Caught!

by JL Merrow

  “Hey, nice work, there,” Sean’s low voice said in my ear.

  Startled, I spun round. “Um. Thanks? I, ah…”

  He gave a crooked smile. “Sorry. Gotta go. The twins have got an appointment.”

  It was probably just well, I told myself as his leather-clad shoulders hove out of sight. I hadn’t had the faintest idea what I’d been about to say to him anyway.

  Chapter Seven

  I put the first Saturday of half term to good use, by having a lie-in.

  I was just enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee when there was a knock on my door. I opened it to find Hanne standing there with a sunny smile and a large bowl covered with a tea towel.

  “Have you had lunch?” she asked.

  “No,” I said cautiously.

  “Good! We’re going to do some cooking. Pølsefocaccia. It’s very easy. I made the dough already, and it’s risen.” She handed me the mixing bowl and pulled a can of hot dog sausages from one voluminous parka pocket. Unlike the dough, my alarm was very definitely still rising. “Now, you have cherry tomatoes?”

  I winced at her assured tone. “No. Sorry.”

  Hanne frowned. “Olive oil? You must have olive oil.”

  “I, um, ran out,” I lied quickly.

  “Hmm,” she said. It spoke volumes. “But you have salt, at least?”

  Apparently my face was also fairly eloquent. Hanne sighed and handed me the sausages, clearly far more confident than I was in my ability to handle them and the mixing bowl without dropping something. “Put these in the kitchen and get your coat. We’re going shopping.”

  Once the supplies were safely deposited in the kitchen, Hanne dragged me round the village Tesco at lightning speed. She frowned at the fresh produce and tutted at the meagre array of olive oil, although why anyone would need more than two varieties to choose from was beyond me. I walked out burdened equally with carrier bags and misgivings.

  Back at my house, Hanne searched my kitchen cupboards until she came up with a roasting tin, which she oiled liberally. Then she divided her dough roughly in half (actually, it was more like 55:45, but she assured me that (a) it was supposed to be in halves, and (b) it didn’t really matter if it wasn’t exact.) The first portion she told me to spread out on the bottom of the tin and press down firmly.

  It was harder than I’d thought; the stuff was elastic and springy and kept retreating from the corners. I subdued it ruthlessly.

  “Okay, now you put the sausages on top.” Hanne handed me the can, which I opened and remembered to drain before tipping the sausages onto the dough. They slithered for a moment in alarmingly wormlike fashion, then were still. I started to rearrange them into an orderly array.

  Hanne watched me for a moment. “You know, it doesn’t matter if they’re not quite even.”

  “Are you sure?” I frowned at the last two sausages, which were still a little higgledy-piggledy for my liking.

  She smiled. “But it’s your bread. You do it how you like it.”

  Relieved, I straightened the last two sausages. “Now what?”

  “You put the rest of the dough on top. Like a sandwich.”

  Like a sandwich? I could do this. I’d made lots of sandwiches. Some of them even successfully. It was a bit tricky to do without messing the sausages up again, but I didn’t do too badly, I thought.

  Hanne seemed to be tapping her fingers on the worktop by the time I’d finished, but some people are just restless like that.

  “And now?”

  “Now we add the tomatoes. Like this, you see?” She demonstrated, halving one of the tomatoes with a serrated knife, then using her thumb to poke holes in the top of the dough, into which she inserted the tomato halves. “Now, you do the rest.” She glanced at her watch. “And it doesn’t matter if they’re a bit all over the place, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said and set to work. It was actually quite fun, poking little holes in the dough and pushing the tomatoes in. Charlie would enjoy this, I was sure. Perhaps I should ask Hanne to write the recipe out for his father—like she’d said, this was easy. I couldn’t imagine why I’d always thought cooking was so difficult.

  “Now, we pour on the olive oil—that’s right—sprinkle on the salt… Perfect. And now we leave it to rise.”

  “Oh. How long for?” I was a little disappointed to find we weren’t going to cook it immediately.

