Текст книги "The Risk of Darkness"
Автор книги: Susan Hill
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Eileen sat staring at her. Dougie saw the confusion on his wife’s face, the shock and bewilderment, the uncertainty about what to say or how. He took a step forward so that he was in front of Lucy Groves.
“I think I’ll speak now if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, Mr Meelup, the man with the cakes! But the trouble is, you see, you’re not really anything to do with all of this, are you? It really is your wife’s story, the story of Mrs Sleightholme, not of Mrs Meelup. If c”
“I said I would speak now and I’d be glad if you would let me do it.”
She fluttered her eyelashes in mock surprise. “Well, please do.”
“Thank you. Now, young woman, when you came in here, I very foolishly didn’t ask you your business. You oiled your way inside and my wife took you for a policewoman, as well she might. Instead of which it turns out you’re a newspaperwoman. A newspaperwoman. Well, I thank you, but we don’t want you. I’ll ask you to put your things together and leave and I’ll ask you not to come back, not to dare to show your face anywhere near.”
He was shaking. Lucy Groves hesitated. He could see her, working it out, trying to see a way past him or round him or through him to Eileen but there was no way. He didn’t move. And then Eileen found her voice.
“You pretended to be the police,” she said softly.
“Mrs Meelup, I did no such thing.”
“You sat in my house and you took my trust.”
“I’m really sorry you see it like that. I’m here to try and look after you. Because, believe me, you are going to need it. You are going to need all the help you can get. It’s only a matter of time. And you’ll find, when you think back, that I didn’t mention the police.”
“What do you mean, I’ll need help?”
“I should have thought it was pretty obvious. Mrs Meelup, listen to me c I’m trying to help you here. OK, yes, we get something out of it, of course we do, but only if you run with us and trust us. Then we look after you when the going gets tough. Which is when people find out who you are c those that don’t know already. I’m amazed, frankly, that you haven’t had anything nasty happen so far.”
“I think you’d better go now,” Dougie said.
She ignored him. “You do know what I mean, don’t you, Mrs Meelup?”
“You took me in.”
Lucy Groves shook her head. She was putting the recorder away.
“The thing is, it’s all a big mistake. She’s done nothing, nothing wrong at all, and never these terrible things, not in a million years. Of course she hasn’t, you’ve only to know her. Of course she hasn’t.” Eileen stood up, summoning reserves of dignity and strength. “I know what the truth is. The truth is that there’s a dreadful wrong being done. Someone who took and harmed and killed little children is out there wandering the world waiting to do it all over again while Wee– while my daughter is under wrongful arrest. That’s the truth, and when it’s all sorted maybe I’ll tell it. Only not to you. Not to you.”
She turned as her courage drained away and her face seemed to fold in on itself. Dougie picked up the big bright green bag and stood holding it out to Lucy Groves, and in the end, she took it without saying anything else at all, got up and walked from the room with him close behind her. He thought if he hadn’t kept his arms folded he might have pushed her out of the door.
Forty-seven
The house was always shady. Only the kitchen got the sun for much of the day. The study was the coolest room in the house, so Magda had spent the hot days there. She had tried to work but it didn’t amount to much. Her usually clear, concise thoughts seemed to have gone through a shredder and she was appalled by the feebleness of what she had written.
Now, she lay on the couch half reading, half dozing. The window was open on to her small garden and a blackbird was hopping about on the mossy paving stone. The garden was in shadow from the high wall, apart from a wedge of brightness at the far end.
She closed her eyes. She felt weak and when she’d woken that morning she had been tearful. In hospital she had felt safe and had company, not so much people to talk to as to watch and think about. She had also been fed and nursed and now she realised that she had come to depend on that, which was why she had wept earlier. Daily life had become a slow and tedious struggle. In half an hour she would like a cup of tea but the effort of getting to the kitchen to make it would probably defeat her.
I am not like this, she thought. I have become a stranger to myself and it frightens me.
She had been in control all her life, an achiever, a strong, vigorous woman, independent in mind and body. Now, someone else lay on her couch and dozed and was lonely and dreaded the dark.
The blackbird came closer. She had never noticed birds. The garden was a secluded green space but she had never cared about flowers or plants. Animals took from you and gave nothing in return, she had always said. As a child, Jane had wanted hamsters and rabbits, a cat, a dog. “Animals are not equal companions for intelligent human beings.”
