Текст книги "Vows of Silence "
Автор книги: Susan Hill
Жанры:
Криминальные детективы
,сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
“Who reported it?”
“A woman, walking her dog. Lives over there, at number 17. Seems reliable. She flagged down a motorist, he saw the man at the window with the gun and then, a few seconds later, with the woman. Used his mobile to phone us.”
“Has he opened a window, shouted anything out?”
“No, guv.”
“DCS Serrailler?” The sergeant in charge of the ARV was at his side, the vehicle pulled up a few yards back.
Simon filled him in.
“What do you want to do?”
“Wait. Just to see if there’s any communication.”
“OK. Give us the word.”
Simon stepped back and looked up at the house. Then he walked off in the opposite direction, to think.
Inside the Armed Response Vehicle, six men waited.
“Always the bloody same,” Steve Mason said. “Go like a bat out of hell then sit cooling your heels.”
“Probably a water pistol,” said Duncan Houlish.
“Somebody’s shadow.”
“His own arm.”
“Kids. Often kids.”
But they were tensed as they waited, on the ready, pepped up and wanting to go. They were trained for it, trained to do, yet 90 per cent of their time was spent not-doing.
Clive Rowley looked at his feet. “Get on with it,” he said under his breath.
“Could be linked with the other one,” Steve said.
“What? Melanie Drew?” Clive looked at him.
“Once you’ve got a lunatic with a gun out there c”
“What’s to say he’s a lunatic?”
Clive picked at the skin on the side of his finger. They yammered on. He preferred to stay quiet. Ready. Not that the others wouldn’t be ready, but they talked too much.
It was hot inside the vehicle.
Steve’s chewing gum went to and fro, round and round, with a wet clicking sound.
“Liverpool to win three–nil,” someone said.
“Be a draw. They haven’t got the strikers.”
The talk shifted. Shifted back.
“Need air conditioning in here.”
“Your wife due her baby this week, Tim?”
“Next. She’s had enough. Heat gets to her.”
“What’s that, three?”
“Three up.”
Clive Rowley’s right foot itched inside his boot. It was the kind of thing that could drive you mad, itching where you couldn’t get at it. But the minute he unlaced the boot the balloon would go up.
Five minutes later, as Serrailler was walking briskly back, plan made, the door of the house opened and a man came out, hands up, shaking his head. A young woman followed him, clinging to his hand, crying that it was all nothing, he hadn’t done anything, it had been a row about nothing.
The weapon was a popgun belonging to the woman’s five-year-old son.
Inside the ARV the mood was deflated and irritable. They were trained for it. Up for it. Tensed for it. Swore liberally at another false alarm, another shift spent hanging about.
Outside the house, two PCs wound up the tape. The street emptied. The circus moved on.
“They should fine people like that, for wasting our time. A grand would do it,” the DS said, on the way back to the station.
“‘People like that’ don’t have a grand. More to the point, a young woman was murdered and we haven’t found her killer. You think we should have ignored this?”
She sighed. “Trouble is, everybody gets twitchy. A popgun for God’s sake.”
He decided to leave it. They would all be grumbling for the rest of the shift, not least the AR officers. They all knew that there were likely to be a lot more incidents of the same kind until Melanie Drew’s killer was found because no one was going to be taking chances, anything halfway suspicious would get an overreaction.
He went up to his office. There were new files on his desk and he had to write up his report on the afternoon’s incident. It was twenty past six. The report would take him fifteen minutes or so and the files could wait till tomorrow.
His father had returned from Madeira the previous evening. Simon thought he ought to go over there, offer to take him out for a drink which might lead on to a congenial dinner—in the unlikely event that Richard Serrailler would be feeling mellow in the aftermath of his holiday.
Fourteen
When he was four he had told his Mam he was going to marry her and when she’d stopped laughing and said he couldn’t because she was already taken, he said he’d marry Stephanie then, only his sister had said she hated boys and hated him the most so that had been that, until he’d met Avril when he was fifteen.
He’d pined for Avril Pickering. He’d worked out how long before he could ask her out, then how long before he could get a job and start saving, how long till they could get engaged, how long till he had enough to rent a house and they could be married. He’d put it all down, figures in columns, everything. On paper it had looked all right to him. Fine. Then Avril Pickering had gone out with Tony Fincher. He’d seen them, walking down Port Street holding hands. He’d hated Avril Pickering. Not Tony Fincher, oddly. It wasn’t his fault. It was hers.
