‘Are you trying to make me look like a fucking serial killer?’ Matt shook his head.

  ‘Yeah,’ Dan nodded, taking Matt’s phone off him to check it was recording. Satisfied, he handed it back and indicated the brunette. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, don’t all look, OK?’ Matt asked in vain. He downed his drink and headed for his target.

  The woman spluttered into her drink when he delivered his line, glancing briefly over his shoulder at his assembled colleagues who were now all suspiciously silent.

  ‘You on a dare or what?’ she asked him, looking him up and down with barely concealed contempt. Matt pulled out his self-deprecating ‘I know I’m a bumbling fool but look how cute I am’ grin.

  ‘That was a shocking line, wasn’t it, but it is true – you have beautiful skin. Seriously, you look about sixteen.’

  The woman smirked. ‘So do you,’ she told him. It wasn’t a compliment.

  ‘Yeah, I am youthful, but that’s not a bad thing.’ Matt tried his ‘I know where a clitoris is’ eyebrow-raise. ‘It means I’ve got the stamina to give a woman what she wants.’

  ‘What, a pair of Gucci shoes?’ the woman retorted, quick as lightning.

  Matt took a second to regroup, all too conscious of the baying pack of hounds at his back, ready to rip him to shreds at the first opportunity. He needed to try another tack.

  ‘Did you know that you could be a model?’ he asked her, cringing inwardly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do know. I am a model. Model slash presenter actually.’

  ‘Oh well, there you go. I was right then.’ Struggling, Matt listened to line after line fall totally flat. He’d always thought he was a proper charmer – but maybe that was because the women he normally picked on were a lot more drunk and a lot more susceptible than this one, keen to lap up every hackneyed compliment as if it were gospel. Maybe he always sounded so shallow and shit like he got his lines from a Christmas-cracker joke, maybe he’d just never heard himself properly before. Matt wondered what his chances were of finding another job – maybe Lucy would put a word in for him at her magazine. But then again, maybe she wouldn’t.

  ‘Come on then,’ the brunette pressed him. ‘You’re trying to pull me, aren’t you? Don’t give up now – God loves a trier and so do I.’

  ‘OK, you’re an intelligent, sophisticated woman, you don’t want any of the flannel and the lines.’ Matt took a breath, pinning his career on the next few words. ‘The truth is I really want to make love to you, what do you say?’

  The brunette exchanged a deadpan look with her friend.

  ‘I say if that was your best shot you’ve blown it. Seriously, mate, you didn’t ask me my name, or anything about me. Are you on the clock or something? Seems to me like you’re just trying to pull any bird so you can write some sleazy magazine article about it.’

  ‘I … but … OK, how do you know?’ Matt said, his words almost lost in the cacophony of jeers that set off behind him. ‘You’ve been in the magazine, haven’t you? Look, I know that makes me look like a prick, and I have no idea how I haven’t remembered a woman as beautiful as you, but I promise you that is not what this is about.’

  The woman slowly looked him up and down as if she were appraising a stud horse.

  ‘OK then,’ she said with a nod.

  ‘OK then what?’ Matt asked her.

  ‘OK then I’ll shag you,’ she told him, looking him directly in the eye. Matt suddenly felt quite nervous, certain that the parts of him that were basic requirements for such an endeavour had just shrunk away to nothing.

  ‘Really?’ he squeaked.

  ‘Yeah, but on one condition.’ She raised a flirty brow that made Matt think a million scary and exciting things.

  ‘Name it,’ he whispered.

  ‘You’d better ask my husband first,’ the woman told him. ‘After all he is your boss.’

  ‘He’s … what?’ He looked around to find the entire staff of Bang It! gasping with laughter, banging on the table while Dan held up his glass and winked at him.

  ‘I said you should have asked me my name. It’s Aimee, Mrs Aimee Sutherland, and that moisturiser line, that was Dan’s first line with me. It worked out a lot better for him.’

  Leaving Matt speechless, Aimee sashayed past him in her Gucci heels, and bending over her husband, grabbed him by the collar. ‘Right, now you really owe me dinner, come on – we’re going.’

  As Dan stood up and kissed his wife, he was literally crying with laughter. ‘That is the funniest thing I’ve heard in years,’ he said. ‘Seriously, we should put that on the website. Babe, you were brilliant.’