Now she watched the blackbird with fascination. Its whole life was a quest for food, without guarantee that food would be found. Perhaps it had come upon a reassuring supply here. She had no idea what blackbirds ate. Other people put out breadcrumbs and nuts for birds, a thing it had never occurred to her to do. But she felt a sudden surge of feeling for the blackbird. She had a few bits of food in the pantry and the fridge and she was never very hungry, but when supplies ran out she would somehow have to get more. Did grocers still deliver? Who could she ring and ask to shop for her? What had always been straightforward was now an impossibly complex challenge. Everything was a challenge, going from room to room, dressing, undressing, washing, bathing, sorting out clean clothes. She was a pathetic old woman and it angered her.
But the deep green shade of the garden was soothing to look out on. She closed her eyes and opened them again at a slight sound. The blackbird had gone.
The movement in the room was quick and soft so that by the time she had registered what had happened, he was standing beside the couch. Magda started to shift about, trying to pull herself up.
“Hello then, Miss,” he said quietly. “I’m hoping you remember me.”
She stared, trying to place him. He was very tall and he wore jeans and a T-shirt with Atlanta Olympic Games 1996 stamped but barely still visible on the front. Something about him, something c she managed to sit almost upright. But not enough.
“Come on, come on, Miss, you have to remember me.” His voice was both threatening and pleading. “It’s no good telling me you forgotten, Miss.”
“How did you get in?”
“Ah, that’s our secret. Only if you don’t remember me, which is a sad thing and all, you’ll remember my mate Jiggy, he come here not long ago, Miss.”
“The one who broke in and took things and hit me, is that your mate Jiggy?”
“Sounds like you do remember him then, so you try and remember me. I think I’m sitting down a bit here.” He did so, in the chair opposite her, but he pulled it across the room first, so that he was closer. “Now you look into my face, Miss, and tell me you remember? That’d be something.”
She found that she had to look into his face. She could do nothing else.
“Remember now, come on, Miss.”
“Why are you calling me Miss? I don’t remember you, not at all.”
“OK, OK then, Doctor. Doctor. Doctor. Doctor. Now you’ll remember me.”
She put her hand to her eyes and closed them, blotting him out. He had huge teeth, wide-spaced, with a broken one at the side. Huge hands.
“Doctor.”
“If you’ve come to take things, take them c whatever Jiggy left. Just take and go.”
“No, no, no. I’m not taking anything. No, no.” He laughed. He had his knees apart and his huge hands resting on them. “That’s not my idea. No.”
“What is your idea? What are you doing here? Please go. I want you to go. I’m not well and I need to sleep. Please, just leave that way.”
“I know the way. The way in, the way out. Only I’m for staying here. Till you remember me, which you should, which you’d better.”
“Why should I remember you? I’ve never seen you before.”
“Oh yes, oh yes, Miss Doctor, Miss Doctor, you’ve seen me, you’ve seen me a dozen times, maybe more, in your room, in your office, where you wore glasses. No glasses today. No glasses.” He laughed.
She looked into the tiny pupils in his egg-white eyes. “You were a patient? You came to my clinic?”
“Hey yes, now then, you see? Hey. Good. Now we’re getting along fine, a lot better. OK.”
“I don’t remember you.”
His face tightened and he suddenly slapped his fist on to his knee. “You better tell me you do.”
“It must have been years ago.”
“Many, many years. Many years. I was six or seven c or eight years old. You see, now I don’t remember. Remembering is hard, isn’t it, Miss Doctor? A little boy then. But I remember everything else. I remember you talking and talking and talking and I remember the writing you did, writing and writing, and the questions and questions and questions. I remember. I didn’t know the answers all the time, I just heard the questions and the talking and saw the writing. Then I was sent away. You remember now maybe?”
“Sent away?”
“Nobody forgets being sent away.”
“But I didn’t send you away.”
“You did so. You asked questions and wrote stuff and wrote stuff and I kept being back in your room and then one time I got sent away. I don’t forget that.”
“What’s your name?”
“You pretending you don’t remember that now?”
“No, I don’t remember. What is your name?”
“Mikey”
“I didn’t send you away. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the authority to send children away.”
“Maybe you told someone else then. Maybe that. I only know what happened. I remember that OK c that’s why.”
“Why?”
He got up and came to stand over her so that she shrank back. He smelled of something sweet, but it was not a sweetness she recognised.
“Where I went, Miss, I remember that. I remember everything. You remember nothing. That’s too bad. I know what Iremember and who made it happen and that is you, Miss, you, Doctor Doctor, and I’ve waited to come and help you remember and here I am.”