He had planned to do something to her, make her regret it, but before he had worked out what it was going to be, it was the summer holidays and when they went back to school in September Avril wasn’t there. The Pickerings had moved away. Scunthorpe, somebody said; London, somebody else. No one really knew.
He had gone out with a few girls after that. Four or five girls. The usual sort of girls. Nothing special. He began to wonder what the fuss was about. He told Stephanie. She laughed. He told Dad, one day when they were shooting. His dad had given him a look and said he’d got something there. What was all the fuss about? Right.
Then he had met Alison, introduced by Stephanie’s fiancé, as he was then. Soon to be husband.
And everything had changed. Alison.
He sat nursing a pint, on his own, remembering, because there was a new girl on the front desk and her name was Alison and it had all clicked into focus again. Vivid. Seeing Alison. Hearing her. Watching her. The tiniest things. He could rerun it like a film going through his head.
Not that he’d ever forgotten. But when something happened, the same name, a little link, it went full on. Colour. Vivid.
He drank the rest of his pint slowly and steadily to slake the anger that always blazed up. Sparks. A breath of wind. A fire, running out of control, and for years nothing would dampen it down.
But then he found it.
Fifteen
Hallam House. It was dark when he approached it down the lane. The lights shone out onto the drive.
Simon stopped. It was still hard. He still hated coming to the house knowing that he would not see his mother, that Meriel would not be pruning or weeding or cutting something back in the garden or else visible in the kitchen or at her desk in the window of the small sitting room. He saw her now. The shape of her head, the way her hair was done, the way she glanced up and her expression when she saw him.
She had not always been there if he had called unannounced. Even though her busy life as a hospital consultant was over and she had stood down from several committees, she was still on the board of this and a trustee of that, often out. But when she was there, she made time for him at once, sat down, listened, caught up with news. Family first, last and always, she had said.
Simon missed her with a strength of sadness that was still raw and painful. He thought about her, had meant to say this or that to her, ask about someone or something.
He looked again at the house. The lights on and welcoming. But his father had never learned the knack of making his family feel especially welcome.
The kitchen curtains were not drawn and as Simon got out of the car, his heart lurched because she was there, he saw her, saw her standing beside the dresser, her arm raised to take something down, saw her as clearly as he saw the two stone urns filled with the white geraniums she had always planted in them, beside the front door.
He looked away quickly, terrified. How could his dead mother be there?
And when he looked again of course she was not.
“Simon? Have I missed a message from you? I don’t remember your saying you were coming.”
“I wasn’t far. Thought I’d drop by and see if you enjoyed your holiday.”
“I did indeed.”
As he followed his father into the kitchen, Simon caught a glimpse of her again, her back to him. Only the way she had done her hair was new. Meriel had always worn her hair upswept. Elegant. She had always been elegant. Even in old gardening clothes, elegant.
Meriel was dead. Meriel had been dead for—
“Hello.”
She turned round.
Her hair was quite different and she was far younger. But she was tall, like his mother, and with the same way of speaking. Odd.
“I don’t think you’ve met. Judith Connolly: my son Simon.” Richard paused and his voice took on its usual faint edge of sarcasm. “Detective Chief Superintendent Serrailler. He’s a policeman.”
“I know,” she said. Smiling. Coming over to him. She held out her hand. “Hello, Simon. I’ve been wanting to meet you.”
There was a smell of cooking. Something simmered on the stove. Since his mother’s death, the kitchen had lost some of its warmth and the small touches that had made it special. There had always been flowers and flowering plants on the window ledges; there had been notes pinned to a cork board, reminders about meetings written in Meriel’s striking italic hand and bright blue ink; there had been a row of musical scores on a shelf next to the cookery books, and photographs of them all as children next to new ones of Cat’s sons and daughter, stuck up everywhere. But the plants had died and never been replaced, the music had gone to Cat; some of the photographs had fallen down or curled at the edges. The notice board was bare. Simon hated going into the kitchen. It was the one room where he missed his mother beyond bearing.
Now he noticed some scarlet geraniums on the ledge, neat in their pots with saucers beneath. There was an unopened bottle of wine on the table. Glasses.
Who was this?
“I take it you’ve seen your sister,” Richard said.
“Of course. They’re back and fully functioning. It’s brilliant.”
“I’ll telephone Catherine tomorrow.”
“Don’t you think you should drive out there, Richard, not just telephone? They’ll be longing to see you.”
Simon looked from the woman to his father and back again. Richard said, “Oh, I doubt that.” But he was smiling.
“Will you stay for supper, Simon? I’ve made a chicken pie that will feed half a dozen. I always cook too much.”
