Free Cutting Edge by John Harvey Page A

think there was anybody else in the house.
    “Look,” Karen said, “let me get dressed. It won’t take a minute.”
    Carew didn’t move.
    Shrugging, she turned and went back upstairs, conscious that he was following her, looking at her legs.
    “Mind the …”
    “I remember.”
    The room was much as he’d remembered it as well, clutter and last night’s cigarette smoke. It had almost been enough to put him off her, the way, after a meal, after the cinema, after sex, she would automatically light up. Cheap. Expensive to look at but cheap underneath. He watched as she pulled on a pair of faded blue jeans and exchanged her socks for a pair of sports shoes, white with a pink trim.
    She picked up the kettle. “Tea?”
    “When did I ever drink tea in the mornings?”
    Karen spooned instant coffee into mugs, relieved that he seemed to have calmed down, feeling safer now that he was almost friendly, wanting to keep him that way, only not too much. Carew watched her as the water boiled, lounging with one of his bare elbows against the wall, posing.
    “I should be really pissed off with you,” he said, as she spooned sugar into her own mug, ready.
    “You mean you’re not?”
    “I ought to be.” Not leaning any more now, standing close as she lifted the kettle, almost touching her, touching her. “Desperate without you, that what you reckoned? Thought of someone else in there with you, in bed, picture of it driving me insane?” His knee was resting against the back of her thigh, knuckles sliding gently up and down her arm.
    Karen moved away, turning back towards him at arm’s length, offering him the coffee.
    “Thanks,” smiling through the faintest shimmer of steam.
    Smug bastard! Karen thought. “It was the police who asked me about you,” she said. “I didn’t mention your name.”
    “I have been thinking about you, you know.”
    “I doubt it.”
    “It’s true.”
    “It’s because you’re here. If you weren’t here, you’d be thinking about running, getting drunk, lectures, somebody else.”
    “Well,” he said, reaching for her, hands up under the sleeves of her T-shirt, alternately pushing and stroking, someone who read an article on massage once but became distracted midway through the third paragraph. “Well, I’m here now.”
    Somebody along the street shouted at a dog, a cat or a child and slammed their back door so forcefully that Karen’s window, despite folds of yellowing newspaper, rattled in its frame.
    “Look,” said Karen, pushing his hands away, moving across the narrow room, picking up things and putting them down, trying to seem businesslike, “I’m sorry about the police. Really. But now I’ve got to go. I’m already late for a lecture.”
    “What?”
    Hand on hip, she looked at him. Unmade, the bed was between them, a tatty stuffed animal poking out from beneath the rumpled duvet.
    “What lecture?”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    “Then don’t go.”
    “I mean it doesn’t matter to you, what does it matter, what bloody lecture I have to go to?”
    “Hey, Karen. Calm down.” Oh, God! Trying the smile, giving his teeth their best shot. Don’t bother! She opened the door to the room and left it open, wide to the stairs.
    He didn’t move.
    Neither of them moved.
    Karen prayed for the communal phone to ring, someone to come to the door, postman, milkman, double-glazing salesman, anyone, one of her fellow tenants to return. She considered leaving him there and taking off down the stairs, but knew he would come after her and catch her, haul her back before throwing her down on the bed. It had happened like that several times before but then it had been different, she had enjoyed it, they’d been going together.
    “What I can’t understand,” Carew said, “is why you’d prefer someone like that anyway.”
    “Someone like what?” Karen said, knowing as soon as the words were out of her mouth that she shouldn’t.
    “Oh, you know …” He gestured with his hands.