He was speaking more and more quickly, the words running together. Once or twice she felt his spittle on her hand and then on her cheek.
And suddenly, she saw him, a stick-thin boy with huge hands and scabs on his head, bruises round his neck and on his arms. He was sitting on a straight chair in her room looking at the floor, touching his ear or his leg now and again in a gesture that was more than random, that was as someone touches a talisman. He was shocked into silence, malnourished, angry with a confused, hurt, pent-up anger, too frightened to release even a whisper to her. She saw him time after time and, once, only once, she heard him speak, but she could not catch what he was saying. A word she had never caught.
“I remember,” Magda said. “Mikey” His smile was triumphant, wide, gap-toothed, a mouth of a smile which opened into a roar of what she thought was delighted laughter, a second before she recognised it as rage.
In that second, she lifted up her arms to shield her face before he came down upon her savagely, roaring still, as the light shrank to a pinpoint behind her eyes and then went out.
Forty-eight
He had thought he would wait until it was dark but he felt in pain with the frustration of waiting, of the heat, of being able to do nothing else, of having it bang against the inside of his head. He rinsed his head under the cold tap in the kitchen and went out just before seven. The pavements radiated the heat of the day back up and the tarmac was melting at the sides of the road. He turned to take the canal path. It was a longer route but shady, pleasanter. No one was about except one old man on a broken bench, whispering to himself.
They had come here a few times to walk, in winter, in spring. Lizzie had longed to see a kingfisher and someone had told her kingfishers occasionally flashed blue from bank to bank of the canal and nested under the willows, but she had died and the kingfisher remained unseen. Now he stood staring at the willows, still in the early-evening heat. Nothing.
He passed the lock-keeper’s cottage and the warehouses. Lizzie had come there for him but when he had reached out to her she had run away, tripped, fallen, cried and sent for the police. It had been a confusion and a misunderstanding but he had not been able to explain adequately, they had seemed obtuse. But then, he had always believed that policemen were obtuse, overtrained and undereducated, without subtlety or fastidious intelligence.
The cathedral bells rang the hour.
Lizzie’s death was someone’s fault. Whoever had once fed her contaminated meat. Doctors who had diagnosed her disease too late. Doctors who had failed to treat her. Doctors who had stood by watching her symptoms crawl into her brain and eat it away. Nurses in the hospice. People whose prayers were useless. God. God. God and God’s priests.
He crossed the canal at the narrow iron bridge on to the town side. Here, the backs of terraced houses overlooked it; people might look out of their bedrooms on to the green-black surface of the water, on to the cardboard carton bobbing against the base of the bridge, on to the supermarket trolley embedded in the undergrowth, on to the peeing dogs and the narrow boats and the willows and the secret kingfishers.
He pushed his way through a patch of nettles and briers, through a broken-down gate and up a long tube of a garden without grass. No one saw him. No one came. A dog barked somewhere.
He was sweating. He smelled of sweat.
The house was in a mess, a honeycomb of let-rooms with dirty curtains. The house on his left was the same, but on his right, someone had a garden. He went across and looked through the broken fence panels. Marigolds. A wooden archway with trellis and a rose climbing up it, peachy-coloured. The path was lined with tiles like hoops. There was a bed of vegetables—onion tops, potato tops, a cane bean-wigwam. A couple of nut holders swung from a laburnum tree. There was a tiny pond. At the far end, behind a privy, he could just see a birdcage set against the brick wall and a flash of canary yellow. He tried to push his way through the fencing but it would not give. He wanted to be in the garden, beside the tiny pond, near the birds, among the potato tops and marigolds.
Abruptly, Max began to weep, resting his head against the broken fence, and his weeping turned to a torrent of anger, making him shake the wood panels violently until someone shouted from a house. No one came. Just the shouting, then silence again.
His hand had blood on it from a piece of broken wood which had punctured the pad below his thumb.
And then he saw her. She was sitting with her back to him on a bench near the archway. Her hair was fairer, as if she had been in the sun for a long time. He pulled at the fencing slats and this time a half-rotten one snapped and when he kicked at the space it opened enough for him to crawl through. He stood still, amazed that he was inside the garden as close to Lizzie as breathing. She was there. She had not stirred or turned. She might be waiting, though he wondered why it should be here, where he had found her quite by chance.
He wiped the back of his wet hand across his face. The cut had stopped hurting but still bled. She would know what to do.
“Lizzie,” he said.
It was very quiet. He waited.
“Lizzie.” She did not move and so he went forward a step or two, reaching out his hand to her, to touch the slightly fairer hair.
