“We’re helping each other grow, Patrick,” Bella said, and I didn’t immediately realise why my hands clenched on the wheel as my foot jerked on the accelerator.

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

Home

Throughout the drive to Julia’s I was aware of Bella’s bag on the back seat. Her hand and Roy’s were clasped in front of it like a protection or a pledge. Its contents were silent, and as far as I could judge they were still. Whenever Bella looked at me in the mirror, her eyes were so wide that they might have been eager to fit in more innocence. I found this and the presence of her souvenir increasingly hard to bear, and on the final stretch of motorway they made me break my silence. “Will you be taking your trophy to Roy’s mother’s?”

Roy shivered, perhaps at the prospect. “Mum doesn’t have to know, does she?”

“I think she does if anything like that is being brought into her house.”

As he looked betrayed Bella said “No need for any trouble. I’ll keep it at mine.”

“Where might that be?” I said and met her innocence with a version of the same.

“Not far from Julia’s. I’ll tell you when we’re close.”

We’d hardly left the motorway when she directed me along the outskirts of the town towards the river. In less than ten minutes most of the houses were left behind, and the remainder were split into flats, unless the families whose bicycles – toy and teenage and motorcycles too, not to mention scramblers – occupied some of the front gardens were extravagantly large. Although more than one house sounded like an outsize stereo system mainly devoted to drums, nobody was to be seen. The buildings on the right side of the road gave way to a high brick wall that was losing a struggle to restrain trees. “I’m here, Patrick,” Bella said.

Before I could suggest it Roy said “Shall we come with you?”

“I’ll only be a minute.”

She grabbed her bag as she unbent with a ballerina’s litheness from the car. I expected her to head for one of the houses, but she crossed the road and vanished through a gap in the wall. “Where’s that supposed to be?” I said.

“Don’t know.” Roy made it plain that he resented both his ignorance and having it exposed. After a minute or so he said “Maybe we should look.”

I wished he’d proposed it sooner. I was reaching to open my door when Bella reappeared in the gloom beneath the trees beyond the wall, brushing at herself with both hands. As she slipped into the car Roy said “Where did you go?”

“Where I live. What did you think?” With a laugh at his bemused expression, she recaptured his hand. “That’s a short cut to it,” she said.