Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose [Stories]

Passion Killers

The doorbell chimed.

In the kitchen, Gloria looked at the clock. She had to be out of the house by half-past, or she’d certainly be late for choir practice. The tea was too hot, so she added some extra milk to cool it, took a sip and found it didn’t taste like tea any more.

Her mother was letting a few seconds pass before going to the door. She wouldn’t want it known that she’d been behind the net curtain in the front room for the past ten minutes.

Presently Gloria heard the caller being greeted in a refined accent her mother never used normally. “Is it actually raining outside? I must tell my daughter. She’s about to go to choir practice. She’s a soloist with the Surrey Orpheus, you know. Gloria, my dear,” the message came, still impeccably spoken, like a headmistress in school assembly, “it appears to be raining.”

“I know.”

Tonight the choir were rehearsing the Cathedral Christmas Concert. “Sheep May Safely Graze” was open on the kitchen table. Nobody seemed to mind that the piece happened to be secular, from the Hunting Cantata; it was so often played in church. Gloria, who would be singing the part of Diana, supported the League Against Cruel Sports really and hoped people wouldn’t say she was abandoning her principles just to get out of the chorus. She got up and tipped the tea down the sink, ran some water over the cup and saucer and reached automatically for the tea-cloth, but the tea-cloth didn’t come to hand. Instead, of all things, she found that she was about to dry the cup on her mother’s thermal knickers. They had been through the washing machine the day before and Mother must have hung them to dry on the towel rail, long-legged things in a hideous shade of pink described in the mail-order catalogue as peach-coloured. Even her mother laughingly called them her passion killers. Gloria clicked her tongue in annoyance and tossed them over the folding clothes-rack where they should have been.

The visitor was Mr Hibbert, the dapper man from number 31. For the last two Fridays he had called on Gloria’s mother, Mrs Palmer, at precisely this time, just as Gloria was leaving for choir. The pretext for the visits wasn’t mentioned, and Gloria hadn’t asked. Her mother was only forty-one and divorced. She was entitled to invite a male friend to the house if she wished. It wasn’t as if she was getting up to anything shameful. No doubt Mr Hibbert had a perfectly proper reason for calling. True, Mother had put on her slinky black dress and sprayed herself with Tabu, but it was just to make herself presentable. It couldn’t mean anything else. Mr Hibbert had a wife and lived just four doors up the street.

At seventeen, Gloria viewed her mother’s social life with detachment. Sometimes she felt the more mature of the two of them. Gloria worked in a small draper’s shop in the High Street that had somehow survived the competition from department stores and mail order catalogues. It stocked a tasteful range of fabrics, haberdashery and wools. There were foundation garments discreetly folded away in wooden drawers under the glass counter. Nobody under forty ever went in there. Since leaving school Gloria hadn’t kept up with her so-called friends, who had always seemed far too juvenile, obsessed with pop-singers and boyfriends. Even though she was the youngest in the choir by some years, the others talked of her with approval as old-fashioned. The way she plaited her fine, dark hair and pinned it into the shape of a lyre at the back of her head strengthened the perception.

In the hall, she put on her black fitted coat and checked her hair in the mirror. She called out, “I’m off, then. Bye.”

From behind the closed door of the front room, her mother called, “Bye, darling.” It was a pity she chose to add something else, a terrible pity as it turned out, but she did. First she called out, “Gloria.”

“Yes?”

“If you’re not in bed by midnight, you’d better come home.”

The remark was meant to be funny and Mr Hibbert showed that he thought it was — or that he ought to react as if it was — by laughing out loud. Then her mother laughed too.

Gloria was deeply shocked. She gasped and shut her eyes. There was a swishing sound in her ears. The humiliation was unendurable. That her own mother should say such a thing in front of a man — a neighbour — was a betrayal.

And the way they had laughed together meant that Gloria must have been mistaken about them. Mr Hibbert’s visit wasn’t the innocent event she had taken it to be. It couldn’t be. Decent people didn’t laugh at smutty humour. By mocking her, they were affirming their own promiscuity — or at the very least their desire to be promiscuous.

