Chapter 204: Kept I

He didn’t turn round.

Every muscle in his neck wanted to. He could feel the pull at the back of his skull like a hand on his collar. He kept his eyes on Jodie’s face and kept walking, off the bottom step and out between 2 parked cars, and she kept her eyes over his shoulder the whole way and didn’t blink.

"Keep coming to me," she said. "Don’t stop."

He reached the kerb on her side. She put both hands flat on his chest without looking at him and held him there facing her, with the house at his back.

"Tell me what’s there, Jodie. Tell me everything you can see, and don’t let me look at it."

"It’s her." Jodie’s voice was very low and very fast. "The secretary. Peg. She’s in the doorway with the lamp behind her, so she’s mostly a shape, but it’s her, the grey coat buttoned up to her throat, the same as at the hospice. I watched you go in. I watched that door the whole time you were in there, and nobody came up those steps after you, nobody, I’d have seen.

"She’s got your page. Ida’s page. She’s turned it to the lamp to read it, and now the light’s on the side of her face, and I can see her mouth moving. She’s reading it all the way down, Danny. And she’s looking up from it. She’s looking at your back."

"Hold my coat. If I start to go, hold on to my coat."

"I’ve got you." Her fists closed in the front of his coat. Her eyes were still over his shoulder, wide, with the streetlight in them.

From behind him, across the road, in the voice that had said good evening at every hour of the day for weeks, the secretary said his name.

"Mr Flynn."

The hair stood up on the back of his neck. His shoulders started to come round on their own, and Jodie pulled him into her by the coat, chest to chest, and put her mouth by his ear.

"No. You told me what Pemberton said. You walk out and you don’t look back." Her voice was shaking. "She’s saying your name to see if you’ll turn. Stay with me."

He stood with his face in Jodie’s hair and his eyes shut, and didn’t move.

"Mrs Marsh’s page," said the voice behind him, clear across the quiet street, level and even. "It was laid properly, Mr Flynn. It will be kept."

A car went past the end of the road. Somewhere a dog barked once.

"She’s folding it," Jodie whispered. "She’s folded it in half and put it inside her coat. She’s stepping back into the hall. The door’s closing, slowly." A breath. "It’s shut, and the fanlight’s gone dark."

He opened his eyes. He still didn’t turn.

"Walk me to the tube," he said. "Keep hold of my arm, and don’t let me look back at it till we’re round the corner and it can’t see us."

They walked. Jodie kept her arm through his and looked back for both of them every 10 yards, till they’d turned onto the main road and the house couldn’t be seen from anywhere they could stand. Then she stopped under a streetlight outside a closed estate agent’s and let her head go back against the glass and breathed out hard through her mouth, a long white cloud of it in the cold.

"She was sent to that door," Jodie said. "That’s where they sent her at midnight on Thursday. You asked her at the hospice if it’d be her on the Kensington door next time, and she said she couldn’t answer, but she’d remember you’d asked. And there she was. She came to the door tonight so you’d know it was her."

"And she said my name in that voice on purpose, to make me look back." Danny leaned on the window beside her. "If I’d turned round, I think that page would have been worth nothing to them."

"You nearly did. I had hold of your coat."

"I know you did. I’d have turned if you hadn’t."

She wiped her face with the back of her glove.

"It will be kept," she said. "What does kept mean, to them? Kept like a promise? Or kept like a file in a drawer that nobody opens?"

"Ida never wrote that down, and I’m not going back up those steps to ask them." He took his phone out. "I’m ringing my mum before we go underground. I want her told something tonight, even if it’s not all of it."

His mother answered on the second ring, with the telly going behind her.

"Mum, it’s me, I’m all right. I’ve done something for you tonight, in that house in Kensington. I went in on my own and I asked them for something for you. I’m not telling you what till I know if it’s worked."

"Danny, what have you gone and done?" his mother said. "You tell me now. I’m not having another Monday where you don’t tell me things."

"Nothing you’ll have to pay for, and nothing I’ll have to pay for that I know of. If anything strange comes through your door this week, a letter, anything at all, you ring me before you do anything else with it. If nothing comes, I’ll still tell you."

"When?"

"Wednesday night. I’ll come round and tell you all of it, whatever happens, every word I wrote. I promise you. Go to bed."

Pembury was cold. The new white door shut behind them on its closer with a soft click, and Jodie turned the key twice, the way she had the night before, and put the fan heater on. Mara’s dark green wool lay folded double on a clean sheet on the floor under the window, 3 metres of it, with Mara’s measurements on a strip of brown paper pinned to the top. Jodie stood over it with her shears in her hand.

"I can’t cut it," she said. "My hands are shaking. Look at them. If I cut that coat tonight I’ll cut it wrong, and that’s 120 pound of Mara’s wool."

She put the shears down on the windowsill, very carefully, with the points to the wall. Then she took the yellow tape measure from round her own neck and held it out between them by one end.

"Take your clothes off," she said. "All of them. I’ve been meaning to measure you properly since the day I met you. I’m going to make you a coat after this one, a proper one, and I’m going to start it now, so I’ve got something to do with my hands."

He looked at her.

"Now, Danny. Everything, by the heater."

He took everything off and stood on the bare boards in front of the fan heater in the lamplight, and she came and stood in front of him with the tape.

She measured me slowly, the way I’d watched her measure a hem, without losing her place, except that she stood close enough for her breath to be on my collarbone. Her cold fingers took the tape round my chest under my arms, and she pulled it snug and read it close to my skin.

"40," she said out loud.

She went behind me and laid the tape across my back from shoulder point to shoulder point, and read it, and kissed the nape of my neck. "18 and a half. Arms out."

She did my arm from shoulder to wrist with her other hand flat on my stomach. She did my waist, and her knuckles brushed the hair low on my belly, and I was hard before she’d said that number. She looked down at me and didn’t say anything about it. She knelt.

"Inside leg," she said.

She held the end of the tape at my ankle and drew it slowly up the inside of my leg, her knuckles trailing up my calf and the inside of my thigh, and stopped with the tape pressed against the top of my thigh, her fingers an inch from my balls. She looked up at me from the floor.

"33," she said.

"Jodie."

She hung the tape back round her own neck and took my cock in her hand instead, and held the weight of it, and ran her thumb slowly along the underside the way she’d run it along a seam to check the stitching.

Then she stood up and undressed in front of me without hurrying. Her jumper went over her head and her bra after it, and she stepped out of her jeans one leg at a time with a hand on my shoulder for balance, and pushed her knickers down and kicked them away across the boards. She stood there with the yellow tape hanging down between her tits and her nipples pulled tight in the cold room.

She pulled the duvet off the mattress and threw it on the floor in front of the heater, and knelt up on it, upright, and held her hand out to me.

"Kneel," she said. "Facing me. Close as you can get."

I knelt on the duvet in front of her, knees to knees. She took the tape from round her neck and passed it round behind my back and then round behind her own, and pulled the 2 ends together between us till it held us chest to chest, her breasts flattened against me, the cold of her skin going warm on mine. She looked down at the numbers where the ends crossed.

"58 inches," she said. "It only just goes round. That’s the 2 of us."

She held the tape there in one fist at the small of her back, and with her other hand she reached down between us. She opened her knees wider on the duvet and lowered herself, slowly, inch by inch, onto my cock, kneeling up over my knees, till she was sitting down on me with her pussy wet and tight round me and her face level with mine.

Neither of us could move far. The tape held us too close for it. She put her arms round my neck and rocked against me instead, her hips rolling forward and back in short tight strokes, her clit dragging against the base of me every time she came forward, and the tape creaked where she held it.