Who was this? What was she doing, cooking in his mother’s kitchen, inviting him to supper, telling his father where he should go, who he should see? Who was this?
She handed him the bottle of wine. “Would you open this?” Smiling. She had a warm smile.
She was—what—late forties? Tall. Light brown hair with some careful, fairer streaks. Straight. Very well cut. Pink shirt. Necklace of large almond-shaped stones. Large mouth. Slightly crooked nose. Who was this?
His father said, “Should we eat in here or shall I lay the table in the dining room?”
“It’s so comfortable in here. Simon, do stay. We don’t have any holiday snaps to bore you with.”
Holiday?
His father was avoiding his eye.
Simon picked up the bottle and went to the drawer for the corkscrew but she had it in her hand. Held it out to him.
Her look said, Don’t ask now. Later. He will tell you later. I will see to it.
He took the corkscrew. She smiled.
Tall. But not like his mother. Not his mother.
In his mother’s place. In her house. Her kitchen. Cooking in her kitchen. Not his mother.
He wrenched the cork hard out of the bottle.
Sixteen
The evening air smelled of bonfires. Cat Deerbon walked towards the east door of the cathedral in the gathering dusk and the woodsmoke drifting on the air was nostalgic of childhood, school satchels, her first year as a junior doctor, running across to the hospital from her room to answer a bleep when the groundsmen were burning the leaves. And her mother in the garden at Hallam House, tall and elegant in jeans in her mid-seventies, pushing the debris of the summer borders into the glowing heart of a small, neat and well-controlled bonfire.
Cat stood for a second catching her breath at the vividness of the memory, wishing she could go there now, make a mug of tea, chat, catch up.
The cathedral was still and almost empty at the end of the day. Two vergers were changing the candles in the great holders on the high altar. Someone was brushing the floor at the far end of the chancel with a rhythmic scritch-scratch of bristle on stone.
There was no service. Cat had had to drop in a letter to the New Song School and she always took the chance to sit in the cathedral for a few moments when she could, centring herself, reflecting, bringing some of her patients and their problems with her to leave in the peace and holiness of the building. She had only just returned to the practice. There were new patients, old ones returning with new problems, nothing dramatic yet. Her energies were going into opposing some changes, learning to work with others, battling the system. Chris, still not fully recovered from a lengthy jet lag, was refusing to argue, refusing to compromise, unusually irritable. But she was determined to win on one front, determined to do some nights on call, seeing her own patients when they needed her most. It would all settle down.
She closed her eyes. Her mother was there again, rekindling the bonfire with a handful of sticks and weeds.
“What would you do, Ma?” And the voice replied, “What your professional conscience dictates, of course—tempered by common sense. And don’t call me Ma!”
Cat smiled. Footsteps down the aisle beside her pew. She looked up and nodded to the verger. The smell of guttering candle wax reached her as it wove its ghostly way down the nave. She bowed her head, prayed for a few moments, then left, pausing as always to look up at the glory of the fan-vaulted roof, the stone angels on the tops of the columns blowing their gilded trumpets.
She had missed a lot of things during their time in Australia and this cathedral perhaps the most.
As she walked out into the warm evening, her phone beeped for a text message from the surgery.
Urgent ring Imogen Hse re Karin M.
Karin McCafferty. The last time she had spoken to Cat was before Australia, but she had sent a couple of emails. She was fine, she had said, still fine, scans all clear, two years after her diagnosis, the oncologist at Bevham General was “surprised but delighted.” “Dare say that goes for you too!” Karin had ended.
Karin had refused all forms of orthodox treatment for a late-diagnosed and aggressive breast cancer and had embarked, against Cat’s best advice, on a journey through all things holistic, naturalistic, alternative—both familiar and what Chris called “wacky.” Karin’s husband had left her to live with another woman in New York, but her business as a garden designer and horticulturalist had flourished and so had she. Against the odds and the medical advice, she had got well and stayed well.
Chris called it a statistical aberration, Karin called it a triumph. Cat had been both delighted—and furious. She had found it hard to talk about—and had replied only briefly to Karin’s last email.
Now she stared at the message on her phone.
She went back to the car, texting as she walked. A message to Chris that she was going to the hospice, Get curry out freezer.
How strongly did a doctor want to be proved right when being right meant a patient’s terminal illness and death? How much had Cat wished for Karin to be both wrong, totally and utterly and profoundly wrong, and yet cured? What would her mother have said? She desperately needed to know, but Meriel’s image was no longer vivid in her mind. Meriel had faded. She was leaving her to sort this one out by herself. “You don’t need me,” she heard her say.