  ‘What do you mean, put it on the website?’ Matt asked him miserably.

  ‘I mean that when I checked your phone, I called my phone and put you on speaker. That was brilliant!’

  ‘You bastard!’ Matt proclaimed, picking up Pete’s drink and downing it in one. ‘That whole thing was a wind-up.’ He looked miserably at Aimee. ‘Oh God, I’m so embarrassed.’

  ‘You should be, love,’ Aimee laughed. ‘Don’t know how you got your reputation for being a ladies’ man.’

  She grinned at her friend who seated herself next to a suddenly silent Raffa.

  Matt grinned too; he had no choice but to take it on the chin. It was pretty funny.

  ‘So am I fired then?’ he asked Dan.

  ‘You should be, but I can’t bring myself to do it, you’re too entertaining.’ Dan glanced at his wife. ‘I’m too drunk to eat – how about a line and a club, yeah?’

  Matt shook his head when everybody else was nodding theirs.

  ‘You know what, I’m going to get back.’

  ‘Back where, to where you left your self-respect?’ Raffa laughed.

  ‘No, I …’ Matt stopped himself saying he wanted to have a shower and go to sleep in front of the telly. ‘I’ve got a bit of a project going on.’

  ‘A woman?’ Pete asked him.

  ‘Yeah, a real challenge, a little older – but, you know, really sexy.’

  ‘You mean like a cougar?’ Raffa suggested.

  ‘Or a milf?’ Greg put in.

  ‘Yeah, no – she’s a lady. You know, refined, quiet and shy.’

  ‘And you reckon you can crack her?’

  ‘I reckon under those frumpy clothes she’s got a slamming body,’ Matt said. ‘It’s only a matter of time.’

  ‘Wait, are you talking about your landlady?’ Pete slurred. ‘The one who’s taking in lodgers because her husband snuffed it?’

  ‘Whoa, low blow – you’re going for a woman on the rebound from death? Mate, that tops trying to pick up your boss’s wife any day of the week.’ Raffa sounded admiring.

  ‘Firstly, I didn’t know I was trying to pick up the boss’s wife, and secondly, her husband’s been dead nearly a year,’ Matt said uncomfortably.

  ‘You are a dark, dark bastard,’ Dan said approvingly. ‘Matt, the dark destroyer. Go for it, mate. There’s a features idea, what depths would a bloke go to to get his end away, hey Raffa …’

  Matt picked up his stuff and headed out into the mercifully cool air of the night, the last remnants of light only just fading even though it was getting on for eleven. As he headed back towards his much longed-for room, his stomach churned and his head spun. It wasn’t just the mixture of beer and whisky; he felt disjointed and out of place. Like when he’d woken up after a big night and known that he’d done something to offend someone but he couldn’t work out what; only this time he knew exactly what he’d done, exactly what he’d said, and he hated himself for it. He didn’t think about Ellen that way at all. He did think of her sexually, that was inevitable, she was a beautiful woman, with a body that hinted at much more, and he was a man. Of course he thought about her like that, but he didn’t think of her as a project, an easy target. That was the very last way he thought about her; if anything, he had this unfamiliar urge to look after her, to protect her.

  As Matt walked down his road, his head hung low, he considered turning back, finding his colleagues and going out after all, but then a noise in the shadows stopped him in his tracks. He listened, uncertain of what he had heard.

  ‘Matt?’ A figure lurched out of the shadows and under the streetlight. It was a second before Matt took in what he was seeing.

  ‘Hannah?’ He stepped forward and caught the woman just as her knees buckled. Looking down at her, he saw her make-up smeared down her face, her eyes bloodshot and swollen, but there was more than that, a livid bruise was inflaming her left cheek just under her eye, her clothes were dirty and torn. ‘Fuck, Hannah, what happened?’

  ‘Will you take me to Ellen’s?’ Hannah asked him drowsily, clearly still under the influence of something. ‘I need to go to Ellen’s, I need to tell her something. I’m trying to get there but it seems so far and I’m … I’m hurting.’

  Matt folded his arm around her waist and took her weight against his shoulder.

  ‘Hannah, what the hell happened?’ he asked her.