She was disgusted.

To burst into the room and protest would only aggravate the injury. They’d tell her she had no sense of humour. They’d encourage each other to say worse things about her.

She turned towards the mirror again, as if the sight of the outrage on her own features would confirm the injustice of the offence. In the whole of her life she had never given her mother cause to doubt her moral conduct. She’d avoided drugs and smoking and she’d never allowed a boy to take the liberties most other girls yielded blithely. Keeping her standards high had not been easy. She was as prone to temptation as anyone else. She’d had to be strong-willed — and put up with a fair amount of derision from so-called friends who had been less resolute when temptation beckoned. Having to suffer taunts from her own mother was too much.

Mind, she knew that her mother had a streak of irresponsibility. Ninety-nine per cent of the time Mrs Tina Palmer behaved as a mother should. But Gloria could never depend on her. A certain look came over Mother at these times, as if she’d just tossed back a couple of gins (in fact, she didn’t drink). Dimples would appear at the ends of her mouth, her eyes would twinkle, and then she was liable to do anything. Anything. Once, at a school speech day, seated in a privileged place in the front row because Gloria was getting a good conduct prize, Mrs Palmer had winked at Mr Shrubb, the PE teacher, who was up on the stage with all the staff. Most of the teachers had noticed and next day it was mentioned or hinted at in just about every lesson. Another time, bored in a supermarket queue, Mrs Palmer had started juggling with oranges and had swiftly drawn a large crowd. Gloria wasn’t among them. Too embarrassed to watch the display, she’d slipped out through an empty checkout.

At this moment she wasn’t prepared to accept what had been said as yet another example of Mother being skittish again. She was deeply humiliated and ablaze with anger. Her evening was ruined. She was in no frame of mind now to go to choir practice. How could anyone do justice to Bach feeling as she did? She opened the chest in the hall and dropped her music case into it.

She’d go out anyway. Anywhere. She couldn’t bear to remain under the same roof while her feckless mother entertained her fancy-man in the front room.

Her hand was on the door in the act of opening it when she noticed Mr Hibbert’s coat hanging on the antique hallstand that was Mother’s pride and joy. It was one of those elegant navy blue coats with black velvet facing on the collar. Gloria had once thought men who wore such coats were the acme of smartness. Now she was willing to believe that they were all playboys. She was tempted to spit on it, or pull off one of the buttons. Then a far more engaging idea crept into her mind, a wicked, horrid, but deliciously appropriate means of revenge.

She would give Mr Hibbert something to take home, an unexpected souvenir — the passion-killers, those unbecoming thermal knickers of her mother’s. At some point Mr Hibbert would become conscious of something unfamiliar in his overcoat pocket and take it out. His immediate reaction on discovering such a revolting garment could only be guessed at, but he would surely think back and work out with distaste who the passion killers belonged to and try to interpret the message they were meant to convey, just as her mother would at first be mystified at mislaying her thermals and then mortified by the only possible conclusion — that her new friend Mr Hibbert was a secret collector of women’s underwear.

Blushing or glowing, she was not sure which, Gloria tiptoed to the kitchen and lifted the thermals off the rack, this time actually grinning at their unspeakable shape and colour. She folded them neatly so as not to make too obvious a lump. Then she went back to the hall and slipped them into the left pocket of Mr Hibbert’s beautiful coat: the left because the right already contained his leather gloves. She pushed them well down. In doing so, her fingertips came into contact with a set of keys. His car keys.

Now an even better idea dawned on Gloria.

How much more suggestive if the knickers were to turn up in Mr Hibbert’s car, say in the glove compartment on the passenger side, where his wife would very likely discover them for herself. The prospect was delicious: Mrs Hibbert reaching in for a sweet, or something with which to dust the window, and pulling out another woman’s drawers. Her wayward husband would really have some explaining to do.

It wouldn’t be difficult. There were no garages in King George Avenue. The cars were parked in the street, and Mr Hibbert’s was the only silver BMW.

