‘Sergeant?’ she repeats, and only then do I realise that I’m resting my forehead on the door, eyes closed, trying to think the situation into oblivion.
Samantha Cowal.
I don’t want you here. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t need the victim’s daughter on my doorstep. Victim’s daughter? How about potential suspect? Victims are invariably killed by someone they know, someone with something to gain, something to avenge. We don’t know of anything that connects the daughters to Harry Lord, but really? Is it at all a stretch to think Harry Lord might have met them at the house, and then slept with them? That’s the first thought that comes to mind, but the options are infinite.
I swallow, try to form words, finally manage, ‘Come and see me at the station tomorrow.’
She touches my arm with an uncertain hand.
Maybe I’ll turn, yes, I’ll turn, and she’ll have a knife, or a gun, and this tentativeness will be feigned, and soon I’ll be getting drugged and slashed and...
‘Sergeant, please.’
I turn.
She looks small and pale and beautiful and lost, and there it goes, my resistance, as if there was the slightest chance I’d have any at all.
SITTING AT THE TABLE, my small table for two that sees so little use. Currently being used to do a jigsaw of the planets and the Milky Way that Rebecca bought me during the lockdown, before I came back to the force. I mean, like I needed a jigsaw, but your daughter buys you something, and you’re aware that you’re the shittest dad in all shitdom, you think, I’ll do it, I’ll do the jigsaw, and I did the most colourful bits, the easiest bits, the edges, the planets, leaving the trickier muddled middle of stars for whenever, a little bit every now and again, I think, though it has sat there for three months now untouched. And yet I don’t break it up.
Samantha Cowal gave it little more than a glance, then I put a large placemat over it so it didn’t get disturbed, and here now we have no food, no snacks, two large glasses, lots of ice, neat vodka poured over.
The first sip, the first taste, oh my fucking God. Like drinking an orgasm. Like drinking heaven. A feeling so good it’s impossible to believe it could be bad for you. How can something that makes you feel this fucking amazing, this alive and kicking, this ready to grab the world by the balls, kill you? How can it turn bad so quickly?
If only one could take that first sip, that first taste, that first glass, and stop. If only one could capture that feeling and leave it there.
She’s wearing a cotton top, top couple of buttons undone. Not unlike the minister I just left. Samantha Cowal, unlike the minister, is clearly not wearing a bra. Samantha Cowal has come to do business, and she can read me like a kipper. The no bra thing is my Kryptonite.
Ha! I’m such a dick. God, aren’t we all in the private dungeons of our own heads?
‘Why?’ I say, as we sit over our first glass, the drink barely yet touched.
‘My father was murdered last night.’
‘That’s not good enough.’
Having no trouble keeping my voice cold. I have vodka, I have a beautiful young woman, I’m giving in like the sad, wasted addict that I am, but I can still be pissed off about it.
‘What d’you want?’ she says.
‘I want to know why you’re here. I want to know why you came to see me, rather than Inspector Kallas. I want to know why you’re not spending the evening with your sister, or with friends. I want to know why this couldn’t wait until the morning. I’m a police officer, just doing my job. Investigating a murder. I’m not family relations. I’m not on bereavement duty. I’m not here to comfort you, or anyone else.’ A short pause, but I’ve got the words flowing, and maybe I can get her to leave without actually telling her to, because I can’t actually tell her to leave, as the part of my brain that wants her here won’t let me. ‘I can give you the number for victim support. Call them. Twenty-four hours.’
‘I don’t want that kind of support.’
She takes a drink, still at the stage where it makes her head snap a little. I manage to leave the glass in my hand, ice cold on my fingers.
‘When was the last time you had sex?’ I ask.
Yep, I go there. Straight there. Would Lewis have asked that question at this point? Or, I don’t know, fucking Vera or one of those other bastards? Probably not. But the path of this evening is laid out, and we might as well get to it. Get it over with, or I can force her to leave with words and logic.
Yeah, sure, that’s happening.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ she says, although she doesn’t look too upset about the question. No faux shock.
‘When?’
She takes another drink, a shake of the head, then she says, ‘About two weeks ago. Happy?’
‘Go to that guy.’
‘What makes you think it was a guy?’
Glib. Cheap. And why should she be anything else?
‘You don’t look any happier about you being here than I do,’ I say.
‘Nevertheless, here we are.’
I take another drink. Manage to make it just a sip. Manage to hold it in my mouth for a moment before swallowing, and manage to savour the taste. I shall sit here and glory in my few moments of restraint...
We stare across the table. Conversation isn’t really necessary, but I force it anyway. Get her to say it out loud. Maybe if we talk long enough I’ll say something genuinely hurtful or spiteful and she’ll leave. I don’t think, however, that I could hurt or spite her, regardless of how hard I try.
‘Spell it out to me,’ I say.
‘We both know who we are.’
‘I know myself,’ I say, ‘and that’s as far as it goes.’
