Free Murder... Now and Then by Jill McGown

money,’ said Lloyd.
    â€˜No appetite,’ said Judy.
    â€˜I know,’ he said, grabbing her hand, running with her, jumping on to the open platform of a not yet phased-out Routemaster, pushing her upstairs ahead of him, to the empty upper deck, where he pulled her down into a seat. The bus groaned as it pulled out from the stop, and car horns sounded.
    Judy stared at him. ‘ Well?’ she said.
    â€˜Well We’re on the top deck of a bus.’
    â€˜Where’s it going?’
    He grinned, ‘Who cares? We’ll get another one back when we’ve been.’ He turned as the conductor laboured up the stairs, his girth making the task only just this side of possible.
    â€˜Fares, please,’ he said, in a deep West Indian baritone.
    â€˜Two to the terminus,’ said Lloyd. ‘Thank you.’
    The machine spat out the tickets, and the conductor stayed where he was.
    â€˜Thank you,’ Lloyd said again, a little more loudly, rather as though he were talking to a hard-of-hearing butler.
    The conductor didn’t move, and Judy’s mouth began to twitch. She didn’t really know how Lloyd was likely to react to being laughed at; she gave him a sideways look, to find him winking at her. Then he literally fell on top of her as the bus swung round a seemingly endless bend to the right.
    The conductor made his way down once the anticipated hazard of being wedged in the stairway had passed, and the bus had made it round the bend. But Lloyd stayed where he was.
    â€˜Get off me,’ Judy said, but there was a lack of authority in her tone.
    He smiled, and kissed her. She kissed him back, and he smiled again.
    â€˜More,’ he said.
    Oh, such a kiss. They emerged from it eventually, and Lloyd sat back. ‘How much of a problem?’ he asked.
    â€˜Too much.’ She sighed. ‘I thought you wanted to be somewhere we could carry on a conversation.’
    â€˜Only so that I could say what was on my mind. I think I just did.’
    â€˜No, Lloyd. It wouldn’t be right.’
    â€˜Not on the top deck of a bus in broad daylight, no.’
    Judy closed her eyes. ‘Not anywhere,’ she said.
    â€˜I … I can’t stop thinking about you,’ he said. ‘And when we were working last night I got the impression …’
    He left the rest of the sentence to her. Judy stared straight ahead as the bus made its way through unfamiliar streets, praying that it would stop and pick up a chain-smoker, but it just swept past all the stops. Had he known it would do this? She wouldn’t be surprised. She could hardly tell him he had got the wrong impression, because he hadn’t. ‘ I’m sorry,’ was all she came up with in the end.
    â€˜What harm would it do?’ he asked.
    In different circumstances, perhaps none. She even had access to a flat, and she wanted nothing more than to go there with him, but she wouldn’t. Not because it was Michael’s flat; some girls might have had qualms of conscience about using their boyfriend’s flat for such a purpose, but she wouldn’t. Michael was the first and only man whose bed she had shared, but their relationship was fluid; he was away on one of his long business trips, and he wouldn’t be going without, of that she was quite certain. He made no secret of it.
    And it wasn’t because Lloyd was married. Or because he had two small children. She could imagine circumstances in which she might well ignore all the moral objections for a bit of fun that would harm no one.
    But she knew how she felt about Lloyd, and that added up to a great deal of potential harm all round. People would get hurt She would get hurt. There was no way she could compete with a wife and two children, and she wasn’t getting into a destructive relationship of that kind. Self-preservation was the strongest drive of all, and her fear of the consequences outweighed everything