Gloria fished out the thermals and the keys.

She held the thermals at arm’s length. The passion killers. Would anyone believe they belonged to her mother? she wondered. Better leave them in no doubt. There was a way to do it.

One of the drawers in the antique hallstand was full of wrapping paper and padded bags people had sent that might be used again. Mother, being economical, kept everything that might be used a second time. When she needed to send a padded bag, she would carefully tear the stamps off one of her collection and cover the old labels with new sticky labels for readdressing. Gloria selected one of appropriate size, folded the pants and slipped them inside. She removed the stamps, but did nothing about the label, which still had her mother’s name and address typed on the front. Just perfect. She didn’t seal it, either.

As a precaution, just in case some nosy neighbour might see her in the street, she unpinned and unfastened her plaits. Nobody ever caught her with her hair loose. Like this, she suddenly felt a different person, not the high-minded young lady she liked to be known as usually, but a free agent.

She slammed the front door as she went out. The lovers could relax now, believing she was gone for at least two hours and a half. Sheep may safely graze.

The rain had stopped. Darkness had set in some time ago. The street-lamps in King George Avenue were more decorative than effective, but she spotted Mr Hibbert’s BMW parked opposite number 31. There could be no question that it was his car because it was well known that he’d paid for a registration with his initials, HPH — a clear sign of vanity, in Gloria’s opinion. Nobody seemed to be about, so she went straight across and tried the key on the passenger’s side. It was a central locking system and she heard all the doors unlock. When she pulled open the door an interior light came on, so she got in quickly and shut the door and the light went out.

Simple.

The glove compartment opened at the press of a button. Inside were a couple of maps, a roll of peppermints, a half-eaten bar of chocolate and some petrol tokens. She stuffed the bulky envelope inside and closed it.

Now what? There was a sense of anticlimax. Gloria hadn’t thought how she would spend the evening now that she wasn’t going to choir practice. To go back to the house was out of the question. She’d be a prime suspect if she did. It was a chilly evening. She’d sit here a moment and think.

She’d never been into a pub unaccompanied and she wasn’t going to start tonight. She wouldn’t feel very safe walking the streets for long. And there was no one she could visit.

The best plan was to go to a film. She’d walk down to the Cannon and find out what was showing.

She was on the point of leaving the car when she heard footsteps close behind. She glanced into the mirror mounted on the side, but saw nobody on the pavement, so she turned her head.

A figure was walking slowly along the centre of the road between the rows of cars. She couldn’t see too well, but she was fairly certain that it was a male wearing some sort of crested headgear, a fireman’s helmet, perhaps, or a policeman’s.

Panic-stricken, she ducked right down with her head over her knees hoping he’d walk past without looking in.

She could feel her heart thumping against her thigh.

Please, please go by.

The footsteps had the heavy tread of boots. They were agonizingly slow.

They stopped right next to the car.

She nearly died of shock when he opened the door on the driver’s side and got in. The light came on in the car.

“Bloody hell!”

She remained quite still.

“Are you ill, or somefink?”

If he was really a policeman, he ought to have sounded more assertive, more in control, but she dared not check.

“You just give me a nasty turn, any road.”

She was petrified. He took a grip on the hair at the back of her head and pulled her upright.

She had another shock when she turned to face him. The crested helmet was in reality a punk hair-style, a bright green Mohican tuft presently being squashed against the roof of the car. He was a youth of about sixteen. There were three silver rings through his left ear and a glittery stud through his nose.

He asked her, “This motor — is it yours?”

She shook her head.

“Your old man’s? What you doing, then? Nicking stuff? You deaf, or somefink?”

She succeeded in saying, “Who are you?”

He said, “I asked you a question.”

“You asked about five questions.” She was beginning to feel safer with him. She was close enough to see that he was just a boy.

“I don’t know you,” he said, as if the fault were Gloria’s. “I don’t know you, do I?”

She said, “If you pulled the door properly shut, this light would go out.” Immediately she’d said it, she realized that she might be misinterpreted. She was only anxious that nobody should see her sitting in Mr Hibbert’s car, with or without a boy with green hair.