“Lizzie.” He realised that he had been saying her name but silently, saying it in his heart and in his head but not out loud. Now he spoke it clearly into the still garden.
“Lizzie.”
She turned round then and screamed and the screams were like knives tumbling and falling through his brain and he lunged forward, desperate to reach her and stop her, to show her who he was and that she did not need to scream, but when he felt her body and looked into her face and the open, screaming mouth, Lizzie had gone. It was not Lizzie and his brain caught fire.
Forty-nine
The small hands were slightly damp. Like a clammy sort of sea anemone on her arm.
“Bloody hell, Kyra!”
Natalie woke up completely and leaned across Kyra to switch on the lamp.
“What you done?” She sounded weary. She was weary. This was the fourth night in two weeks. “You wet your bed again or what?”
The small hands were pulled away.
“You bloody have. Honest to God, Kyra, how old are you? Wetting the bed is what babies do, little kids, you’re six years old, nearly seven. OK, tomorrow morning, we go to the doctor, first off, and you don’t go to Barbara’s till you’re sorted.”
Kyra curled up on the farthest side of her mother’s bed. She didn’t mind about not going to Barbara’s. In the holidays she was there eight till six. She only minded about the doctor.
“Shut up, it’s me should be crying, you’re wet at both ends these days, you. Come on, get out of there, you want a clean nightie, I’m not having you make this bed wet and all. I’ll sort yours tomorrow. And if you stop in here you stop still, right?”
It only took five minutes but then of course she couldn’t get back to sleep. Kyra slept. In the morning, she’d barely remember any of it.
Natalie lay on her back, arms behind her head. She knew why she wasn’t sleeping and it wasn’t only that Kyra kept waking her, if not because she’d wet the bed then because of bad dreams. There was something wrong and Natalie knew it, only Kyra was like a bloody oyster, clammed up tight. She hadn’t said anything at school, she wouldn’t say anything to Barbara, and Natalie had given up. She’d tried talking, tried asking questions, tried pleading, screaming, shutting her in her room, giving her treats, confiscating her toys, forbidding television, taking her out, making her stay in. Nothing. All Kyra said was, “I want to see Ed,” and sometimes, “Where isEd?”
But she wouldn’t talk about Ed, except to say the old stuff. I like Ed. I like going to Ed’s house. We made buns. We made toffee. We read stories. We did the garden.
“Did Ed ever do anything to you?” Silence.
“Did Ed ever tell you about other children she knew?” Silence.
“Did Ed tell you where she worked? Did Ed ever ask you to go in her car? Did Ed ever tell you off?” Silence. Silence. Silence.
Natalie was more worried than she found it easy to admit even to herself. She wondered what she ought to do now, whether she ought to ask the doctor if Kyra needed to see someone else. Or maybe she ought to get her away, take a holiday, go to Butlins or Center Parcs or camping in France like Davina at work. Ha bloody ha. She hadn’t got camping money or Center Parcs money or even, probably, Butlins money. Everything went on the rent and keeping them going, even the bit of extra benefit she got. That and the bloody car wanted mending. And then there was the business she hoped to start. The one she had had planned in her head for as long as she could remember. Dream on, Natalie.
She wasn’t going to start weeping or whingeing to anyone, because she wasn’t the weeping or whingeing sort. She was tough. She was independent and she was bringing up Kyra to be the same. Only sometimes, like now for instance, in the middle of the night, the toughness got cracks in it.
Kyra mumbled and murmured like someone with a mouth full of pebbles. Natalie had strained to hear any words, anything that made sense, but there never was anything. Just pebble mumbling.
She turned on her side and tried to sleep but her brain was shot through with brilliant light and jazzy pictures and she didn’t finally drop off until after dawn. Kyra had not stirred from her place, rolled up on the very edge of the bed.
*
The surgery was overflowing and one of the doctors had been called out. Kyra sat on the bench swinging her legs. Every time she swung them back they banged against the wall and a woman opposite glared. If she hadn’t, Natalie would have told Kyra to stop swinging and banging, but because of the woman, she let her go on doing it. They were seen nearly an hour after their appointment time and were in the room for three minutes. He had looked at his computer all the time and not at either of them and asked how old Kyra was twice.
“OK,” Natalie had said, “so you think it’s just normal, then, her suddenly wetting the bed. Fair enough.” She couldn’t be bothered. He hadn’t even asked if Kyra had had any upsets, hadn’t seemed to know a lot about anything.
