A TEENAGER told her boss a colleague was “bothering” her in the months before she was killed, a court heard.

Michael Lane stands trial accused of murdering Shana Grice in her Portslade home.

The 19-year-old’s body was found in her Chrisdory Road bedroom on Thursday, August 25, after she failed to turn up to work at Hove-based wholesaler Palmer and Harvey.

She had been dating Ashley Cooke since 2013 but became involved with Lane, 27, in 2015 when they met through work.

They were both employed at Brighton Fire Alarms, in Foredown Drive, Portslade, at the time along with her housemates Emma King and Angela Stebbings.

Ms King, giving evidence on the stand, told Lewes Crown Court this morning how she accompanied Miss Grice to speak to one of the company’s directors to complain about Lane.

She said on a number of occasions Miss Grice had talked about Lane pestering her with texts and phone calls.

She said: “I tried to help by answering the phone for her so she didn’t have to speak to him.”

But Simon Russell Flint, defending, said: “Throughout this time this was a pretence by Shana. “They were, in fact, in a relationship.”

He said she had been replying and responding to the texts in an “affectionate” and “encouraging” way.

Ms King agreed and told how on the night of a work leaving party at the Mile Oak party in March last year Lane had revealed they were seeing each other and showed her messages.

When Miss Grice found out she became upset. Ms King also became upset and asked her about the relationship, commenting that everything Miss Grice had told her about the situation “was a lie”, the court heard.

In April 2016 Miss Grice split up with Mr Cooke and shortly after admitted her relationship with Lane. The pair even went to a Rihanna concert together at Wembley stadium.

But by July the relationship had ended and Lane was “upset” about this, Ms King said.

She told how Lane started to follow Miss Grice to work and to the supermarket. She said: “I followed Shana to work one day and saw him drive past me.

“He followed her a lot of the time. Over the space of a few weeks it was pretty much most days.”

At the beginning of August Lane wrote Miss Grice a letter asking her to pay him back at least a “couple of hundred” pounds for what Ms King called “silly things like car park tickets and meals they’d had together” and perfume he had bought her at the airport when he went on holiday.

She said: “He wanted the money back.”

Mr Russell Flint suggested Lane was let in to the bungalow through Miss Grice’s open window to see her on a number of occasions but Ms Stebbings, who was also called as a witness, said she had never seen this happen and had never heard of that taking place.

Ms Stebbings said: “We were really surprised she was seeing him after anything that had happened.”

She told the court Miss Grice told her Lane had been “hiding behind walls” near where her parents lived and that Miss Grice had “suspected” him of letting her tyres down.

She said of Miss Grice: “She was lovely. She liked to get on with everybody really. She was very friendly and bubbly kind of person. She got on with everybody.”

Lane, of Thornhill Rise, Portslade, denies murder.

The trial continues.