He closed the door and said, in the darkness, “Want a smoke?”

She said, “Look, this is someone else’s car.”

“He won’t come out. He’s watching telly in one of them houses, I bet. Long time since I tried a BMW.” He put his hands on the wheel and it clicked. The steering column must have locked. “Bleedin’ hell.”

Gloria said, “Mind your language.”

“Sod off.”

At least she’d registered disapproval.

“If it ain’t yours,” he said, “how did you get in?”

“With the key. I, em, nicked it,” she added, to forestall the next question.

“Jeez. Where?”

“From his pocket.”

“Cool.” He didn’t ask about the circumstances. Instead, he said with admiration, “You’re class.”

She liked that. Nobody — certainly no boy — had ever referred to her in quite those terms before.

“What’s your name?”

“Gloria.”

“Gloria — blimey. I’m Mick. Want to go for a ride, Gloria?”

“What do you mean — in this?”

“What else? You just said you got the key.”

“Can you drive?”

“I wouldn’t be here, would I? Give us the key and I’ll show you. I could start it easy, but the wheel’s locked.”

He was a joy-rider. He’d walked up King George Avenue trying the doors of all the cars to find one open and it had happened to be Mr Hibbert’s.

The keys were in her lap. Mr Hibbert’s keys. Mr Hibbert, who had laughed at the idea that she might spend the night in bed with someone. She handed them over. “Just a short ride.”

He slotted the key in and turned it to free the steering wheel. The engine started first time.

“Nice motor,” said Mick, switching on the headlights and revving the engine. He released the handbrake and they moved out of line and cruised quite quickly to the end of King George Avenue, where it met the High Street. Gloria felt an upsurge of excitement. She was joy-riding — and in Mr Hibbert’s car.

“Open your window. Get some breeze through.”

It worked electronically. She found the button and pressed. The wind was noisy. She glanced at the instruments and saw that the car was doing sixty in a built-up area.

“We can have a burn-up on the by-pass,” said Mick apologetically. “These can do a ton, easy.” He switched the radio on. A Mozart piano concerto was being played. “God ’elp us. See if you can get somefink with a beat.”

She tried the controls, found some rock music and turned it up loud.

“Ace,” said Mick.

They were flashing past parked cars at reckless speed. Gloria was scared, but enjoying it in the way you can enjoy a roller coaster ride. She wasn’t even using the seat-belt. That, to a full-blown punk like Mick, would surely have been chicken.

They succeeded in getting to the by-pass without being stopped by the police. On the triple carriageway, Mick moved out to the fast lane.

“Let’s see what this heap can do.”

Gloria’s skin prickled. To think that this could have been choir practice. The wind stung her face and stretched her hair in what felt like a comic-strip illustration of speed. Mick was steering one-handed, with his free hand resting on her thigh. She didn’t mind.

They overtook everything. When anyone had the temerity to block the fast lane, Mick used the horn and headlights together. They weren’t held up long.

Gloria looked at the speedometer and saw the needle hovering near 110. They passed the sign for a roundabout. She drew it to his attention in the most tactful way she could. “Let’s go round and come back the other way.”

“You go for this?” Mick shouted. “Does it turn you on?”

“It’s magic.”

The hand on her leg moved higher, exploring, but he had to use both hands to swing the car around the roundabout, the tyres screeching, and by that time Gloria had brought her legs up to her chest with her heels on the edge of the seat and her arms tucked around her shins. The one-handed driving was all very macho, but she felt it required Mick’s undivided attention.

They raced back along the stretch they had just travelled. Someone in the fast lane refused to give way, so Mick overtook on the inside and made an obscene gesture as they passed. Gloria did the same. She had never felt so delinquent, or so alive.

“You know what?” shouted Mick.

“What?”

“You’re neat.”

“You’re neat, too.”

“I’ll get you a present. What do you want — jewellery?”

She didn’t know what to say.

“Somefink to wear? Leathers?” said Mick.