Oh God but I do, Cat thought, as she stood, afraid to drive to the hospice, not wanting to find out what was happening to Karin, smelling the last faint smoke from the burning of the leaves.
Imogen House. There was change here too. The new wing was complete, the old senior sister had retired, a couple of other nurses Cat had known well had moved on, new ones had arrived. But Lois on the reception desk for evenings was still there and greeted Cat with a look of pleasure and a warm hug. It was Lois who was the first face of the hospice when patients arrived at night and were apprehensive as well as desperately ill. Lois who welcomed relatives who were afraid and in distress, Lois who made every one of them feel at home, in safe and loving hands, Lois who was cheerful and positive but never too chirpy, Lois who remembered every name and who absorbed what she could of the anxiety and dread.
“Karin McCafferty?” Cat said.
“Came in last week. She’s been refusing to see anyone at all, but this afternoon she asked if you were back.”
“How is she?”
Lois shook her head. “Be prepared. But it’s more than her physical state, which is actually better now they’ve sorted out her pain control. She seems very angry. I’d say very bitter. No one can get through to her. Maybe you’ll have some luck.”
“I might. I can guess what’s making her angry. Surprised she wants to see me though—Karin’s very proud, she won’t want to lose face.”
The telephone rang. “People,” Lois said to Cat, before she answered it, “behave unexpectedly. You know that as well as I do. There’s no second-guessing how it’s going to take anyone. She’s in room 7.
“Imogen House, good evening, this is Lois.”
The sense of calm and peace Cat always experienced walking through the quiet corridors of the hospice at night met her as she left the reception area, though there were voices from some of the wards, and lights were on. Whatever their beliefs about death, Cat thought, no one could fail to be affected by the atmosphere here, the lack of rush, the absence of noise and bustle that was the inevitable part of any other hospital. She turned into B wing. Here, rooms 5 to 9 were grouped around a small central area which had armchairs and small tables, and double doors that led onto a terrace and the hospice garden. Patients who were well enough sat here during the day or were pushed out in wheelchairs and even beds, to enjoy any fine weather. But now the doors were closed and the room empty.
Or so it seemed. But as Cat went across to room 7, someone said, “I’m here.”
Karin McCafferty was sitting in the chair closest to the darkened windows. The chair was high-backed and turned away, towards the light. Cat realised that she had failed to see her not only because of that but because Karin, who had never been tall, seemed the size of a child curled up in it.
Cat went over and would have bent to hug her but Karin made a movement to lean back and away from her.
“I was afraid I’d die,” she said, “before you got home.”
Looking at Karin in the light from a lamp in the corner, Cat understood that this might well have been so. The flesh seemed barely to cover her, her skin had the transparent gleam and pallor of the dying. Her fingers on the chair arm were ivory bones interlaced by the blue threads of veins. Her eyes were huge in deep sockets sunk into her skull.
“Don’t gloat,” she said, looking intently at Cat. “Don’t crow because you won.”
Cat pulled up one of the chairs. “You think very badly of me,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Karin’s eyes filled with sudden tears and she shook her head furiously.
Cat took her hand. It lay almost weightless in her own. “Listen—everything fails. Sooner or later. Everything. We don’t know nearly as much as we pretend. You did what you believed in and it gave you time—good time too, not time recovering from awful side effects, not time without your hair and being sick and exhausted or recovering from major surgery. You had the courage to reject the orthodox. And, for you, for a long while, it worked. What do I have to crow about? You could have had surgery and chemo and radiotherapy and been dead in six months. Nothing’s guaranteed.”
Karin smiled slightly. “Thanks. But it hasfailed. I’m angry with it, Cat. I believed, I really and truly believed, that it would cure me for good. I believed that more than I have ever believed anything, and it let me down. It lied to me. They lied.”
“No.”
“I’m dying nevertheless—and I wasn’t going to die. I was going to stay well. I thought I’d beaten it. So I feel totally betrayed and if anyone asked me, should they go down the road I took, then no, I’d say, no, don’t bother. Don’t waste your money or your energy or your faith. Put your faith in nothing. None of it’s any good.”
The tears splashed down onto Cat’s hand, and now Karin leaned forward so that she could be held.
No one can get through to her. Maybe you’ll have some luck, Lois had said.
Cat felt Karin’s frail body shake in a fury of crying. She said nothing. There was nothing to say. She simply held her and let her cry her tears of weariness and pain, disappointment and fear.