  “Oh, about three quarters of an hour or so. Then you put it in a medium-hot oven for half an hour. You let it cool for ten minutes, and then it’s ready to eat.”

  I frowned. “How many minutes is or so? And what temperature is medium hot?”

  She smiled and shrugged. “It doesn’t have to be exact.”

  I stared at my cooker dubiously. If appliances had expressions, I was fairly sure the cooker’s would be mirroring mine. “So… It goes from one to nine. So medium hot would be four and a half?”

  “You know, the numbers are only a guide. Every oven is different.” She gave me a searching look. “You have used the oven before?”

  My gaze darted guiltily to the microwave in the corner.

  Hanne sighed. “Try it on gas mark five or six. If it looks like it’s burning on top, turn it down a little.” She wiped her hands on a tea towel and picked up her bowl.

  “Aren’t you staying?”

  “No, I must get back to the dogs. And I have the other half of the dough at home for my own lunch.”

  “But…”

  “You’ll be fine. Just half an hour in the oven, remember? You could check it after twenty-five minutes. You have an oven timer? Maybe an alarm on your watch?”

  “Oh, I won’t need that.” At least one thing I could be confident about.

  “Then it’s no problem. Enjoy your lunch. Maybe next time we’ll make deer antlers?”

  “Yes, all right.” Hah. I’d be safe next time. I was pretty sure they didn’t stock those in the village Tesco.

  “Good. Now, you tell me when your pretty friend is coming round next time, and we’ll make something special, okay?” She swept out with her mixing bowl, leaving the kitchen feeling empty without her cheerful presence.

  I found myself missing her—and envying her too. Hanne seemed so sure of her place in the world—and she seemed to manage living alone much better than I did. Of course, she had the dogs. Maybe I should get a dog? I pictured myself, Barboured and wellied up to the gills, striding confidently over mizzled fields, my faithful companion at my heels. Just like any other country dweller. Yes, definitely something to think about. We could play Frisbee, and I could throw tennis balls for him—or her—to catch. It would get me out of the house more.

  I might even bump into Sean once in a while, a sly little voice whispered in my id. He seemed the sort to get on well with animals; after all, he seemed to have no problem wrangling the twins.

  I gave myself a mental slap on the wrist even as I grinned at the thought.

  Right. The bread thingy was going to need another thirty-six minutes to rise. Time to get on with the laundry. And this time, I was going to do it perfectly. My record of thirteen days without a mixed-wash accident couldn’t stand unbroken forever.

  I put the bread in the oven at 12:42 on the dot, turned it on to gas mark five and sat down with the paper. Then at12:48, a thought struck me. Weren’t ovens supposed to be preheated? I had a vague memory of that from long-ago home-economics classes. Damn it.

  I took the bread out of the oven. How long would an oven take to heat up? Five minutes? Ten? Twenty? If I left it that long, wouldn’t the bread be too risen?

  And now I came to think about it, had I just made a catastrophic mistake, removing the bread from the oven after it had already been in for six minutes? Would it collapse in on itself like soggy papier-mâché?

  Maybe I should put it back in. I nipped back into the kitchen and did just that,
careful not to burn myself on the oven door. But damn it, how long would it need now? Should I count the previous six minutes it had had? Or did the cooling-off time, plus the not-actually-heated-up time cancel that out…?

  Get a grip, Emsy. I was overthinking this. It was a loaf of bread with sausages and tomatoes in, not a medley of raw uranium, plutonium and whatever else they put into nuclear reactors shortly before national disasters were declared. I took a deep breath and walked out of the kitchen, shutting the door behind me. Then I sat back down with the Times, turned it to the crossword page and told my brain sternly not to think about anything even vaguely bread related for the next half an hour.

  The crossword was actually rather good today. The compiler was new to me, and his clues were consequently that much harder to unravel. He slipped up badly with one of them, though—“Animal liberators captured (3)” was so obvious I was sure not a single child in my class could have failed to get it. Well, the ones that could read well enough, at any rate. I wrote R-A-T in the grid with a sardonic pen.

