Free Late Night Shopping: by Carmen Reid Page A

Dinah's homemade plum.'
     
'Plum! Yes!' Ed nodded, full of enthusiasm. 'We have a winner. Do we have white bread and peanut butter in the house? Or do we have to stop at the shop?'
     
Monday to Friday, Ed, who was head of the music department at Lana and Owen's school, walked home with Owen. Lana, being older, would rather have had hot needles stuck into her eyeballs than be seen walking home with a teacher , obviously. But Owen wasn't quite so fussy.
     
Anyway, Ed and Owen would usually talk a little bit about how their day had gone, but as both had hearty appetites, which the twenty-minute walk home always seemed to sharpen, the main focus of the journey was on planning their afternoon snack.
     
'We're not going to have time to eat supper before the recital this evening, so we're going to need a lot of jam and peanut butter,' Ed warned.
     
'Is Mum coming to see me play?' Owen wondered.
     
'I hope so, she said she would,' came Ed's reply. He knew that the school's junior string quartet wasn't Annie's idea of a thrilling night out, but Owen was playing violin and had been practising so hard that Ed had made her promise she would come and watch him as his reward.
     
As they turned into Hawthorne Street, Ed ran his eye approvingly over the front gardens still bursting with green and bloom. Well, OK, the garden of number eight was in need of a little attention, particularly in the way of hedge trimming, but there would hopefully be time for that at the weekend.
     
However, the house looked amazing. A narrow, four-storey Georgian townhouse, it was quaint, ever so slightly wonky and just utterly charming. The window frames, recently repainted, gleamed bright white. The door was a shiny light blue. Two large blue pots at the front door brimmed with the pink and blue flowers Ed had planted in the summer.
     
Annie, although a genius at house renovating and redecorating, turned out to have something of a kiss-of-death effect on everything she touched in the garden.
     
'Leave everything inside to me,' she'd insisted, 'but you'll have to go out there and get dirty, babes.'
     
As Ed pushed the key into the brass-rimmed keyhole of the solid wooden front door, he thought of his mum. Coming in though the front door still made Ed think of his mother because she'd lived in this house for twenty-seven years, until she'd died just two years ago.
     
For several years, Ed had lived in a flat in the basement, and on his mother's death he and his sister should have had to sell up the family home and move on. But then Annie had bustled into his life, Annie with her big plans and snap decisions.
     
She'd moved in, she'd redecorated, then she'd sold her place and bought enough of a share in the house for him to be able to afford to own the rest.
     
He must be just about the only teacher in London living in a townhouse in north London's lovely Highgate. That was for sure. He would always be grateful that Annie had enabled him to stay here.
     
The mortice lock had already been opened, so Ed knew that Lana must be home. He pushed in the Yale key and opened the door.
     
There were two schoolbags in the lobby. The brightly patterned number he recognized as Lana's, the dark rucksack he suspected might be Andrei's.
     
'Hi, Lana!' Ed called into the stairwell, 'just to let you know we're back!'
     
'So you can put your clothes back on,' Owen muttered in a low aside.
     
Ed tutted him.
     
There was silence. Lana's room was on the attic floor two flights of stairs up from the lobby, but she should still have been able to hear them.
     
'Everything OK?' he called up.
     
When there was still no response, Ed told Owen to go and put the toast on in the kitchen and he'd be down in a minute.
     
Once he was on the first floor, he told himself that he was just being silly and anxious and maybe even too nosy. He was not going to go up to the attic room and knock on Lana's door. Whatever she was doing up there, she was fine and it was her business . .