‘You give off the vibe. You’re not the team player, you’re the, I don’t know, you’re the maverick. You’re the copper who doesn’t give a toss. You’re the guy who does whatever he wants, surviving by the seat of his pants. Good enough to not have lost your job, but then, you’re what, in your fifties somewhere... maybe you should’ve been an inspector by now. You’re certainly older than the inspector on this case. So that’s who you are... And you give off such an air of sadness. You’re lost, Sergeant. And not little boy lost, but deeply and darkly lost, lost beneath a great welter of sorrow and horror, it’s quite impossible to imagine.’
She pauses, eyes held on my mine, neither of us breaking the stare.
‘And it’s attractive to someone like me. That’s it. Because I’m the same, but without this... this thing you have. I don’t give a fuck, I do what I want. I’ve been a student for eight years. Drove dad nuts. But I like it. I drink, I fuck, sometimes I smoke pot, sometimes pop a pill, sometimes work behind a bar if money’s getting low, and dad’s refusing to cough up, but I don’t give a fuck. That’s who I am, and that’s who you are. And that’s why...’
And she indicates her and me and the table and the vodka, and she lifts her glass, and this time takes a longer drink, and now the world is unleashed, and I take my first long drink, and there’s no savouring, and there’s no hesitation, I swallow it, a long draft, and Jesus fucking Christ but it tastes good and feels good, and life pulses through me like a fucking firework.
Glass rested back on the mat, everything said that needs to be said.
‘I won’t tell anyone I was here.’
‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t say that. I don’t know who you are, and the person you just described would tell anyone she felt like, if the mood took her.’
‘I like you.’
‘Now you do. If you’re as like me as you think, you’ll hate yourself and anyone within a five mile radius two hours from now.’
She holds my gaze for a moment, and I see it in her eyes right there. She knows that feeling. She recognises herself.
‘You know Dylan?’ she says.
Jesus. Do I know Dylan?
I nod.
Suspicious. As ever. Paid to be, after all. Part of the job description. Is it e
ntirely coincidental that she brings up the music I listen to more than any other?
Coincidences, as Poirot would observe, will fuck the detective up the arse if he lets them.
‘He had a song earlier this year, I Contain Multitudes. You know that song? I mean, it’s new, so...’
‘I know the song.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure.’
Take another drink. Ice clinks against my teeth as I near the end of it. Plenty more where that came from, although now that I’m sharing it, not as much as there was going to have been.
‘A lot people say they know Dylan, then it turns out they know the first line of Blowin’ In The Wind, and that one Adele did, though they can’t remember what it was called.’
I smile. Can’t help it. Coincidence? Fuck it, sure it is. I’ve had my fill of people nefariously using my Dylan obsession against me. But she’s got a nice smile, when she uses it, her hair is down over her shoulders, and over her face, resting on the top of her chest, the blouse is undone, her breasts are pressing against the material, the vodka glistens on her lips, and my gut – which incidentally does not waver upon the addition of vodka – is giving me the all-clear.
‘I know all Bob’s work,’ I say, leaving it at that, and she toasts me and drains her glass, setting it down on the mat next to the bottle.
‘When I heard that song... God, who knows? Maybe everyone thinks the same thing. Maybe everyone thinks, that’s me, that’s me! I too contain multitudes. I can be nice and I can be an asshole, I can be this and I can be that. Every-fucking-one of us contains multitudes. But, really, I don’t know about anyone else. Tbh, don’t really care either. There’s just me, the only one I can really know. And Dylan nailed it. That line where he, you know, juxtaposed fussing with his hair, and fighting blood feuds... Oh my fucking God.’
I pour her another glass, manage to stay my hand and not add any to my own just yet. Look at me with my self-discipline.
She gives me a look to let me know she knows what I’m doing, but at the same time she immediately takes a drink. When your motto is don’t-give-a-fuck, well, you’re not really going to give a fuck, are you?
I take a drink, pause, drain the glass, set it down, don’t immediately fill it back up. Still at a good stage. Early days, when it feels warm and fresh and harsh and delicious, and it just makes you want to throw off all the shackles.
Is there anything else to say? She’s said her thing, and I’ve said my thing, and we are where we are, sitting across the table from each other on a Friday evening. The vodka works quickly, doesn’t it? Five minutes ago I had two certainties. I didn’t want her to be here, and I wanted to fuck her. The vodka has managed to straighten out the paradox.
‘I need a shower,’ I say.
Yep, that’s how it is.
I mean, when I’m slaughtered, ugly drunk, staggering through town picking up anyone I can, even if I have to pay for it, I don’t give a fuck. But in happier times – here we see Tom in happier times! – I need to wash before sex. I need her to wash before sex. Maybe I’m on a scale. Maybe I just have standards. I don’t know. Tell you what though, I contain multitudes, that’s for sure.