  I wondered what Sean was doing today. Did he work Saturdays? After all, presumably infestations didn’t keep to office hours. Then again, one quite frequently saw mice in the London Underground. And city life was sometimes referred to as the rat race. I smiled to myself at the thought of little dark-suited rodents with miniature briefcases scurrying back to their commuter-belt homes at six o’clock.

  Then I remembered I was living in the commuter belt, and the thought didn’t seem quite so amusing. I swept a glance around the corners of my front room, but no furry creatures waved cheekily before going back to nibbling at the wiring and peeing on the carpet, thank God. Unless—was that something moving behind the curtain? I froze—then realised, embarrassed, that it was just the curtain itself, shifting in the draught from the imperfectly sealed window. I could feel myself blushing even though there was no one there to see. Get a grip, Emsy, I told myself again—and oh dear Lord, I’d forgotten the bread. Half an hour had been over a scarily long time ago.

  I sprang up from my chair and threw open the door to the kitchen. Then I squinted. The kitchen, and everything in it, looked a bit…fuzzy. This, my nose informed me, was because it was steadily filling up with greyish smoke that billowed from the cooker in ominous waves.

  I might not have a great deal of experience with baking, but I was fairly certain this wasn’t supposed to happen.

  I flew to open the back door, then darted back to the oven to turn it off. Damn it, why did the bloody thing have to have so many knobs? Flapping at the smoke with my left hand, I squinted at the tiny little icons and numbers. Yes—that one. I turned the knob as far as I could to the right.

  Then, cursing, turned it as far as I could to the left. A reassuring zero appeared. Should I open the oven door? It’d probably be safer to leave it for a while. A long while.

  I escaped from the kitchen and leaned back on the door to heave a sigh of relief, only to have it turn into a hacking cough that left my chest aching and my eyes streaming.

  Oh God. I mopped my face with a mortified handkerchief. Hanne would never speak to me again if she found out I’d burned her unpronounceable bread to cinders. I’d have to lie if she asked me how the baking had gone, I decided. And just hope she hadn’t happened to look out of her window while smoke was billowing out into my back garden. Perhaps I should light a small bonfire by way of camouflage? Then again, on current form, I’d most likely end up burning down the whole village.

  What the hell had I been thinking of earlier? I couldn’t get a dog. I could barely look after myself; I’d probably kill a pet within a week by feeding it the wrong thing, or letting it out to play with the traffic.

  I felt so depressed about the whole thing, I had half a mind to go out and play with the traffic myself. Then again, this was Shamwell. The traffic on the High Street generally trundled along over the speed bumps at around fifteen miles an hour. Anyone serious about suicide would be better off popping down the road and jumping in the river.

  Granted, you’d be hard-pressed to drown yourself in its usual four to six inches of water (rising, I’d been told, to four to six feet at times of heavy rain, though I found this hard to envisage) but no doubt you could take your pick of unpleasant waterborne diseases to expire from. Eventually.

  Bizarrely cheered by these morbid thoughts, I decided to go out for a run. Having slept late today, I hadn’t been out yet. I’d changed into tracksuit bottoms and a long-sleeved T-shirt and was lacing up my running shoes before it occurred to me it would perhaps be a bit risky leaving the kitchen door wide open while I was out. A quick peek into the kitchen confirmed the smoke—and the smell—hadn’t yet dissipated. Still, the back gate was bolted, it was broad daylight, and I lived in the middle of the village, for heaven’s sake. How likely was it that anyone would break in? Or rather, walk in, seeing as no breaking would be required in this instance.

  In any case, they’d probably take one look at my meagre possessions, decide, as Rose had, that they were all around a hundred years old, and walk straight out again. Not having been used to having a whole house to myself, I hadn’t really accumulated much in the way of portable goods, and the television that had come with the rest of the rented furnishings didn’t look as though it would make enough on resale to be worth the bother of carting it away.

  I carefully hid my laptop under the sofa cushions and set out, crossing the road and taking the back lane up the hill to the park.

