by Saul Black
Nell said: ‘Grandma.’
In a moment, she was on her knees by Nell’s bed, her arms around the little girl. ‘Nellie, Nellie, sweetheart I’m here. I’m here,’ though she could hardly get the words past the tears.
Valerie nodded to Forester, who quickly wheeled her out.
‘I’ll come back in a little while,’ Forester said, depositing Valerie at the side of Carla’s bed.
‘Thanks,’ Valerie said. ‘Can you make sure there’s someone there for Mrs Trent?’
‘Done,’ Forester said.
Carla’s leg was in an incomprehensible contraption.
For a while the two women didn’t speak.
Then Carla said, ‘You still don’t know, do you?’
‘What?’
Carla blinked, slowly. ‘Carter,’ she said.
Valerie waited. Let the pieces come together. Agent Mike Carter. Three years ago. The other candidate for fatherhood of the lost child. Along with Nick Blaskovitch.
Carla smiled, without amusement.
‘He was nothing to you,’ she said. ‘He was a lot more than nothing to me.’
There wasn’t anything to say.
‘He was never the same,’ Carla said, studying Valerie now with a sort of empty fascination. ‘I don’t know what you did to him, but, you know, congratulations.’
After several moments, Valerie said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t know there was anyone.’
‘Would it have made any difference if you had?’
She thought about it. The way she’d been then. The will to indiscriminate wreckage. She didn’t have it in herself to lie.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I guess it wouldn’t.’
Carla reached for the glass of water on the bedside table. Took a few sips through the straw.
‘And now you’ve saved my life,’ she said. Then after a pause: ‘Which obviously doesn’t help.’
There was still nothing to say. Valerie didn’t know if Carla hated her or felt grateful to her. Then she realised that Carla didn’t know either. They were both stalled by the simple incompatibility of the facts.
‘What are you doing here?’ Valerie’s nurse said, appearing in the doorway. ‘You’re supposed to be in bed. Back. Now. Immediately.’
Ten minutes after Valerie was returned to her bed, her room phone rang.
‘Skirt, do me a favour,’ Nick Blaskovitch said. ‘Don’t get shot any more, will you?’
‘OK.’
‘Because there’s a limit to how much of this I can take. It’s bad enough you’ve shaved your head.’
‘Everyone else likes it.’
‘Everyone else is irrelevant. Have you given any thought to where we’re having dinner?’
It was terrible how badly she wanted to see him right then. For a few seconds, she couldn’t speak.
‘Well,’ she said, swallowing. ‘At the moment, anywhere I can get away with only using a fork.’
‘One-armed and half bald. Terrific. I suppose you’re going to need help getting undressed, too?’
‘It looks that way. I’m sorry. If you want to bail, I’ll understand.’
If you want to bail. Please don’t. Please don’t.
Pause.
‘Are you all right?’ he said. Not banter any more. His voice. The familiarity. The quiet allegiance. The love. Everything she didn’t deserve. She was very close to letting herself feel… Not happy, but ready to try to have what they could have. Very close and very afraid. There was nothing more dangerous than love.
‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’
‘OK, well do me another favour.’
‘Yes?’
‘Look in your doorway.’
Three seconds. Four. Five.
Then he walked in, smiling, still holding the cell phone.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I got impatient.’
Acknowledgements
A very big thank you to my superhumanly brilliant agents, Jonny Geller in London and Jane Gelfman in New York, for doing all that they do with a combination of tact, humour, infallible intuition and precision-strike professionalism. For a novelist, representation simply doesn’t get any better.
It has been a great pleasure to work with my astute and patient editors, Bill Massey at Orion in the UK and Charles Spicer at St Martin’s Press in the US. They both understood immediately where The Killing Lessons was going, and put a lot of time, effort – and diplomacy – into getting it there. I am much in their debt.
Two books proved invaluable to my research: Police Procedure & Investigation, by Lee Lofland (© 2007) and Forensics: A Guide for Writers, by D.P. Lyle, M.D. (© 2008) both published by Writers Digest Books, an imprint of F+W Publications Inc., Cincinnati, Ohio. Any deviation from the expertise contained in these works is entirely my own, for the purposes of fiction.
In addition, for reasons too numerous and varied to list, I’m grateful to: Kate Cooper, Eva Papastratis, Kirsten Foster, Laura Gerrard, Liz Hatherell, Stephen Coates, Nicola Stewart, Jonathan Field, Vicky Hutchinson, Peter Sollett, Eva Vives, Mike Loteryman, Alice Naylor, Lydia Hardiman, Emma Jane Unsworth, Ben Ball and Susanna Moore.
Copyright
An Orion Books ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Orion Books
This ebook first published in 2015 by Orion Books
Copyright © Glen Duncan 2015
The right of Glen Duncan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 5297 2
Lines from ‘The Novelist’ by W.H. Auden.
Copyright © 1940 by W.H. Auden, renewed.
Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
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