A Nice Cup of Tea by Celia Imrie

Author:Celia Imrie
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408883259
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-04-09T12:44:20+00:00

The phone rang when Theresa was tucked up in bed, just drifting off to sleep.

Neither her tiredness nor the chocolate had done the trick. She had been kept awake not only fretting about the photos, especially this new, strange photo-collage of herself, but also by the sounds of a noisy quarrel taking place in the rented flat above. The man and the woman having a real humdinger this time. The woman was way more loquacious than the man, going at it hammer and tongs, while he only seemed to murmur rebuttals.

With this afternoon’s café shenanigans, followed by the arrival of the photo-medley, Theresa was hesitant to answer the persistent clanging ring, but, just in case …

And it was lucky she did.

‘Grandma? Could I meet you?’

Theresa sat upright in her bed and turned on the light.

‘I think tomorrow we’ll be going through Bellevue-sur-Mer. That’s where you live, isn’t it? So I wondered if I could meet you for breakfast.’

‘Of course, darling. Do you want to come here? Either on your own or with Neil?’ Theresa decided to wait till later to bring up the invitation to the Nice café.

‘I’ll be on my own. About nine?’

‘Isn’t that very early for you?’

Theresa noticed a slight hesitation in her reply. ‘Neil has to go somewhere with his dad to pick some stuff up, so I’ll be on my own.’

‘Fine, fine. You have my address, don’t you?’

‘You won’t have anyone else there with you, will you, Grandma?’

‘Of course not!’

And Chloe hung up.

Wide awake now, Theresa couldn’t stop thinking about the bizarre events happening around her. She gazed up at the ceiling.

She thought about her answering machine. When she got in from the café this afternoon, she had had a machine blinking at her, displaying the information that she had twelve messages, but no one had actually said anything. Just a row of silences and clicks. Could they all have been Chloe, trying to contact her to apologise about not turning up today or trying to set up tomorrow’s meeting?

Theresa turned off the light, rolled over and stared out at the dark courtyard.

After a few minutes lying in the silence, she began to wonder if she was going mad.

Was it her imagination or could she hear someone saying her name, over and over?

She put her face to the window.

There was no one in the courtyard. How could there be, unless they had dropped down from the Hotel Astra or the upstairs flat?

Then she heard it again.

A whisper.

Theresa!

She pressed her face to the glass and scanned the entire space. No one was there.

Then she looked up towards the hotel.

She felt sure that a head bobbed back inside from one of the dark hotel windows.

Now she wished that she had curtains to draw but it had never occurred to her to get any as no one could see inside, unless they were standing in the courtyard and the only door to that was from her flat.

Slinging her dressing gown round her shoulders, Theresa got out of bed and tiptoed to the back door.

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