The Other Woman by Jill McGown

landlady’s hearing – but he mustn’t start behaving like a criminal, he thought, as he let himself into the house, and took the stairs as quietly as he could.
    â€˜Mr McDonald!’
    My God, they should use landladies instead of radar. He turned. ‘Yes,’ he said.
    â€˜I’m having to go over to my sister’s,’ she said. ‘ She’s been taken bad again. There’s a hotpot in the fridge that you can heat up for your evening meal – I’ve left instructions on how to use the microwave.’
    â€˜Thank you.’
    â€˜I should be back about ten, I think. She’s usually perfectly all right – she just panics.’
    He smiled briefly. The conversation seemed to be terminated; he turned back and went up to his room.
    He’d be as well going to see Melissa at the paper. They didn’t want his piece on the opening for tonight’s edition, but he could write it up and use it as an excuse. He rang Sheila at the garage, and said that he wouldn’t be in until the afternoon.
    He had lied to the police. He wouldn’t have reported it at all if he’d thought for a moment that they would suspect him of murdering the girl. If you found a body, you reported it; that had been all that he had thought. The questions, the intense interest in what he had been doing – that hadn’t occurred to him. Now, on reflection, he knew that it was bound to have made them suspicious of him. But they couldn’t prove that he hadn’t been walking round Stansfield all evening; they certainly couldn’t find anything to tie him in with the dead girl, aside from the fact that he had found her, and somebody had to find the dead bodies that other people from time to time left lying around.
    It was usually fishermen, he reflected, as he shrugged on his jacket. Or people taking their dog for a walk. Or kids playing in old air raid shelters. Did they all get the third degree about what they’d been doing? Probably, he told himself comfortingly. But Mac had a nasty suspicion that he would get to know the officers of Stansfield constabulary much better than he had any desire to before this business got itself sorted out.
    And he had to tell Melissa that he had kept her name out of it. The paper obviously didn’t know yet that he had found the body, or he would have heard from them, but she would, of course, find out. So he’d get some Brownie points for not giving her hobby away, at least But of course – he didn’t have to write up his piece. His having found the body was a good excuse for going to the paper, he told himself, as he set off towards the bus stop. He would go in to report his news, and just happen to talk to Melissa while he was there. Even with the uneasy feeling that lying to the police had given him, he viewed seeing Melissa again with pleasurable anticipation, and he felt almost jauntily certain that a little shuttle-bus would appear as soon as he arrived at the stop, so good a turn did his luck, seem to be taking.
    And a shuttle-bus indeed did; he took the fifteen minutes or so of the journey to sort out his thoughts. He was, despite joking to himself about updating the sports desk on the available skirt, beginning to doubt that Melissa’s behaviour of the night before had been in character, and he was glad that he hadn’t told the police about her. If he had, it might all have got out, and he wouldn’t have wanted to do that to her. He had never felt chivalrous about any woman before, and he walked in the sunshine towards The Chronicle offices with a spring in his step.
    Until he saw the police car already there.

Chapter Five
    â€˜And you thought she was me?’ Melissa looked with astonishment at the young sergeant who had arrived on the dot of nine o’clock.
    â€˜For a while. The first thing you do is check to see who’s been reported missing.’
    â€˜But my husband said that he gave you a