“Stop scraping your shoe like that, Kyra, I gotta get back to work.”
“Can I have an ice cream?”
“No, you bloody can’t.”
“Why not?”
“No money, no time and they rot your teeth.”
“Not just one?”
“Oh Gawd, all right. But only c” Natalie stopped. She took hold of Kyra’s hand tightly, “only if you tell me.”
Kyra stared at the pavement.
“Kyra?”
“What?”
“What happened with Ed?”
Silence.
“OK, that’s it then. No talk, no eat. Come on. And stop scraping your bloody shoe, will you?”
“When’s Ed coming back to her house?”
“Never,” Natalie said, feeling suddenly vicious.
She waited for Kyra to cry but there was no crying. Nothing. Just the silence.
She’d taken the morning off, so she might as well have it. Kyra went to Barbara’s. Natalie went to Top Shop and bought herself a pair of shorts. There was time for a wander about and a milk shake.
And then it came to her, like a bubble popping inside her head and letting out an idea like a gas. She sat for a long time, thinking it through, having a Coke after the milk shake, which wasn’t the best idea because the two seemed to froth up in her stomach for the rest of the day. But the idea was a good one. By the end of the afternoon she’d worked it out quite carefully, how much she might possibly get, how she’d use it.
She didn’t go back to work. She had too much to think about. It was very hot and she took her thinking, and three different newspapers, into the garden. Ed’s house was odd, like a ghost house, a hollow shell sitting next door, not just a house where they were out at work or even away on holiday. Different.
It wasn’t just about getting money. It was about telling someone. She began to go through the papers. There were articles with the names of the people who had written them at the top and she wrote one or two down, but only women. She couldn’t have explained why, but she knew it had to be a woman.
Melanie Epstein. Anna Patterson. Selina Wynn Jones. She liked that name. There was a postage-stamp photograph at the top of the article, which was about women sex addicts. Selina Wynn Jones had straight blonde hair to just below her ears and what looked like quite a big nose, which was reassuring, somehow. She wanted to have someone called Selina Wynn Jones as a friend. Friend. Natalie was struck by the word because she supposed she had thought of Ed as a friend, because of Kyra. Ed had had patience with Kyra, more than she herself usually had. They’d cooked things, started tomatoes off in pots and sunflower seeds in the garden, Ed had read books to her, and if you’d asked, Natalie knew she would have said that Ed was a friend. She didn’t have many. She was a bit like Ed, private, not always in and out of other people’s houses, other people’s lives, and that had meant they suited each other as neighbours. She remembered hearing them over the fence in the garden, Kyra rabbiting on in her scratchy little high voice, Ed saying the odd thing, but mainly being quiet, letting Kyra talk. Once, Ed had come in for a cup of tea. Once, Natalie had taken her post round when it got misdelivered. They’d said Hi. Was that being a friend?
Jesus Christ. She stood up as if a wasp had stung her, remembering what had happened, what Ed had done. If she had. Maybe there was a mistake. They did make mistakes, even big ones. Papers were full of them, people standing on the steps of a court, weeping, waving, arms round their mothers and sisters and wives, innocent after twenty years, the something Four, the somewhere Seven. Whatever.
Ed?
Natalie went indoors, got a half-finished bottle of lager from the fridge, drank it, threw the bottle in the bin and went to the telephone. She got the number of the newspaper in ten seconds and wrote it down. That was the easy bit. Then she went upstairs.
Kyra’s room was neat. Kyra was neat. Sometimes Natalie told her the fairies had swapped her for someone else’s kid she was so neat. Tidy. Her picture books were edge to edge and her soft toys arranged big to small down the shelf. Bloody hell. It was like Ed’s house when Natalie had been into it the odd time, clean, tidy, neat. What was that all about?
She looked out of Kyra’s bedroom window. The walls were there, the roof, the garden, the gate, the fence panels. It was there. The same. Ed’s house. She wondered what the men in white suits had found. She wondered what it felt like in the house, whether by standing in one of the rooms you would know. Just know.
She ran down the stairs fast and took the portable phone into the kitchen.
“I want to speak to Selina Wynn Jones.”
“Thank you.”
She hadn’t expected just that. Just “Thank you,” and the tinned music, Whitney Houston; she didn’t know what she’d expected and it had taken three seconds.
“Selina Wynn Jones.”
Natalie’s mouth went funny, as if she’d sucked on a lemon. She thought she couldn’t speak.
“Hello? Can I help you?”
“Yeah. I think c well, can I ask you something? That’s it really.”
