Free All Bones and Lies by Anne Fine Page B

encourage any contact in the future. ‘There’s a bit of a problem elsewhere in the building, so I’m just checking round.’
    The scowl was instant, the tone bellicose. ‘Who is bloody complaining?’
    â€˜I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say.’
    â€˜Well, what they bloody complaining
about
?’
    â€˜It isn’t a problem with this flat,’ Colin said hastily. And then his eye fell on the gas fire. No point in going through the proper channels. The baby could be dead before morning. ‘Except that we will, of course, be fitting you with a brand new gas fire, at no expense at all to yourselves, later this afternoon.’ Now he would have to go all the way back to the office to beg Old Hetherley to take a couple of his men off Tanner Street and send them round here. And then he’d have to fiddle the paperwork – and probably end up paying for the whole damn thing himself.
    Never mind. He might not be able to catch infants in flight, but he could save them from carbon monoxide poisoning. Sagely, he stuffed his card back in his pocket before shifting the baby round on his lap, then handing her back. ‘Thank you,’ said Mel, though whether it was because he’d given her back her baby or promised her a gas fire, he couldn’t tell.
    And it still wasn’t clear as he watched her face later. She sat impassively, cross-legged on the sofa while Hetherley’s crack force tutted and grumbled their way through a simple replacement fitting and reline of flue. ‘Where’s your “unfit” tape, then?’ Tubs Arnold kept demanding. ‘You didn’t ought to have peeled that off. That’s quite illegal.’ At first he thought that Mel was simply being smart, keeping her mouth shut. (As one of the council’s tenants, she could hardly, thought Colin with a stab of embarrassment, have thought this prompt service was standard.) But then he realized she was barely listening. Men could peel back her threadbare carpet, chip at her fire surround to make it bigger, and even spill grease on her tired little fire stool, and she, in some whole other world, paid no attention. She was hardly there.
    At least by the time they’d checked the sealant and packed up their mess, she had come back to earth enough to agree he could come round next day with the last of the paperwork. Tubs Arnold pounced. ‘
What
paperwork? We had it straight from Mr Hetherley that this was a Special that got lost in
pro forma.
He said all the rest of the inkslinging’s been signed, sealed and knotted.’
    But evil sprites of billing had not prevailed. Mel had her gas fire. Tammy had her life. And Colin was soon inthe habit of popping in every now and again to see the child he now considered that he, too, had saved. He’d have his excuses at the ready. ‘Bit of an on-going noise problem in your block. I thought I’d just—’ But she’d simply step back to let him in, and make him a coffee while he cuddled the baby. There’d been no sightings of the challenging young man, and Mel’s indifference to footsteps outside on the walkway, and even the odd drunken rattling at her door, gave him to understand there was no need to assume he’d be back in a hurry. Over the last few months it had become a friendship, of a sort. Comforting (though it hadn’t helped at all with this business of going down Bridge Row). But he hadn’t told Dilys, for fear of the teasing he knew would follow. ‘Found a tart with a heart, have you, Colin?’ And neither, he couldn’t help noticing, could Mel herself have got round to mentioning his visits to Dilys. Otherwise, why would his sister keep trying to bring him up to date with snippets from the flowered notelets, as she was doing now? ‘Did I tell you little Tammy has started at playgroup?’
    In the wash of relief from getting round the corner into Stemple Street, he