Something In The Air

Chapter 18 - Bad Husband

After the eventfulness of the morning and with tomorrow's schedule already filled in by the big announcement at Newham Town Hall, Maddox was looking forward to nothing more than a quiet afternoon and a chance to reorganise his thoughts. He could open up the office for a few hours and see if he could draw in some new business, even give Megan a quick call to check how she was still doing. However, he'd barely arrived back home and was just halfway through frying an omelette for lunch when his phone started to vibrate on the kitchen table. Maddox put down the spatula and looked over to see who it was.

"I wonder what you want, Christos?" he muttered under his breath.

He decided his client could wait until after he'd finished cooking, so he cancelled the call then turned back to the hob. No more than a few seconds had passed before the phone started up again, somehow sounding even more insistent than last time.

Maddox sighed with annoyance and moved the frying pan to a cool hob to stop it burning before picking up the phone and putting it to his ear.

"What is it, Christos?"

"Hugo, you need to come quick!" Christos blurted in his ear, his voice sounding panicked. "She's going crazy! Absolutely loco!"

"Who's going crazy?"

"Megan! I hear a knocking at the door, so I go to answer it and she just bursts in demanding to know where Sophie is!"

Maddox groaned and reached behind him to switch off the hob – unfortunately, it looked like lunch would have to wait for a while.

"What's she doing now?" Maddox asked.

"She's storming round the house, throwing things everywhere and screaming at the top of her voice. I told her what I've always been saying, that I don't know anything about what happened to Sophie, but she's not listening! She says she doesn't believe me! She... she says you told her it was me!"

Maddox swore under his breath and rushed out of the kitchen, reaching for his jacket and car keys in one swift motion. "All right, I'm coming over now. Just try not to get her too worked up."

"Is it true, Hugo? Did you tell her it was me?"

It wasn't just Megan who was screaming now. Whatever was going on inside Christos' house, it sounded like complete chaos.

Maddox abruptly ended the call without answering and threw the mobile onto the passenger seat as he leapt into the car. He pulled away with a screech of tyres and felt like he didn't stop to breathe until he was halfway to Beckton. His heart and mind were racing simultaneously, the hands around the steering wheel clammy with sweat, and every red traffic light in his way brought up another foul insult.

"Please don't do anything stupid, Megan," he kept on repeating over and over again. "Please don't do anything stupid!"

When he arrived in Beckton, he was travelling at nearly fifty miles per hour in a strict thirty zone. A speed camera flashed as he whizzed by in a blur of engine noise and expletives, but right at that moment he couldn't care less in the slightest. He just had to make sure that Megan saw sense before it was too late. If she acted rashly and out of turn, it would ruin everything.

Maddox was feeling so flustered that he almost missing the turning onto Christos' road. At the last moment he recognised the street name and stamped on the brakes, swinging the car round in a cloud of tyre smoke and narrowly missing a cyclist coming the other way. As the cyclist waved his fist angrily in the rear-view mirror, Maddox threw the car up onto the pavement and brought it to a sudden juddering halt. He then stumbled out and started sprinting for the house, cursing the fact that he wasn't in better health. As he raced up the driveway, he noticed Megan's red Kia parked right up behind Christos' much larger Mercedes, effectively trapping it in. It couldn't have been an accident, not if Megan was thinking what Maddox feared she was. The front door was hanging wide open and he was surprised that half the close hadn't been drawn to it judging by the level of noise erupting from inside. He traversed the porch in one giant leap and burst dramatically into the hallway.