Transgressions by Sarah Dunant

wanted to hear it again.
    The music flowed in like a wave. She turned it up more loudly than its elegance could really bear, then louder still, treating it like rock ’n’ roll. She went over to the French windows and pulled up the catch that released the locks from the top and bottom of the frames and opened both doors out onto the garden.
    Outside it was dark and near freezing. She stood staring into the night, her breath making clouds of smoke, her body tensed against the cold. Somehow it made her feel better, the temperature giving her something real to shiver about. Across the long gardens a security light at the back of one of the houses beyond snapped on, fierce, penetrating, then just as suddenly switched off again. Night life. The place was full of it. The feeble glow of the kitchen light picked out a small, dark shape slipping out from the undergrowth across the grass. A cat—not Millie, but her adversary, the ubiquitous black tom. Halfway across the garden it registered her presence and turned, staring straight at her, ears back, body ready to pounce. She held its stare. Then, equally suddenly, it relaxed and moved on and out of sight. Damn animal. It treated the place as if it owned it. Certainly these last few weeks, since the fight with Millie, it was always around, sleeping in the flower beds or dancing its way across the top of the wall. Millie, in contrast, had given up the battle, more often than not spending her days as well as nights inside. Poor Millie. Too young and too active to be confined to the house. Some would say just like her owner.
    She closed and locked the French windows, checking the bolts as she did so. The doors had been put in at the same time as the kitchen extension eighteen months ago. The locks were new, too, state of the art apparently, with the inside catch releasing two steel bolts into the top and bottom of the frames. The glass was double-glazed and laminate—burglarproof, her builder had assured her, though evidently he and the police differed on the precise meaning of that phrase. On the other hand, there was still no evidence that anyone had broken in through them. In which case who, or maybe even what, had moved the CDs?
    Not yet, she thought. Not yet. Not until I’m ready.
    On the table the pizza was cold and congealed in its box. She put it on a baking tray in the oven. Then she got out a salad bowl and started to cut up peppers, lettuce, and mushrooms. She turned off the Vivaldi and tuned in instead to the radio, where someone was talking about a breakthrough in bone marrow transplants, and how things that had seemed impossible only a few years ago would soon be commonplace. She liked that idea and listened carefully, deliberately not thinking of anything else. Gradually the kitchen became hers again, domestic, tamed.
    When the salad was ready and dressed she took out the pizza and opened a bottle of wine. The sound of the cork sucking its way out of the bottle made her feel safer. She lit the candles on the table, but didn’t turn the lights off. She had eaten one, maybe two mouthfuls when the doorbell rang. It took the top of her head off even though she was expecting it.
    In the crack between the door and the chain a middle-aged man with a worn, moon-shaped face was standing holding a bag. “Locks Today,” he said rather mournfully. “You called.”
    She pushed the door forward to release the chain and then he walked in, putting his bag down in the corner. “The front door, is it?”
    “Yes.”
    He fingered it, turning it, watching the lock snap out and back again. “Hmmn.” Then he looked at her. “You should have asked to see a card, you know.”
    “What?”
    “Anybody could turn up at your door and say they were from the locksmith’s. You should ask to see some form of identification.”
    Amazing, she thought. Now even the good guys are strange. “But you’re the only people who knew I called,” she said.
    “Hmmm,” he said again. “You’d be