“There’s no need,” said Gloria. “You don’t have to get me anything.”

He reduced speed. They were coming to a slip-road that would take them off the by-pass.

“Have you got a telly? Portable?”

“Look, I don’t want anything, Mick. If you want to get me a drink—”

“A drink? All right. You like fizz?”

“Fizz?”

“Champagne. You can have champagne if you want.”

She laughed. “All right.” If he wanted to be extravagant, she’d settle for a glass of champagne. Immediately she wondered if she’d made a wise choice. With some drink inside him, Mick might take even bigger risks with the car. Maybe she’d be wise to walk home.

They cruised at a mere seventy along the main road into town, ignoring several pubs. Gloria decided that Mick was driving them to his favourite haunt, some place where punks and rockers met, with wood floors and music and one-arm bandits.

In the High Street, he slowed and turned his head, as if looking for someone. He cruised quite slowly, past Woolworth’s and Boot’s and the Laundromat. Gloria didn’t know of any pub along here. There was just the County Arms Hotel, with four stars in the RAC Guide, and that, surely, wasn’t the sort of place Mick would frequent.

Like a mind-reader, he said, “We’ll get it in the Wine Mart.”

“Fine,” said Gloria.

“Put your head down, right down, like you had it before.”

“Why?”

“Why do you fink? We’re going to ram-raid the place. These fings are built like bloody tanks.”

She was horrified. “No, Mick!”

“Do what I say — if you want to keep your face.” He spun the wheel sharply right.

She had a glimpse of the shop window of the Wine Mart straight ahead. She plunged her head between her knees. She felt the wheels mount the curb and then the terrific impact as the shop front was ripped apart. An alarm bell jangled.

Mick forced open his door and stepped through shattered glass into the shop’s interior. Gloria sat up, twitching with fear and shock. The car’s bonnet was covered in glass.

Mick was back, brandishing a bottle of champagne that he’d taken off a shelf at the rear of the shop. This was a nightmare.

Gloria said in a voice shrill with panic, “You’re crazy!”

Mick shouted above the blare of the alarm, “Burst tyre. We got to run for it!” He opened the car door, grabbed Gloria’s arm and tugged her out. “Come on! Let’s get out of here.”

They abandoned Mr Hibbert’s car, still blocking the pavement with its front wheels inside the Wine Mart. Regardless of the people who must have heard and were certain to be watching from flats above the shops, Mick dashed up the High Street with Gloria following. At the first opportunity they turned left up a side-street.

Gloria leaned against a doorway to recover her breath.

Mick swung around. “You can’t stop here. We got to go on.”

If she’d had any breath left, she’d have shouted back at him, told him he must be a head-case to have done such a thing, made it clear that she would never have consented to it. That — far from impressing her — it proved that he was a pathological idiot.

A police siren frighteningly close interrupted her resentment. She forced herself to run again. They were coming into a paved area where cars couldn’t normally pass, but she was sure the police car would pursue them if they were spotted. A couple of derelicts shouted at them from a shop doorway. They’d seen the bottle that Mick was still carrying and they were asking him to share it. Mick was too fast, but one of them stepped out to try and grab Gloria. He caught hold of her wrist with a filthy hand, and his face came close to hers, unshaven, bright pink and foul of breath. She screamed, pushed at his chest and managed to wriggle free. He stood in the middle of the walkway yelling obscenities as she dashed on.

Mick waited for her by the parish church beyond the shopping mall, a pathetic figure now with his stupid green hair in disarray like daffodil stalks after the flowers were picked. “Over the top, right?”

She nodded, too breathless to speak.

The wall around the churchyard was about four feet high. She put her hands on the coping and half-jumped, half-hauled herself off the ground. Mick shoved her backside unceremoniously higher and she scrambled onto the wall and jumped down. He followed, then stooped to pick up the champagne, which he must have tossed over first. Why he bothered with it, she couldn’t imagine.

“Come on.”

