He looked startled as I stepped out of the shadows, and I immediately tried to apologize for being there, and then, in the middle of my apology, I began to cry and was immediately angry with myself for being so pathetic and tried to apologize for crying. So now Ben was standing on the steps outside his flat with a crying woman. Worse and worse. In the midst of it all Ben managed both to put his arm round me and get his keys out of his pocket and unlock the door. I started an explanation of what had happened at Jo's flat but, whether because I was shivering with cold or whether saying it out loud made me realize how frightened I had been, I was unable to speak coherently. Ben just murmured words into my ear and led me up to the bathroom. He turned on the bath taps. He started to pull down zips and unfasten buttons on my clothes.
"I like the jacket," he said.
"I was cold," I said.
"No, really."
He pulled my clothes over my head and eased my trousers down my legs and over my feet. I caught sight of myself in the mirror. Red-faced from the cold, red-eyed from crying. I looked raw, as if my skin had been peeled off with my clothes. The hot water of the bath stung at first, then felt wonderful. I wanted to live in that bath for ever, like a primeval swamp animal. Ben disappeared and came back with two mugs of tea. He placed them both on the side of the bath. He started to take his clothes off. This was nice. He got in with me, entangling his legs with mine, and he behaved like a complete gentleman: he sat at the end with the taps. He draped a flannel over them so that he was able to lie back without being in total discomfort. My mouth was working again and I managed to give him a fairly composed account of my escape, if that's what it had been.
He looked genuinely startled. "Fuck," he said, which struck the right note. "You climbed out of the back window?"
"I didn't open the door and ask him in for tea."
"You're absolutely sure it was him?"
"I've been desperately trying to think of any other explanation. If you can come up with one, I would be so grateful."
"It's a pity you didn't get a look at him."
"Jo's front door doesn't have a peephole. There was the additional problem that I was having a heart-attack from fear. I have to admit that there was a part of me that almost wanted to lie down and wait for him to come and get me so that it would all be over."
Ben took another flannel and draped it over his face. I heard a sort of murmuring from under it.
"I'm sorry," I said.
He pulled the flannel away. "What?" he asked.
"About all this. It's bad enough for me, but I can't do anything about that. I'm sorry that you've been landed with it as well. Maybe we met at the wrong time."
"You shouldn't say sorry."
"I should. And I'm also saying it in advance."
"What do you mean?"
"Because I'm about to ask you for a favour."
"Go on, then."
"I was going to ask you to go to Jo's flat and get my stuff for me." Ben looked so unhappy at this that I immediately rushed into a desperate explanation. "Because I obviously can't go there myself. I can't go there ever again. He might be watching from outside. But you'll be fine. He's only looking for me. He might assume that he's got the wrong flat."
"Right," said Ben, looking even less happy. "Yes, of course, I'll do it."
The atmosphere had definitely changed. We didn't talk for a bit.
"Are you all right?" I said, eager to break the silence.
"This wasn't what I planned," he said.
"I know, I know, it would have been easier for you if you'd met somebody who wasn't involved in something like this."
"That's not what I meant. I was talking about here, in this bath, now. I was planning to help wash you. I would have rubbed you on your shoulders, and then down over your breasts. We would have gone to bed. But now, instead of that, I'm going to get dressed and go out and probably get murdered myself. Or he might torture me to find out where you are."
"You don't have to, if you don't want to," I said.
In the end, Ben phoned up a friend of his, Scud. "Not his real name," Ben said. Scud worked with computer graphics, but in his spare time, he played club rugby. "He's fifteen stone and a lunatic," Ben said. He managed to persuade Scud to come over straight away. "Yes, now," I heard him say on the phone. Scud arrived fifteen minutes later and he was, as advertised, massive. He looked amused to meet a new woman wearing Ben's dressing-gown and he was evidently puzzled by the pared-down version of my story that Ben gave him. But he shrugged and said it would be no problem.
I gave a brief description of where my stuff was.
"And when you leave, make sure you're not followed," I said.
Scud looked at me, apparently alarmed. I'd forgotten that much of what I said made me sound insane to unprepared normal people. Ben pulled a face.
"You said there'd be no problem."
"Not for you. But he might think you're connected with me and follow you. Just keep an eye out."
The two men exchanged glances.
Ben was back in less than an hour, an hour in which I drank a tumbler of whisky and flicked through Ben's glossy magazines. He came in looking as if he had been Christmas shopping. He dumped the bulging carrier-bags on the floor. "I owe Scud one," he said.
"What for? Did anything happen?"
"I owe Scud one for dragging him away from his wife and children in order to rummage around the flat of someone he doesn't know. And then possibly involving him in criminal activity."
"What do you mean?"
"Jo's front door was open. It had been forced."
"But there's a chain."
"It must have been kicked in. The whole frame was broken."
"Jesus."
"Yes. We weren't sure what to do. It's probably not legal to go round a crime scene helping yourself to things that don't belong to you."
"He broke in," I murmured, almost to myself.
"I think I've got everything," Ben said. "Clothes, mainly. Some of the odds and ends you asked for. Your pieces of paper, stuff from the bathroom shelf. I can't guarantee that some of this isn't Jo's. In fact, the more I think about this the less legal it seems."
"Great," I said, hardly listening.
"And Jo's photograph, like you asked."
He put it on the table and we both looked at it for a moment.
"I did want to make one comment," he said. "In fact, more than one. I assume that you've got nowhere to stay, so I don't want to make a big deal of this or presume on anything but you're welcome to stay here. As long as you want to, basically."
I couldn't stop myself. I gave him a hug. "Are you sure?" I said. "You don't have to, just because I'm in this helpless state. I'm sure I could find somewhere."
"Don't be stupid."
"I don't want to be like this dismal, needy woman forcing herself on a man who's too polite to kick her out."
He put up his hand. "Stop," he said. "Shut up. We should find somewhere to put all this stuff."
We started going through this odd assortment that I'd gathered over the past days.
"The other thing I wanted to say," he said, while sorting through my underwear, 'at least I wanted to raise it as a possibility, is that this was just a normal break-in."
"What about the person who rang work pretending to be my dad?"
"I don't know. There might have been a misunderstanding.
Perhaps what you heard at the door was someone breaking in. They rang the door bell, as they do, to check that no one's home. You didn't answer, in your normal style. The villain assumes nobody's home and breaks in. There's so much of that happening in the area. Just a few days ago, these friends of mine round the corner heard a huge crash in the middle of the night. They went downstairs and exactly the same thing had happened. Someone had kicked the door open and grabbed a bag and a camera. It might have been the same thing."