She giggled at that, and it made me want to bottle the sound.
‘No. What it needs is ice cream.’
‘I think there’s a box of Magnums in the freezer,’ I said, already unfurling my legs from beneath the fleecy throw I’d snuggled beneath.
‘No. We need the really good stuff, the kind you eat straight out of the tub with a couple of spoons.’
‘I don’t think we have any of that,’ I said with regret.
‘Yes, we do,’ she said, groping on the settee for the TV remote to pause the film. ‘There’s a tub on the bottom shelf, right at the back behind a big bag of ice cubes.’ She picked up a device and pointed it at the screen. ‘I had to hide it there to stop Sam from finding it. He loves ice cream.’
My lips felt cold as the smile on them froze. ‘Oh, right. Okay. I’ll see if I can find it then, shall I?’
Her reply was an angry growl as she repeatedly pressed on a button that failed to halt the film playing on the screen. ‘What’s the matter with this bloody thing?’ She was quicker to anger these days, and it always caught me by surprise. But this time, I just laughed.
‘It might help if you had the right thing in your hand,’ I said.
She looked down at what she was holding, and I heard every tick of the clock on the wall as I waited for her to laugh, but she continued to stare at the piece of technology in her grip as though it had personally offended her.
‘That’s your calculator, not the TV remote,’ I said, laughing because it should have been a funny moment, even though I was starting to feel that it wasn’t.
She recovered well, with a laugh that sounded like she’d borrowed it from someone else. ‘Of courseit is,’ she said, throwing her calculator down impatiently on the cushions as if punishing it for deliberately tricking her.
We looked at each other for a long moment. Was this another of those things I was meant to brush under the carpet? Because it was starting to get pretty crowded down there.
‘Ice cream,’ I said decisively, as I strode from the room and into the kitchen.
Since moving in, I’d only used the upper shelves of Amelia’s freezer; I certainly hadn’t bothered investigating the lower sections. I crouched before them now, engulfed in a wave of cold air from the open cabinet door.
‘Hidden behind the ice cubes, so Sam couldn’t find it,’ I said softly as I pulled the bag aside and saw the tub of expensive ice cream. I reached for it, and as I plucked it out something thin and black slid into the space it had just occupied.
I was cold. Really cold. And it had absolutely nothing to do with crouching in front of the open freezer. I reached for the dark object and pulled it out.
Its surface was encrusted in tiny particles of ice that looked like snow. I brushed some of it clear. The glass beneath my fingers resembled a windscreen that had been in a really bad accident.
All thoughts of the film and the ice cream were forgotten as I returned to the lounge with the object in my hand. I set it down carefully on the coffee table. It was still covered in freezer snow, which was melting fast.
‘What’s that?’ Amelia asked.
‘Unless I’m very much mistaken,’ I said, sounding like a character in a whodunnit, ‘that is your missing iPhone.’
That at least got her attention. Amelia sprang forward and plucked up the mobile, mindless of the puddle of icy water that was now dripping from it.
‘Where did you find it?’
It felt like an almost unnecessary question.
‘It was in the freezer, behind the ice cream tub.’
‘What was it doing there?’
‘That was going to bemyquestion,’ I said.
Her face was genuinely puzzled, as though I’d presented her with an intriguing conundrum that she’d quite enjoy solving. I didn’t feel anything except a sensation of impending dread that I could neither explain nor understand.
‘I suppose it must have got caught up when I was putting the ice cream away and I never noticed.’ She gave awhat am I likelaugh, and looked happily towards me as though expecting me to join in. ‘This is the very best thing that could have happened.’
‘It is? How?’