Stumbling between ancient headstones in the near-darkness they made their way as well as they could across the churchyard to the accompaniment of the police siren. At one point Gloria thought she could make out the sound of running footsteps quite close, but Mick was unconvinced. He’d stopped from sheer exhaustion, leaning against a tombstone. “They’d have searchlights and torches if they was trying to follow us.”

Gloria said, “I can’t run any more.”

“Have some of this.” He started fiddling with the foil wrapping on the champagne.

“I don’t want any, you moron. I didn’t want it in the first place.”

He was loosening the wire around the cork. “You did. You said.” He sounded like a six-year-old now.

“I didn’t know you were going to break into a shop to get it and ruin Mr Hibbert’s car.”

The cork popped and Mick’s hands were covered in froth. “Have a swig.”

“I don’t want any.”

“I don’t want any,” he mimicked her. “Snotty-nosed bitch.”

“I’m the one who stands to lose most,” she pointed out. “I’ve never been in trouble with the police.”

“Who says you’re in trouble? We got away, didn’t we?”

“Yes, but I took the keys from his overcoat pocket when he was visiting my Mum. It’s going to be obvious.”

“He was visiting your house?”

“Yes, he’s probably still there.”

“What’s he doing with your Mum?”

“That’s my business.”

“Is he staying long?”

“I don’t know — a couple of hours.”

Mick fumbled in his pocket and produced the car-keys, dangling them in front of her face.

“You’ve still got them?”

“Now who’s a moron? You can stick them back in his pocket and he won’t never know.”

“Give them to me.”

He closed his fingers around them and hid them behind his back. “Who’s a moron?”

“I’m sorry, Mick. I didn’t mean that. Please.”

“Come here.”

“Mick, I said I was sorry.”

He curled his finger, beckoning.

She felt her stomach clench. He wanted her. This was what it had all been leading up to, the joy-ride, the ram-raid, the champagne. Almost every day of her life since she had first learned about sex she had tried to imagine how it would happen to her the first time — the situation in which she would consent. Never, remotely, had she pictured it like this, among the gravestones in the bitter cold, with the police searching for her.

She said, “There isn’t time.” She could have added that it was dangerous and squalid and unromantic, but those were concepts that would make no impression on a punk. In his scale of values they might actually be incentives. And — in spite of everything that had governed her life until this moment — Gloria herself was being swayed. She was a different person now, a law-breaker.

Impulsively she stepped towards him and offered her lips.

He jammed his mouth against hers so hard that their teeth scraped. She could feel his hand fumbling low down at the front of her coat.

He said, “Take ’em, then.”

It was a moment before she understood that he was trying to hand her the car keys. He pushed them into her hand.

Then he drew back and so did she, bewildered. Apparently all he’d wanted was the kiss.

“You’d better leg it now,” he told her.

“Yes.”

“See you.” He turned and walked away.

She put her hand to her mouth as if the act of touching her slightly numb lips would somehow preserve the kiss. She didn’t want him to leave her. She knew it was the sensible thing, the safe thing, but tonight she’d stopped being sensible and safe.

“Mick!”

He turned his head and said, “Leave it out, will you?”

Despairingly, she echoed the words he had used. “See you.”

He walked on.

She bit back her distress. If she really wanted to be accepted by people like Mick she had to be tough with herself. She left the churchyard by a different route from Mick’s and — to borrow his terminology — “legged it” through the streets towards home. So much had happened that she hardly expected to see the houses still lit — but they were — almost every one she passed. She couldn’t believe that Mr Hibbert would still be in the house with his coat hanging in the hall, but in fact the entire adventure had lasted less than an hour and twenty minutes. It might still be possible to return the keys and pretend she had been at choir practice.

But when she turned the corner of King George Avenue she had a horrible shock. A police car was parked in the space where Mr Hibbert’s car had been. The police? Already?

In two minds whether to run back and search the streets for Mick, she stopped at the corner and waited, going over in her mind what she could say if the police were with her mother now. She was in an appalling position. If she told the truth, she’d have to betray Mick. Then it occurred to her that the police might not yet have connected her with the theft of the car. It was possible that they were there for no other reason than to inform Mr Hibbert what had happened.

