Bad moon rising part three

I sat at the kitchen table eating a light lunch, a ham and egg sandwich with a cup of Earl Grey tea, no milk, no sugar.

As I ate I was eyeing the mail which had just arrived with a clatter. It lay on the formica topped table next to my now empty sandwich plate. At a glance I could see it was just the usual stuff, a couple of bills mixed in with some junk mail trying to sell me a sofa, a stairlift for the elderly and the local supermarket special offers for today.

The first letter I opened was the monthly telephone bill. I wasn’t really expecting any surprises here, it was usually more or less the same amount, about fifty pounds or so. What was different was that British Telecom had been forced by the government to offer extra service features like itemised billing.

The first page of the bill with the total figure due shocked me. It was three hundred pounds. I flipped through the following ten pages trying to see how they could justify such a scandalous amount. At the very last page all was revealed. There was one number out of all that I simply did not recognise. What’s more, the number was only ever called when I was out of the house, a Friday night when I popped out to see a male friend for a beer, a Saturday afternoon when I went to see the local football team play a match. It piqued my interest somewhat to say the least.