LITMIR.BIZ

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she would drive over to Elsie Johnson’s in the morning just before Elsie was due to leave for her sister’s, and that she would stay at the house until Leigh returned from London to relieve her on Wednesday.

      If her stepsister’s business continued to expand they would need to think of taking on extra staff, Debra mused as she packed. Both Leigh and her partner were adamant about preferring to take on only other women. They were not a tough, macho agency, Leigh had pointed out when Debra had gently reminded her that in doing so they could be accused of discrimination. The reason they were getting so many small commissions from other women was perhaps because it was a female-based agency and because, as women, they understood all too well how other members of their sex felt about male betrayal.

      ‘Jeff helped out and he’s a man,’ Debra had pointed out.

      ‘That was different,’ Leigh had overruled her, adding that Jeff only helped them out as a favour. He didn’t work for them.

      In the morning Debra was careful to make sure that she arrived at Elsie Johnson’s exactly on time.

      As she had expected, she found the older woman was packed and waiting for her, a relieved expression touching her face as she opened the door to her.

      Inside the house was shadowy and dark, the hall filled with old-fashioned Edwardian furniture.

      Mrs Johnson was meticulous about security. Both outer doors had security chains as well as double locks; all the windows had locks as well, and Mrs Johnson herself reminded Debra of a timid little field-mouse, all nervously twitching whiskers and tensely anxious little body.

      She would ring every evening, just to make sure that everything was all right, she told Debra before getting into her waiting taxi.

      It was just as well that Leigh’s clients were wealthy, Debra reflected later as she made herself a cup of coffee in the immaculately tidy kitchen. It was they who were paying Mrs Johnson for the use of her house, and paying her very generously as well.

      Cautious and orderly by nature, Debra did not, as she suspected that Leigh would have done, find the immaculate tidiness of the house constricting.

      She had brought all her own food supplies with her, and once she had had her coffee she unpacked her case in the small spare bedroom.

      From upstairs she had a completely unrestricted view of the next-door house and rear garden, and if she left the landing window open she could, additionally, hear cars arriving at the front of the house.

      Her instructions from Leigh were relatively simple. All she had to do was to monitor and then log down on the tape-recorder the details of anyone who visited the house.

      Leigh had also provided her with a camera.

      ‘Just in case we really get lucky and he brings one of his other women here,’ Leigh had told her.

      In any other circumstances Debra might have balked a little at such an intrusion of anyone’s privacy, but she agreed with Leigh that a girl of seventeen, madly in love and totally obsessed with her lover, was in a dangerously vulnerable situation, and she could well understand Ginny’s parents’ concern for their daughter.

      Before she had left, Elsie Johnson had told her nervously that there had been a good deal of commotion next door during the previous evening, raised voices, doors slamming, that kind of thing; but today all was peace and silence.

      Debra had brought some work with her to help pass the time…not office work.

      The previous summer she had accidentally become involved with a semi-private, semi-council-sponsored scheme which had involved individuals giving some of their spare time to young teenagers whom the council had in care.

      It had been through a friend of a friend that Debra had originally heard of the organisation, and now she was a very committed member of the group, giving up a couple of evenings a month plus odd days at weekends to spend at the home.

      The object of the exercise was to provide the teenager with someone with whom they could hopefully form a bond on a one-to-one basis, someone who, while not being their parents or having any authority over them, could help them with their problems in an adult way.

      Debra was still in touch with the fourteen-year-old Amy, who was now back with her mother, and she was presently trying to form a bond with Karen, who had been taken into care having been abused by her stepfather, a withdrawn and obviously desperately unhappy girl. It made Debra’s heart ache with compassion and sadness to see the look of despair and misery in her eyes.

      If and when she ever managed to break through Karen’s isolation, she hoped that she could do as she had done with Amy—take Karen out for small treats and help her to re-establish herself and to feel less institutionalised.

      Now Debra was making a list of the problems she confronted in trying to make contact with Karen, and opposite these problems she was writing down the solutions she might find to them.

      It wasn’t easy; she found working with the teenagers emotionally and mentally draining, but the counselling and courses that all members of the group took had helped her to understand the children’s problems and how best she could help them.

      It was seven o’clock before she saw any sign of movement from next door.

      She almost missed hearing the car pull up outside, and in fact she suspected that she would have done if she hadn’t happened to be on her way downstairs at the time.

      She frowned a little. The small compact Volvo was not somehow or other the kind of car she had expected the man to drive.

      The net curtains hanging at the landing window obscured her vision of him and she had to flick them back a little as well as switching on the cassette which Leigh had impressed upon her she was to have with her at all times.

      The man emerging from the car was tall and dark-haired. Before opening the garden gate he paused, glancing down the road, so that Debra had an unobscured view of his face.

      A tiny shock of sensation curled through her, an immediate and disturbing physical response to him that made her check and tense.

      He was frowning slightly and looked rather more formidable than she had imagined. He looked like a man used to being in control of himself and others. Warily Debra watched him. She had expected him to look different, less powerful, less compelling. She had assumed that he would have about him an air of weakness and self-indulgence, which this man most assuredly did not.

      Before walking up the path he paused and then looked up at Elsie Johnson’s house. Immediately Debra tensed. He couldn’t possibly have seen her watching him, could he?

      Her heartbeat suddenly accelerated, her muscles tensing. She dared not look out of the window in case he was still studying the house.

      One minute went by and then another. This was ridiculous, she told herself crossly. There was no reason why she should not simply walk past the window, why she should feel so intimidated.

      She took a deep breath and forced herself to move. Only when she was safely on the other side of the window did she allow herself a brief glance out of it. The man had gone inside the house.

      Vigilantly Debra kept watch all evening, but all that happened was that she got cramp. All was quiet from next door. No one had arrived or left.

      When she went to bed she set her alarm for six-thirty so that she could be on duty for seven when Jeff went home.

      She didn’t need the alarm. She hardly slept at all, and not just because she was in a strange bed, she admitted as she dressed. It wasn’t just what she was doing that disturbed her; the man himself had unnerved her.

      By seven o’clock she was eating her breakfast in front of the sitting-room window, where she had a clear view of the Volvo.

      When by nine o’clock the Volvo was still there she began to panic a little.

      Could he have left via the back door? Had he guessed that he was being watched? Had he perhaps even left during the night

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