She was going to have to find the courage to walk into the house and act as if she knew nothing at all. It was no use waiting for them to leave, because Mr Hibbert was sure to leave as well. The only chance she had of returning the keys to his overcoat pocket was now.

With her heart pounding, she stepped up the street to the house. The light was on in the front room and she could hear the faint murmur of voices, but the curtains were too thick for her to see anything. Under the porch light she checked her clothes. Her shoes were muddy at the heels and her coat was dusty where she’d climbed over the church wall, so she did some rapid grooming with a paper tissue. She couldn’t do anything about her hair; she’d just have to say that one of the plaits had come undone and she’d unfastened the other one. She took a deep breath, slotted her own key into the front door and let herself in.

The coat was still hanging on the hallstand, but there were others as well. And she didn’t have time to do anything about the car-keys because the door of the front room opened and Mr Hibbert came out, followed by a police sergeant in uniform.

“You must be Gloria,” said Mr Hibbert. “I’ve seen you several times, but we’ve never spoken. Your hair’s different, isn’t it?”

She murmured some bland response.

“Mrs Palmer’s daughter,” Mr Hibbert explained to the police-man. “Just back from choir practice, I believe.” He sounded surprisingly chirpy for a man whose car had been stolen and wrecked.

Other people were coming out of the front room. Two women from up the street and old Mr and Mrs Chalk, from next door. Even the obnoxious Mrs Mackenzie from the house opposite, a woman her mother detested. So many witnesses?

And now her mother was there. “Gloria, help Mrs Mackenzie with her coat, there’s a dear.”

Nobody seemed unduly alarmed.

“I’ll be off, then,” announced the police sergeant, opening the front door. “Thanks for the coffee, Mrs Palmer.”

Gloria reached for the fur coat that she recognized as Mrs Mackenzie’s, just as Mr Hibbert was lifting his overcoat off the hook. He was saying something to her mother about coming again. In a swift movement, using Mrs Mackenzie’s fur as a shield, Gloria succeeded in dropping the car keys into Mr Hibbert’s coat pocket. Only just in time.

“Goodbye all.” He’d put on the coat and was gone.

Some of the others were not so quick to leave. There was no sense of urgency. They were talking about what they would be doing for Christmas.

When Mrs Palmer finally closed the door on the last of them, she breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Let’s have a fresh cup of tea, love. Have you had a nice evening? You’re back early, aren’t you? What have you done with your hair? I rather like it down. It suits you.”

“Mum, whatever were all those people doing here — and the police?”

“Didn’t I tell you? This is the third meeting we’ve had. We’re setting up a Neighbourhood Watch. You know — keeping an eye on each other’s property. It’s becoming essential with all the crime round here. Sergeant Middleton was telling us how dreadful it is. He’s the community liaison officer. It’s his job to advise people like ourselves how to get organised.”

“That’s why they were here?”

“Well, yes.”

“Mr Hibbert?”

“He is a neighbour, dear, and quite well off, I believe. He’s got an interest in protecting his property. He’s one of the moving forces. He’s always the first to arrive.”

“Yes, I noticed,” said Gloria, wishing the earth would swallow her up.

The kettle had boiled. Mrs Palmer made the tea. “Of course, that Mrs Mackenzie from across the way came, and I’m convinced the only reason is that she wanted to see inside the house. She’s so nosy, that woman. Do you know, when I made the coffee she insisted on coming out here to help me, as she put it. Of course, all she wanted was to get a look at my kitchen. Oh, and Gloria, darling, I’m so grateful to you for putting my thermal undies out of sight. Imagine if that woman had clapped eyes on them. I’d have died, I really would. I suddenly thought of them when she was opening the biscuits. The relief when I looked at the towel rail and they weren’t there. I mean, they’re not the most flattering things to have on display — my enormous bloomers.”

Gloria tried to give the smile that her mother obviously expected.

Mrs Palmer added, “Tell me, where did you put them, dear?”

The doorbell chimed.