even to myself.
‘I know,’ Flynn said brightly. ‘But I thought itmight be a good idea and I was right. Look.’ He held his phone screen up in front of me.
The recording was surprisingly good quality. It showed the patch of hallway right outside my door, at night, from the low-level lighting. ‘You’re not going to win any Oscars for this one,’ I said, pushing the phone down.
‘Keep watching.’ He lifted the screen again.
Now the recording showed a distant light source, my downstairs neighbours, I thought, opening and closing the front door. Grainy darkness reigned on. Then, after a few moments, a shape materialised out of the blackness. Someone, wearing dark clothing, a hoodie it seemed, had come up the stairs and was standing in front of the new door, glancing from side to side.
‘That’s Dex,’ I breathed.
‘He keeps his hood up, so I couldn’t tell.’ Flynn turned the phone sideways to maximise the screen.
‘It’s him. I know it is.’ A shard of coldness slid between my shoulder blades. ‘What is he doing?’
‘Looking at the door.’ Flynn slid the timer along the bottom to speed up the passing of film time. ‘It seems to have taken him by surprise.’
The figure, moving jerkily now in the rapid frame-time, put a hand against the door and seemed to push once or twice. Then it looked all around the door, face still hidden inside the hood; just the tip of a nose and a chin occasionally caught what little light there was. Another push, at the frame now.
‘I had a steel reinforcement put in,’ Flynn said, smugly. ‘He won’t get through that without a forklift truck.’
Another moment in which the hooded figure seemed to consider the door. Then a foot came out and smashed against the bottom, in an angle the camera didn’t catch. The shape disappeared and then rematerialised, hopping and waving its arms.
‘He probably broke a toe.’ Flynn’s smugness had reached maximum levels. ‘That thing is solid.’
‘I wonder why he came?’ I stared at the footage. Dex, after a few more shoves in the direction of the security door, slithered out of the frame, obviously back down the stairs again. ‘Surely he’d worked out I wasn’t there.’
‘Dunno.’ The film ended. ‘I thought you ought to see. I wasn’t certain who it was – I mean, I had my suspicions, but he kept his face hidden.’
‘It’s Dexter. I recognise the shape and the way he moves.’ I’d often thought Dex moved like a cat, with that springy, cocky kind of walk that cats have when they know they own the garden. It was beginning to dawn on me that he’d moved like a cat which had prey on its mind.
‘So, anyway. He came here, and the date on this film is just after the explosion. He must have known you were in hospital then; it was in all the local papers. Dad managed to get it listed as a gas explosion, I didn’t think you’d want your business spread over the media.’