  It was a glorious autumn day, the leaves still largely on the trees but turned to gorgeous hues of red and gold. Every time the gentle breeze gusted, a few leaves drifted down lazily to dapple the grass. The air smelled fresh, moist and earthy. In the enclosed playground in the centre of the park, bundled-up toddlers and older children in anoraks shrieked as they ran between the swings and the roundabout or bounced around on strange springy things that were supposed to look like horses or motorbikes.

  My steps faltered as I passed the playground and spotted a trio of redheads: one tall, two small. Sean was playing football with the twins. As I watched, he booted the ball past his two opponents and between a woolly hat and a piled-up scarf lying on the ground. He drowned out their disappointed cries with a loud cheer, pulled his shirt up over his head and ran around the makeshift pitch doing an aeroplane impression.

  I couldn’t help laughing at the sight. Part of me also noticed his actions had exposed a taut abdomen with a light sprinkling of ginger hair. It started around his belly button and trailed enticingly downward, leading inevitably to recollections of Rose’s ginger nuts comment…

  “En-em-ee, En-em-ee,” the twins chanted. Sean skidded to a halt and pulled his shirt back down as I realised I’d been standing there, staring. Probably with a silly smile on my face. Or a creepy leer. I wasn’t sure which was worse. Mortified at the questioning look in Sean’s eyes, I gave him an awkward wave and ran on.

  My route led down a gentle slope to the river. I imagined this must be a popular spot for families in warmer months, but now there were only a couple of dog walkers. I stopped to do some stretches by a willow tree, its melancholy branches dipping golden leaves to caress the sluggish water. I did a few more than usual—for some reason my heartbeat was a little slow to return to its resting rate of fifty-four. I must be getting unfit, I thought. Rose, though lovely, was in some respects not the best influence healthwise. Still, it was running that would sort that out, not stretching. One last go at the hamstrings, and I unfolded myself, ready to be on my way.

  Except now Sean was right in front of me, Startled, I stared at him for a moment. The twins trailed a long way behind him, kicking the ball between them as they zigzagged across the grass.

  Sean stared back. Then he shook himself almost imperceptibly. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I said back. Oh God, what should I say? “I’m, um, out for a run.”

  He smiled, his gaze travelling pointedly down my r
unning-gear-clad frame. “I’d never have guessed.”

  God, he must think I was a complete moron. He’d probably be up at the school after half term, demanding to know why his nephews were being taught by someone so clearly intellectually challenged. “So I’d better, um, run.” I gave him another hideously awkward wave.

  Then I ran.

  Over the bridge, along the riverbank—looking resolutely in front of me, and not to the right, where I might possibly have spotted a flash of red hair out of the corner of my eye. Up the slope and onto the old railway line.

  I was halfway to the next village before I felt safe to stop for a breather. What the hell had that been all about? I leaned on an old brick gatepost (now sans gate) and did a quick quad stretch. Had Sean followed me to demand to know why I’d been ogling his midriff? A thought crossed my mind—but it was ridiculous, so I banished it immediately, and switched legs.

  But Sean had seemed a bit…distracted, down by the river.

  No, I decided, and jogged up the steps to the wheat field above the track, its harvest long gathered in for the winter. A footpath led along the side of the field, eventually crossing a bridleway that would lead me back to Shamwell. It was bordered by rough blackthorn hedges now covered in plump, blue-black sloes. Their vicious spines stood sentry, ready to impale any would-be gin makers who might venture this way.

  There was no way Sean had been ogling me in his turn as I did my stretches.

  For a start, I told myself as I scrambled over a stile, dressed in my scruffy running clothes, I was hardly ogle-worthy. For much of the village, I’d found on previous excursions, I wasn’t even recognisable as Mr. Enemy from St Saviour’s School. The children in my class could usually work it out, particularly after I’d spoken, but their parents, if I greeted them mid-run, generally just gave me puzzled frowns.

  Ah. That must be it. I turned into the single-track lane which led down to the ford. Sean had just followed me to get a closer look at the weird stranger who’d been staring and waving at him.