It took a long time.
In the end, Cat helped her to bed and sent a text message home, fetched tea for them both and came back to find Karin lying, white as the linen of her high pillows, exhausted but calm.
“Have you been in touch with Mike?”
Karin’s mouth firmed. “No, I have not.”
“Maybe he’d want to know?”
“Then he’ll have to want. I’ve moved on from all that.”
“OK. It’s your call.”
“There is c” Karin hesitated. “I want to talk about it. About dying.”
“To me?”
“Do you know what happened to Jane Fitzroy?”
Jane had been the chaplain to Imogen House and a priest at the cathedral.
“No, but I could find out. She went to a convent—I had an address before we went to Sydney—and if she isn’t there any more they’ll probably know where she went.”
Simon might know, she thought but did not say.
“I liked Jane. I could talk to her.”
“I’ll do whatever I can.”
“I’ll try not to die first.”
Cat stood up. “Do you want me to come and see you again?”
“If you can bring Jane.”
“And if I can’t?”
Karin turned her head away.
After a moment, neither saying any more nor touching her again, Cat went quietly out of the room.
Her phone buzzed the receipt of a text message as she crossed the courtyard.
Feel crap going bed. Si here mad as hatter. Hurry up. Xx.
Seventeen
Ten past six. This end of town is quiet. Offices shut. Shops shut. And the Seven Acesnot open till eight. Plenty of time.
Timed it right. Perfectly calculated.
The floor of the old granary looked dodgy but he’d been up twice and it was better than he expected. He’d walked on the beams and the boards. Tested. There was woodworm. Dust flew. But it wasn’t about to give way under his weight.
The evening sun had warmed it. There was straw and white splattering where the swallows had nested in the summer. They’d found the holes in the roof. He came up the old fire escape at the back. He wore trainers with the soles covered in thick wedges of polythene foam. No prints.
It smelled of wood and dust and dryness. There was a FOR SALE sign on the temporary fencing at the front. DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL. Half of Lafferton. The Old Ribbon Factory. The canalside buildings. The old munitions store. Now this. Lafferton was changing. Apartments, boutique shops, smart offices.
He didn’t mind. Not sentimental. Wasn’t born here anyway. Nowhere near. Safer that way.
He’d come up here three days ago, at this time. Looking down onto an empty street. The odd car, but the granary wasn’t on the road to anywhere and this end of town was still run-down. Not for long. But run-down now. Which suited.
He left the door open behind him.
He’d already done the run twice, silently across the open granary loft, slip through the door, close it, rope secured over the fire-escape rail. Quickest. He was good at ropes—no one knew that—ropes and the beam, from being seven or eight. Small. Agile. Strong arms.
Behind the old complex of buildings there were two ways he could take. The path leading to the canal, overgrown, trees and shrubs in the way, so he’d pushed through it half a dozen times. He’d go that way, make a narrow track through, and then along the towpath, running. Easy. The other way was a gravel path leading to the street.
The van was parked in the next, Foster Road, halfway down.
D.F. STOKES. PLUMBING. CENTRAL HEATING.
CORGI REGISTERED. 07765 400 119.
*
All over the house, girls were dressing up. Miniskirts, nurses’ aprons, schoolgirl blouses, St Trinian’s ties. Claire Pescod was Lady Godiva, her own hair but with extensions, a flesh-coloured leotard. Her chief bridesmaid-to-be was dressed as a lady vicar, another girl as a cowgirl, shrieking with laughter, fighting for the mirror.
Claire’s mother, laughing. “I spent my hen night in the pub. Your dad and his best man turned up just before closing time.”
“Mum!”
“Didn’t matter. We had a good time.”
“We’re having a good time. When’s the limo coming?”
“Ten to eight.”
“Too early.”
“Mum, Page says ten to eight’s too early.”
“Well, you can’t change it now.”
“Oh help.”
On and on, mascara, glitter, lip gloss. Fake tattoos. Badges with “Claire’s getting wed.”
Seven. Seven thirty.
“Good God!” Claire’s dad, skirting round them in the hall. “Don’t come near me, I stink of oil.” Off to the shower. “Have a good time, girls. And behave.”
Half the street out to see the stretch limo. White. Black windows. Champagne. Confetti. Chauffeur.
“Behave.”
“Be good.”
“Be careful.”
The limo backed, slow and stately, inch by inch, down the road. Cars stopped for it. Hooted. A man got off his bike. An Alsatian went mad on the end of a leash.
Champagne.
“Here’s to you, honey.”
