The Hypnotist's Love Story Read Free Page B

about it. Pork belly! It sounded disgusting, and now it looked like a big slab of cold, congealing fat.
    If he was the sort of man who ordered that sort of artery-clogging meal all the time, perhaps he’d dropped dead of a heart attack in the toilets? Should she send in that concerned-looking waiter to find out? But what if the pork belly had just disagreed with him? He’d be mortified. Well, she’d be mortified in similar circumstances. Maybe a man wouldn’t care.
    She was really too old for all this dating angst. She should be at home baking cakes, or whatever it was that parents of primary-school-age children did with their nights.
    She looked up again and there he was, walking back toward her. Helooked shaken, as if he’d just been in a minor car crash, but he also had a “The game is up” expression, as if he’d been caught robbing a bank and was walking out with his hands in the air.
    He sat down opposite her and put the napkin back on his lap. He picked up his knife and fork, looked at the pork belly, sighed and placed them down again.
    “You probably think I’m some sort of lunatic,” he said.
    “Well, I’m quite curious!” said Ellen in a jolly, middle-aged lady tone.
    “I was hoping not to have to tell you about this until we’d … but then I realized that I was going to have to tell you tonight.”
    “Just take your time.” Now she was speaking in the calm, slightly singsong voice she used with clients. “I’m sure I’ll be fine—whatever it is.”
    “It’s nothing that bad!” said Patrick hastily. “It’s more embarrassing than anything else. It’s just that, OK, I’ll just come out and say it.”
    He paused and grinned foolishly.
    “I have a stalker.”
    For a moment Ellen couldn’t quite understand what he meant. It was as if English had become her second language and she had to translate the words.
    I have a stalker.
    Finally she said, “Somebody is stalking you?”
    “She’s been stalking me for the past three years. My ex-girlfriend. Sometimes she disappears for a while, but then she comes back with a vengeance.”
    Glorious relief was washing through Ellen. Now that she wasn’t being dumped it was suddenly clear to her how much she actually liked him, how much she was hoping this would work, how she had actually allowed the words “I could fall in love with him” to cross her mind as she was putting on her mascara. The reason she’d been so deliriously happy today had not been because of the weather or the porridge or the new heating or the news. It was because of him.
    A stalking ex-girlfriend was fine!
    It was
interesting.
    Although, then again, stalking …
    She saw notes written in letters cut out from magazines and newspapers. Messages written in blood on walls. Crazy fans sitting outside celebrities’ houses. Violent ex-husbands shooting their wives.
    But who stalked a
surveyor
? (Even if he did have an especially lovely jawline?)
    “So when you say
stalking
, what does she actually do? Is she violent?”
    “No.” Patrick looked as if he was being forced to answer a series of highly personal medical questions. “Never physically violent. Occasionally she yells. Gets a bit abusive. She makes phone calls in the middle of the night, sends me letters, e-mails, text messages, but mostly she’s just there. Wherever I go, she’s there.”
    “You mean she follows you?”
    “Yes. Everywhere.”
    “So, goodness, this must be horrible for you!” There was that middle-aged lady again. “Have you been to the police?”
    He winced, as if at an uncomfortable memory. “Yes. Once. I spoke to a female police officer. I don’t know if she—look, she
said
all the right things, I just felt like an idiot, like a wuss. She suggested I keep a ‘Stalking Incident Log’ recording everything, and I’ve done that. She said I could take out a restraining order against her, so I was thinking about doing that, but then, when I told my ex that I’d been to the police, she said