Transgressions by Sarah Dunant Page A

hadn’t left it unlocked when she went out? But, then, she’d been late and in a rush. She turned the key back again. She realized that she couldn’t remember. She took a few deep breaths, opened the door, and went in.
    The room beyond was bright and empty, just as she’d left it. Nobody there. Nobody at all. She walked slowly across the floor to the shelf where the little green lights on the stereo system were dancing in tune to the range of Morrison’s voice. But she had turned the system off. That much she remembered with absolute clarity. She could see herself doing it again in memory, her finger hitting the switch, watching the light go out.
    As she reached the machine, the track ended, leaving a sudden huge silence. Then the little illuminated number jumped from one to two and a fiddle came in, long and pure. On the console the digital clock that registered the length of each track jumped from four minutes twenty-seven back to zero, then started moving steadily through the seconds again. Four minutes twenty-seven—the first track.
    She thought about what it meant: that four minutes and twenty-seven seconds ago someone must have been standing there pressing the start button. No. It wasn’t possible. But even as she thought it she knew it was. She found it suddenly hard to swallow, hard to sort out the music from the pounding between her ears. Four minutes twenty-seven seconds. Which meant that whoever had done it had to be nearby. Could even still be in the house.
    The shock of the thought sluiced adrenaline through her so fast that it wiped out the fuzz of the booze, leaving her sharply, completely alert.
    She moved to the French doors and tested the handle. The lock was firmly in place. She tried the window. Same thing. No one had come in that way. She thought about the downstairs bathroom. That little porthole window that she’d never got around to having bars put on. She went out quickly, while she still had the courage, but the room was empty, the window intact, lock on, no sign of disturbance. You’d need to be a midget to get through there anyway. Four minutes twenty-seven seconds. She wound back the thread of her life. She would have been in the cab, coming to the one-way street, turning onto the street with the blue Mustang taking off in the other direction. The Mustang. It must have been parked opposite the house. Of course. The Mustang. Why hadn’t she realized it before? Parked, waiting, the clock on the dashboard, no doubt, keeping track of how long the album had been playing.
    It was so simple. If it wasn’t for the car she would never have suspected him. After all, he’d brought the key back only that very day. The key? But it was an Ingersoll. You couldn’t copy an Ingersoll, could you? Wasn’t that what the security people said? She already knew the answer. Tom could do it. Tom could do anything when he set his mind to it.
    So how did he know that she wouldn’t be there? That tonight of all nights she’d be out? Easy. He had knocked earlier and there had been no response. But if he’d been waiting, wouldn’t she have seen the car on the street? It hadn’t been there when she went out looking for him, had it? She would have noticed it.
    No, better than that. He didn’t have to stay because he knew she’d be out later. He knew about the birthday party. Patrick had told him when they’d had lunch together. Of course. He knew that it was she and not he who’d been invited.
    So he went away, waited awhile, then what? Drove here, came in, switched on the machine, and sat outside waiting, just slipping in to start it again every fifty minutes until . . .
    But why would he possibly want to do such a thing? It was so cruel it was almost surreal. He must have known how much it would freak her out. How much could you hate someone for ending something that was already ended, something that you yourself had helped to destroy? Then she remembered something. An incident from a holiday they had