“Who is this?”
“Natalie c Miss Natalie Coombs.”
“From?”
“What?”
“Sorry, are you an agency or what?”
“No. I just c I read you in the paper. I’ve got something to say.”
“About?”
“My neighbour c and my daughter. About Kyra.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“OK.” Natalie took a slow breath. “Right. Sorry. My name’s Natalie Coombs and I live next door to a woman murderer. I live next to Ed Sleightholme? The one with the missing children—the little boy who was murdered and that. She’s in prison, she’s been charged. I live next door to her.”
“Right. I know the case you mean but I’m not sure you’re talking to the right person.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not crime. I’m not news at all. I’m features.”
“Oh.”
“You really need the news desk.”
“Do I?”
“I’d think so.”
“I want to talk to someone c to tell them my story.”
“Oh, right, got you. Ah c hang on c give me your number, will you? It’s Lucy Groves. Yes, Lucy Groves will call you back.”
She never would. Natalie knew enough to know she’d been fobbed off.
She’d have to fetch Kyra in ten minutes. She looked in the fridge but there’d only been the one bottle of lager and what was she doing drinking lager in the day? She didn’t even like it much.
She got a glass down for some water and the phone ringing made her jump and smash the glass on to the floor.
Fifty
Early that evening a spectacular thunderstorm ripped open the bubble of hot, clear weather. Simon watched a sudden whirlwind swirl rubbish out of the gutter and high into the air beyond his office window and then the rain came sluicing down. Lights went on around the building.
“Guv? Can I have a word?”
“Come in, Nathan. Did you get anywhere with our graffiti merchants?”
“Not really.”
“I know they’re usually dead-end jobs, but this sort of thing has a habit of spreading like hogweed if we don’t get on top of it from the start. It’ll be yobs, but go after it.”
“It ent the job c well, it is, only it is and it isn’t.”
“Come in, sit down, make yourself clear.”
“Thanks, guv.”
Nathan sat rubbing his hand about in his yard-broom hair. Simon knew the sign.
“What’s up?”
“This new DC, guv. We got a problem.”
“Go on.”
Nathan hesitated. “I don’t like telling tales out of school, I ent one to come running, I can look after things—”
“Nathan, I said go on.”
“Right then, he’s a bad apple, guv. You know anything about him?”
“Not much. It was a case of beggars not being choosers—we’re two down, Exwood let us have him for a couple of weeks c What’s the problem?”
Nathan told him. Carmody was a racist, a bully, a skiver, he looked slovenly, was offhand to members of the public. “And he kept calling me sunshine.”
Simon kept a face as straight as a bat. “Was this in private or in front of the public?”
“Bit of both. Don’t get me wrong, guv, I can take a word, only it was the other stuff I didn’t go for, nasty little comments, you know, about the synagogue, about the Asian bloke at the shop c it was everything.”
“He’s not with us for good and he’s not ours, we can’t go in heavy. You’re his senior officer, sort it with him.”
“I don’t like the bloke.”
“I don’t like everyone I work with here.”
“OK.” Nathan always wore his heart on his sleeve. Now, he went disconsolately to the door, head down.
“Nathan?”
He glanced round.
“Snap out of it.”
“Guv.”
The rain had stopped but the thunder was still grumbling around. Simon half thought of taking a wander into the CID room and a look at DC Carmody, thought better of it and reached for his jacket. He went out of the building and walked the half-mile into the town centre through the subsiding storm. The florist’s where he had bought Martha her last bright flowers and balloon was just closing, galvanised tins empty on the pavement. Simon tapped on the door.
“Hello, Inspector. I’m closed really but if you see anything you want, take it quick.”
He had been a customer for a long time, buying all the flowers for his mother and sisters, for birthdays and christenings.
“Last minute, I suppose?”
“Peace offering, Molly. Can you put something really special together?”
“Go on then. Come back in ten minutes.”
He went from the florist’s to the bookshop and scooped up half a dozen paperbacks for Cat’s children and then a bottle of champagne. He knew perfectly well what his sister’s comment would be.
The flowers were waiting.
“Best I can do. Told you it was the end of the day.” Deep blue delphiniums and white agapanthus in a huge tied bunch.
It began to pour again as he was carrying everything to the car. The lightning was livid, red-rimmed, the sky sulphurous. He remembered the crash of the waves below him as he stood with Ed Sleightholme on the cliff ledge. Excitement. It had been excitement. He craved more of it. Cold cases might be many things but they rarely held out the hope of much excitement. QED.
