Free Mixing With Murder by Ann Granger

street. I didn’t break my stride. Animals have the advantage over humans in being able to move their ears to catch sounds behind them. I couldn’t do that, but even so, I was sure there was a soft footfall keeping time with my steps. I reached the shopping precinct again, and crossed the main road with the intention of stopping by the first bus stop I reached to wait for a bus to take me back. The person following me crossed over too. He or she was a novice at trailing someone. This was reassuring but also annoying. I didn’t want this busybody, whoever he or she was, reporting back to the Stallards.
     
    I passed a quaint old pub called the Dewdrop which had survived intact between modern buildings with shops below and offices above. There was a bus stop here. I halted and turned round.
     
    My tracker was a young man in jeans and a black T-shirt with trainer-shod feet. When he caught my eye he looked guilty and dithered between diving into the pub and putting a bold face on it and continuing. He decided in for a penny, in for a pound. He walked up to the bus stop and stood there with me.
     
    The situation was bordering on the ridiculous. There we were, side by side, staring at the passing traffic, and painfully aware of one another. He’d been following me and he knew that I’d guessed it. No sensible person would have tried to bluff it out as he was doing. I ventured a glance sideways but he kept his eyes resolutely to the front and his spine ramrod straight in a way which would have done credit to a sentry at Buckingham Palace. Amateurs, huh!
     
    Just then a bus did come along and I hopped on. Would you believe it? Sherlock Holmes hopped on behind me. I wondered, when we reached the city centre, if he’d get off there. But he stuck with me. The bus crossed the river over Magdalen Bridge and rounded the central shrub-planted area of the Plain, halting just at the beginning of the Iffley Road. I got off and yes, he got off too.
     
    This was now just exasperating. Instead of walking towards my destination I stood still on the pavement. Holmes dithered again not knowing whether to walk past me and risk me doubling back behind him. I decided to put him out of his misery.
     
    ‘You’re following me,’ I said to him, not unpleasantly. I even gave him a kindly smile, just to rattle him further.
     
    He turned beetroot-red, right up into his tousled fair hair. ‘No, I’m not.’ His gaze was shifting all over the place now, unable to meet mine.
     
    ‘Do me a favour. Do I look as if I arrived from the moon yesterday? You’ve followed me from Summertown. If you didn’t want me to notice you, well, all I can say is, you’re lousy at tailing someone. If you didn’t care if I saw you, then perhaps you thought it would worry me. No chance. Where I come from, if you worried about the people you met on the street, you’d never go out. So don’t mess me around. What do you want?’
     
    With unexpected pugnacity he retorted, ‘I ought to ask you that!’
     
    ‘Why?’ I countered.
     
    ‘What do you want with the Stallards?’ He was glaring at me now, trying to put the frighteners on me.
     
    There was no way he was going to gain an advantage by blustering, not here on the open pavement, and certainly not now he’d tipped his hand by mentioning the Stallards. I wasn’t alarmed by him but I was seriously annoyed. This was another unwished complication.
     
    ‘Who are they?’ I asked.
     
    ‘I saw you!’ He jutted his jaw at me. He was beginning to sweat now; I could see the pearls forming on his forehead. He was a good-looking guy in a sporty sort of way, the sleeves of the black T-shirt stretched over well-developed biceps. Probably he had more brawn than brain-power, judging by what I’d seen of him so far, but that didn’t make him less of a problem. I wasn’t only annoyed with him but with myself and abashed at my own conceit. I’d flattered myself I’d done a good job looking over the Stallards’