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I walked out through the kitchen door into the garden, and the cold hit me like a good slap.
It was a lovely night. Clear, frosty, a big orange moon over the bare apple trees. Somebody had lit a fire pit on the lawn, and a handful of guests in hats and cloaks stood round it, passing a bottle and telling ghost stories. A man dressed as a pirate was explaining the plot of a film nobody had seen. Nobody was masked as anyone who was upstairs. Everyone was just cold and cheerful.
I stood on the edge of the grass with my breath steaming and the key in my pocket. Behind me the house glowed like a lantern. Music pulsed out of the ballroom, and above it, along the first floor, I could see window after window with a dim flicker of candlelight behind curtains.
One of the upper windows was lit red. A figure in the glass, just a shape, a woman with her hair pinned up, looking down over the garden. Maybe at me. Maybe at nothing.
It might have been a trick of the light.
I’m a sensible man. I have a lift to inspect at nine on Monday. I have a perfectly nice flat and a perfectly nice bed, and nobody had made me do a single thing tonight.
The side gate was twenty feet away, the taxi rank a five-minute walk beyond it. And at the front door, at the foot of the stairs, the cat woman was surely still waiting.