They showered her with rose petals, concealed in skirts and pockets, inside the car, shrieking with laughter, looking out at Lafferton through darkened windows.
He had waited for two hours. Calm. Unworried. Occasionally checking the sight lines through the space a few inches to the left of one of the boarded-up windows. The boarding-up was split, and worm-eaten as well. He had brought nothing to eat, a single can of drink which when finished he crushed up small and put in his pocket.
It was warm. Snug. He was alert. Ready. Tense but not anxious.
Occasionally he had walked the length of the loft and back.
At first it was quiet but in the last half-hour or so it had grown lively outside. The Seven Acesopened at eight. The fluorescent and the neon went on outside the club and on the boards and hoardings. The pavement turned blue and green. Faces were orange. He had worked it out to the second. Took the rifle down from the false cupboard behind the ceiling boards. Left the front panel off to replace it quickly afterwards. Loaded.
Positioned himself. The sights were perfect. Take a stag at three hundred yards. More.
He waited. Only now his heart began to beat faster. As it should. But he was cool. His hand was steady.
The white car glided to the kerb outside the club, caught in the whirling lights, now blue, now green, now pink, now gold. The doors opened and they started to spill out, laughing, shrieking, arms waving.
Claire Pescod.
He had her in his sights.
Aim for the heart.
But a split second and the girl in the silly cowboy hat stumbled and reached out.
The shot glanced off the cowgirl before hitting Claire, too, but not in the heart, not clean.
Outside, the screaming rose and rose.
Chaos.
But not here.
Here he reached up and stowed away the gun, replaced the panel and then went surely, lightly, across the broken rafters and through the door. Dropped the wooden bars. Turned for the metal fire escape and the rope and slid, fast.
At his back the screaming increased until it was like the crying of a thousand seagulls following him away.
Eighteen
“Mummy it’s going to be the Jug Fair, it’s going to be the Jug Fair.”
“Mummy, we can go, can’t we, we always go to the Jug Fair?”
“And I’m old enough to go on the big rides now.”
“Don’t be stupid, you’re not, you wouldn’t be allowed, you’ll be on the teacups again with Felix, nuh nuh nuh.”
“Mummeeeee c”
She could deal with her own squabbling children easily enough. But not Simon.
Simon was leaning against the dresser with a mug of coffee in his hand.
“OK, what’s that face for?—as Ma would have said. Sam, stop winding your sister up. Have you finished your homework? No, don’t answer that, just go and do it. Didn’t Dad make you?”
“He went to bed with his jet lag.”
“Good excuse! Hannah, don’t whine. Now GO. You on duty, Si?”
“Yes and no.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Well, I’m having a glass of vino. Are you staying to eat?”
Simon shrugged.
“For God’s sake, I can’t cope with three of you andChris’s everlasting jet lag. What’s happened, Si? Oh, before I forget, do you have an address or a number for Jane Fitzroy?”
Simon looked wary.
“Karin McCafferty is in the hospice. She’d like to see her.”
“Bad?”
“Bad.”
Cat slipped out of her shoes and lay back on the sofa with her drink. She closed her eyes and centred herself back home, winding down, gathering her resources slowly to cope with supper, the children’s bedtime. And her brother.
“Dad’s got a girlfriend,” Simon said.
She opened her eyes. “Ah.”
“Is that all you can bloody say?”
“Er c I could do “Good” if you prefer.”
“How can you possibly say that?”
“Good. There, said it again. Take that look off your face. Good. Good. Good. If Dad has got someone to be with, good. Why shouldn’t he have?”
“You read Hamlet?”
Cat sighed and got up. She poured a glass of wine and handed it to her brother. “If your phone rings ignore it. They can manage. Now get that down you and stop being ridiculous.”
“I knew you’d take that line. I just bloody knew.”
“Dad is alone, he is lonely—though he would bite out his own tongue rather than admit it. He misses Ma, it’s over a year since she died—”
“Exactly. Only one year.”
“Time enough—if he thinks it is. Anyway, how do you know?”
He told her. “I couldn’t bear it c she was in the kitchen, at the stove, getting things out of the cupboards c she was in Ma’s place. I couldn’t bear it.”
“Get over it. This isn’t about you, it’s about Dad. Who is she, anyway?”
“Some woman called Judith Connolly.”
“Don Connolly’s widow?”
“No idea.”
“If so, she’s lovely—God, what a brilliant outcome. Don Connolly was one of the cardiologists at BG and, ironically, he died of a coronary.”
“Bad advertisement.”
