Chapter 185 Room 4 I

Danny was out of the door before the hand came off the glass.

He took the stairs barefoot in his boxers, 3 flights, his palm squeaking on the rail at every turn, past the door on the 2nd floor where somebody’s telly was still muttering a film to itself. The concrete was freezing. On the last flight he stubbed his toe on the edge of a step and didn’t stop for it.

He got the street door open at the same second the car moved.

It pulled away from the kerb without hurrying, the exhaust breaking up white behind it, and the light inside went off as it went. He stood on the wet step with the cold coming up through his feet and read the number plate off the back of it under the lamp, and kept saying it out loud as the car turned left at the Turkish shop and was gone.

He said it a 3rd time to the empty street, to make sure.

When he got back to the top landing Jodie was standing in the doorway of the flat in his shirt and nothing else, with her hair flattened on one side from the pillow and her dressmaking shears open in her right hand like a pair of tongs.

"Who was it?" she said. "You went down them stairs like the building was on fire."

"It was the secretary. She was in the back of a car across the road, looking up here with the light on." He was breathing hard. "Give me a pen. I’ve got the plate, and I’ll lose it if I don’t write it down."

She put the shears down on the floor, took the biro off the windowsill, and held her left hand out flat. He wrote the plate across her palm in capitals, the way she’d done with Pettit’s car outside the house in Kensington.

She looked at it.

"She waved at you," Jodie said.

"She put her hand on the window. Flat. Like this." He showed her.

"That’s a wave, Danny. That’s what my nan did off the back of a coach." She closed her hand round the ink. "So think about it. They told us she knew where you live with the card under that door on Tuesday. She doesn’t need to sit outside in a car at midnight to tell you that twice. And you don’t wave at somebody you’re trying to frighten. You wave at somebody you know. Or somebody you want to know you’re there."

He sat down on the end of the mattress with his feet throbbing.

Somebody she knows. She’s never once looked at me like she knows me. She looks at me like a form she’s filling in.

"Then why not get out and knock? She’s walked in doors all week."

"I don’t know." Jodie got back under the duvet and held it open for him. "Get in. Your feet are like ice. I’ll put that plate in the MOT checker in the morning, and you’ll be no use to anybody at 10 o’clock if you’ve been sat up all night with your feet in a bucket."

At 20 to 7 she was sitting up against the wall with her phone, in his shirt, with the plate still on her palm gone faint and smudged.

"No details held," she said. "That’s what it says. It’s not untaxed or out of MOT, it’s never been put in at all. Every car on the road’s on that site, Danny. Pettit’s Skoda was on it down to the miles."

"So it’s not a real plate."

"Or it’s real and nobody’s allowed to look at it." She put the phone face down on the duvet. "I’m going to stop trying to be clever before 7 in the morning. Come here."

She pulled the shirt off over her head and threw it at the window.

The light coming in was grey and thin and the window was still open from the night, and the cold came straight across the bare boards. She was naked on her knees on the mattress with her nipples stiff and dark in it and goosebumps up her arms, and she looked at him like she’d decided something.

"Lie on the floor," she said. "On your back. On the boards, in the cold."

"The floor? There’s a mattress right there," Danny said.

"On the boards. I want you somewhere you can’t get comfy."

I got down on the boards. They were freezing under my shoulders and I hissed through my teeth, and she laughed and came down after me and swung her leg over my chest. Then she kept turning, till she was facing down the length of me, with her knees either side of my head and her arse above my face and her pussy an inch from my mouth, pink and wet already and smelling of her.

"Jodie."

"Shut up and use your mouth."

She bent down over me before I could do anything, and I felt her breath on my cock, and then her tongue up the underside of it, slow, from my balls to the head. I said her name into her thigh. She took me in her mouth, hot and wet, and the cold of the boards under me and the heat of her round me went through me at the same time.

I got my hands on the backs of her thighs and pulled her down onto my face.

She moaned round my cock when my tongue touched her. I licked her from her clit back, flat and slow, and then went back and found her clit with the tip of my tongue and stayed on it, and her hips started rocking down onto my mouth. Every time I sucked on her she took me deeper, as though she was paying it back stroke for stroke, and I lost track of which of us was doing it to the other.

A bus went by under the window and somebody down on the street was shouting about a parking ticket, and she was dripping on my chin.

I pushed a finger into her while I sucked her clit, and she came up off my cock with a gasp.

"Don’t stop," she said, with her hand wrapped round me, working me. "Danny, I’m close, don’t you stop..."

I didn’t. I held her down on my mouth by the thighs and licked her hard and fast, and she ground against my face and her whole body tightened. She came with her cheek against my hip and my cock in her fist, shaking, crying out loud enough that the telly downstairs would’ve had to turn up, and her cunt clamped down on my finger again and again and soaked my face.

She was still trembling when she put her mouth back on me.

She sucked me hard now, with her tits pressed warm against my stomach and her hand at the root and her head going down fast, and I couldn’t keep still. I had my face against the inside of her thigh, breathing her in, and I felt it coming up from the soles of my freezing feet.

"Fuck. Jodie, I’m going to..."

She kept going. She took me deeper and held me there, and I came in her mouth with my hips coming up off the boards and her hands pressing them back down, long and hard, and she swallowed and kept her lips on me till I was twitching and had to push her off.

She rolled off me onto her back on the floor beside me, and lay there with her chest going up and down and her hair all over the boards.

"That’s me awake," she said to the ceiling.

"You did that so I’d not think about 10 o’clock."

"I did it because I wanted to." She turned her head and looked at me. "And so you’d not think about 10 o’clock."