  Hannah swung her head round to look at him, her bleary eyes unable to focus, her brows drawn together in a frown.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she told him. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  In her dream Ellen was in a library, no, not a library – the library, the one at college, where the tall dusty shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling were closely crammed together, leaving only a narrow space to walk between them. It was hot and dark. She could feel sweat gathering at the nape of her neck, she was looking for something, she was looking for the way out.

  Searching for a clue, she ran her finger along a shelf of books like none she had ever seen in the university library, each one a fat well-fingered paperback, with purple, pink and red spines cracked along their length as if each one had been avidly read. Ellen picked out one book and saw an illustration of a woman on the cover, the tops of her arms gripped and pulled back forcefully by a muscular topless man so that her breasts surged forward, straining against the laces of what appeared to be some kind of white nightdress. Ellen frowned, puzzled by what was so familiar about the image. She tried to make out the title, gold-embossed swirling letters, but they did not seem to make sense no matter how hard she looked at them. She stared and stared at the image of the woman on the cover, her expression caught somewhere between agony and ecstasy, the internal struggle between desire and propriety expertly caught by the brush of the artist. There was something familiar about the woman, her long dark hair tumbling over one shoulder, her full lips baring her teeth in what might have been either a growl or a groan of ecstasy. Then, with a flush of embarrassment, Ellen realised that she was looking at an illustration of herself in the throes of undeniable passion. And the man who was restraining her, his lips buried in her neck? She could not tell, he was fair and well built, but she could not see his face. Perhaps it was Nick, she wondered, trying to recall if Nick had ever grabbed her so purposefully. Ellen moaned, remembering the gentle pressure of his palm on her inner thigh, the first indication that he wanted to make love. His first move always, even before kissing her. Or perhaps it was Matt, Matt who was seducing her away from quiet respectability, his strong fingers gripping her so hard that they would surely leave their imprint on her flesh, branding her as his. At last she could make sense of the title. Ellen’s Escape.

  This was it, this would show her the way out of this maze she was trapped in, where every corridor, every room led her round and round in ever-decreasing circles back to where she began. The book had to have the answers.

  Desperately Ellen flicked from page to page, anxious to see what secrets they would reveal, but each one was blank. Yellowing cream, slightly rough in texture and entirely empty.

  ‘But what happens?’ Her voice echoed between the shelves. ‘What happens to me next?’ Perhaps she had to fill in the answers, she found herself thinking. Perhaps to escape her story she had to write it.

  ‘Ellen?’ She spun round. Matt was standing behind her, shirt-less just as the man on the cover of her book was, his muscled torso glistening with what might have been sweat but smelt like rose oil, his well-developed pectoral muscles rising and falling as he took each heavy breath.

  ‘You’ve come,’ she whispered. ‘You came. I’ve thought about it and I’m ready for sex, let’s have lots of sex.’

  ‘Ellen?’ he said, softly, insistently. ‘Ellen?’

  ‘Yes, the answer is yes, yes I want you, I want you. As a strong independent woman I will let you take me now!’ Ellen flung herself back, bracing her body against the bookshelf. ‘Rip off my clothes, only be careful with the buttons on this top, it’s my favourite.’

  Matt took a step towards her and gently shook her shoulder.

  ‘Ellen? Ellen, wake up. Wake up. Ellen, wake up.’

  Groggily her eyes opened and she focused on Matt. She smiled, one hand lazily fluttering up to caress the side of his face. And then she realised she wasn’t dreaming any more and Matt was actually leaning over her bed.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Ellen tried to sit up, but found herself pinned down by a tangle of sheets. With some difficulty she unravelled herself with one hand while trying to maintain her modesty with the other. It would be tonight of all nights that she had finally surrendered to the sweltering heat and given up her pyjamas in favour of one of Nick’s cotton shirts.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked Matt breathlessly, dragging a sheet up over her chest. She could be mistaken, but the look on his face didn’t exactly point to a seduction attempt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, careful not to look at her. He sat on the edge of the bed, his weight causing her leg to roll a little closer to his. ‘I didn’t know what to do, I thought I’d better wake you. You were having a pretty radical dream.’

  ‘Have I slept in? Is it morning?’ Ellen was confused, and then a flash of her dream came back to her. ‘Oh God, was I talking in my sleep?’

