Free Keep Me Alive by Natasha Cooper Page A

man about Will’s height but a few years older, dressed in tight blue jeans and a pristine white T-shirt. He was carrying two Furbishers plastic bags. When he saw Will, he dumped them both on the ground.
    ‘What’re you looking at?’ he barked.
    ‘Nothing,’ Will said. ‘I was just trying to decide whether to take the lift or the stairs.’
    The man’s arms didn’t move, but all the muscles in his chest rippled. Will could see them bunching and flattening under his shirt.
    ‘You must think I was born yesterday,’ he said, so wired he didn’t even notice he was spitting with every word. ‘I don’t like people hanging around my flat. I want you out of here. Now. Or else …’
    Will had had enough of threats so he turned his back and went for the stairs. When he heard the grating of a key as it turned inside its lock, he risked a look back. The man was letting himself into 36B, so he must have been the target of Trish’s friend. Running down flight after flight, Will sympathized with her. No woman should have to face a man like that, even if she was a police officer. He hoped she’d had plenty of back-up. He wondered what the man had done, and who was dealing with him now.
    On the ground floor, Will pushed his way out of the swing doors and had to make another decision about where to go. He picked the nearest exit and walked out between broken concrete bollards into the main road, where juggernauts and buses jostled the bicycles and little cars into all the biggest potholes. The pavements were cracked, there was litter blowing everywhere in the humid wind, and there wasn’t a single food shop in sight.
    How do they bear it? he wondered, then shivered. Soon it might not be a question of ‘they’ but ‘we’. If Furbishers won the case, Will thought he’d probably be lucky to end up in a place
like this. He wouldn’t be able to go on living with his sister and her husband much longer, and he’d never be able to get a job that would fund a mortgage, or even much rent. In fact, he couldn’t think of a single job he was qualified to do, except farming or running a food business. No one was going to employ him for either now. Since he’d rather die than work for a supermarket, his only option would be unskilled labouring somewhere. A building site probably.
    ‘At least that’d be in the open air,’ he muttered.
    There was a newsagent’s down the road. They might know where the nearest food shop could be found. This was going to take a long time.
     
    ‘So, Trish,’ Antony said as they left court at lunchtime, ‘you must be feeling better.’
    ‘I am. How did you know?’
    He narrowed his eyes into the seducer’s glint and whispered, ‘Because you look divine, dearest.’
    Usually she’d have been as likely to spit as to giggle in the august corridors of the Royal Courts of Justice, but she couldn’t help it now. She wondered what their disapproving clerk would say if he could hear her, or witness the great man’s frivolity.
    ‘Antony, for heaven’s sake! I think I’d rather be a slimy fish-eating cormorant than “divine, dearest”.’
    He laughed. ‘You’re such a monster of rectitude, Trish, you can’t blame me for trying every technique that might just conceivably work.’
    ‘Maybe not, but you’d better put a cork in it now, or you’ll shock poor Colin when he brings the sandwiches, and he’s got enough to put up with. Oh, did you give him any money for our lunch today?’
    ‘Sod it. I forgot. And I haven’t any cash on me.’
    ‘Don’t worry,’ Trish said, glad to see Antony was back on
track as her pupil brought the laden tray to their usual corner table. ‘I have.’
    She leaned down for the handbag she’d dumped on the floor and fished out a twenty-pound note. Colin looked relieved, even though he made a whole string of polite protests about taking her money.
     
    ‘I don’t remember,’ Jess said, keeping well away from the three plastic trays of sausages. She