  ‘Nothing I could make out.’ Whatever he had heard or seen Matt seemed utterly uninterested, which Ellen found simultaneously disappointing and a relief.

  ‘Look, it’s not morning,’ he went on. ‘It’s about midnight, I think.’ He paused, as if uncertain how to go on. ‘Hannah’s downstairs.’

  Ellen felt her shoulders relax. She leant back against the headboard.

  ‘Typical.’ She ran her fingers through her hair. ‘She worries us all to death and then turns up on the doorstep whenever she feels like it. Seriously, that woman thinks the world revolves around her. She has to learn, she can’t just turn up here attention-seeking any hour of the day or night.’ Unthinking, Ellen swung her bare legs out of bed, hastily pulling on Nick’s dressing gown that still hung on the back of the bedroom door. ‘I’m going to tell her she can bloody well go home and come back in the morning.’

  Just as she reached the door Matt put a hand on her shoulder and stopped her. Ellen turned to look at him.

  ‘Ellen, you don’t understand.’ In the half-light that fed through the open door Matt’s expression was unreadable, but something about the shadows under his eyes and the incline of his head sent an ominous shiver through her. ‘Look, I don’t know what’s happened, but Hannah’s pretty messed up.’

  ‘Drunk, you mean?’ she asked him.

  ‘Probably, she might have taken or been given something too.’ Ellen’s sigh was one of exasperation. ‘But wait, it’s not just that. Something’s happened to her, she’s hurt and she can’t remember how. You need to come and see her, Ellen.’

  Matt took a step closer and finally she could see his expression. He was really worried.

  ‘Oh my God, what’s she done now?’

  Ellen didn’t know what she expected to see when she pushed the living-room door open, but it wasn’t the sight that greeted her. Matt had left Hannah on the sofa, where she had curled herself up into a tight ball and appeared to be sleeping. Ellen flicked on a lamp to get a better look at her sister, who unconsciously screwed up her eyes against the invasion of light. The first thing Ellen noticed was the blood in Hannah’s hair, dried now, a thick black lump matting the auburn strands into a clump. There was a bruise on her left cheek, and her lip was swollen and cut. The neck of her shirt was torn and there was mud streaked along her skirt, which had ripped up the seam revealing the tops of her legs. But the sight that sent ice through Ellen’s veins was a smear of blood, dried and flaking, on the inside of one of her thighs.

  Ellen pressed her hand over her mouth as she stared at her fitfully slumbering sister, forcing herself to stay silent. After a few seconds she peeled her fingers away from her lips.

  ‘Where did you say you found her?’ she asked Matt, her voice strained.

  ‘At the end of the road, she just appeared out of nowhere, looking like that. She seemed really out of it, I think she’d been in someone’s garden, maybe she passed out there. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but I think she was trying to get to you. I didn’t find her, she found me. If she hadn’t seen me I’d have walked right past her.’

  Hesitantly Ellen knelt on the carpet next to her sister, her hands hovering over her, uncertain of what to do, and then biting down on her bottom lip she gently touched her on the shoulder.

  ‘Hannah, Hannah.’ Ellen spoke softly, almost unwilling to bring her round, but knowing that she must. ‘Hannah. Wake up, it’s me, Ellen.’

  Hannah opened one swollen eye with some difficulty and looked at Ellen through the tender slit of her lid.

  ‘Ellen.’ Her voice was cracked and dry. ‘I hurt.’

  ‘I know, I can see that,’ Ellen told her gently. Instinctively she pressed the back of her palm against Hannah’s forehead, as her mother used to do to each of them when she suspected a temperature. Hannah’s skin was cool; she must have been outside for some time. Unsure, Ellen glanced up at Matt, who shook his head. He had no idea what to do either. Ellen had to try and find out more.

  ‘OK, Hannah, Hans?’ She waited for Hannah to open her eyes again. ‘You need to sit up, OK? Let me get a good look at you.’ Ellen was suddenly reminded of the last time she had nursed Hannah when they were both children, when Hannah had been her tiny little sister, utterly in awe of her, taking her lead in almost everything. Back when her mother’s friends used to look at the two of them together and say, ‘What a lovely little mother your Ellen makes.’