‘Can I help you with that?’ she says.
I stand, take her hand, she – true to herself – downs the second glass of vodka before she stands up – and oh, that’s sexy, and there’s a bit of me thinking, damn, I should’ve poured that second glass, but the vodka can wait, the vodka can wait, and when she stands she’s immediately in my arms, and her lips are moist and cold and sharp with the drink, and the kiss is long and glorious, her arms around me, my hands on her back, holding her soft, cool skin, and I can’t stop myself, and I run my hands over her body, around her sides, making her shiver, until I’m feeling her breasts, and she moans into my mouth at my touch on her erect nipples.
I DON’T KNOW IF THERE’S a niggle at the back of my head at the start. The I shouldn’t be doing this niggle, the I’ve been burned before, and more than once niggle, the maybe there’s a camera or a microphone or a thing niggle. But by the time we get to the bedroom, those niggles have long since been banished. And here we are, alone in my house, she walks naked into the room, no phone, no microphone, nothing about her person.
She lies on the bed, splays her arms above her head as she smiles, her breasts look amazing, her legs apart, so inviting, and I can’t stop myself. I kneel between her thighs, lift her buttocks off the bed and slide my cock inside her. We both gasp loudly, what a fucking beautiful sound, and then I start slamming into her. I won’t be able to last long like this, it’s just to give myself the feeling, the sensational electric buzz of it for a few moments, and it’s fast and riotous and frenetic and glorious, and when I feel it getting too much I stop suddenly, withdrawing, and not wanting to see any disappointment on her face at not following through with it until she came, I go straight down between her legs, her pussy so damned wet, like she’s already been squirting cum, and I bury my face in her, licking along her lips, and then, as she gasps and judders, and presses her thighs against the side of my head, I settle into sucking and licking and biting her clitoris, and she’s moaning and grabbing my hair and squirming and pushing back against me and soon, God, so quickly, she’s coming and crying out and pushing even harder, and then pulling away, panting, her hand thrust down between her legs, pressed against her clit, the spasms still jerking through her thighs.
‘Jesus,’ she gasps, and I can’t contain myself, can’t wait for her to recover, and I lie on top of her and thrust my erection deep inside her again, and hold it there for a moment, our bodies hot and desperate, pressed close together, and that feeling, on the verge of frenetic thrusting, on the verge of glorious fucking, with still so much to come, is just the most extraordinary feeling you can imagine, and I kiss her, and she can taste herself on my lips, and she’s gasping, and I’m breathless in the kiss, and then I start fucking her, my hands on her hips, my cock thrusting into her soaking pussy.
27
Three o’clock in the morning. A small flat, up one flight of stairs, on the north side of Main Street. A shop beneath, and a flat above, a flat on either side. The shop unit beneath has been empty since the spring. It will forever be marked down as a Covid casualty, and indeed it had been, closing at the start of the lockdown, the small café never with the slightest hope of being able to reopen. However, in the previous five years the unit had been vacant for around half the time, and in the other half had seen eight different businesses come and go. A charity shop, a clothes shop, a pound shop, a café, a clothes shop masquerading as a boutique, a community police office, Bob’s Diner, another café, they’d come and gone, and then at the end, before the economy was sentenced to disappear without a trace, the third attempt at a café. Tea & A Scone, it had been chirpily called, the lettering in red against a white background. The S had fallen or had been removed and never replaced. No one knew why anyone would steal a capital S. People just do things.
The occupier of the small flat above the former café was Margaret Malone, fifty-seven year-old, three-time divorcee, as they’d say in the newspapers. Indeed, as they would say in the papers the day after next, when they got around to reporting her murder. Leader of an interesting life, although most of it sad. Depressing. The details of it would be polarising. A Marmite life. A living, about to be dying, misery memoir. Some people would breathe in the detail, absorb the horror and the desperation, the heaping of one act of sadness or madness upon another, while others would abhor the very mention of it, believing such a life either infectious, or simply too depressing to hear tell of.
Abuse and drugs and unwanted pregnancies and unwanted marriages, the occasional ray of light, quickly extinguished, one limping, hobbling, humbling experience to the next, a neverending cycle, but not a rollercoaster, because rollercoasters also go up, and the best she ever managed was to reach a level playing field for a few months, maybe just a few weeks, maybe some respite from the endless cruelty and awfulness o
f real life.
And now, living in a small flat on the main street of a small town, above an empty shop unit, people with not too dissimilar lives on either side, only just around the corner from the police station, but when it comes to it, it might as well be a thousand miles from the nearest police station because there’s nothing the police can do when they don’t know something needs doing.
Maybe her death will be a release. She’s thought that often enough before, albeit the one time she slashed her wrists, she didn’t make the cuts properly or deeply enough and the wound congealed before she bled out, and the first time she took pills and alcohol she didn’t take enough of either, and she just felt fucking awful for two days, and the second time she took pills and alcohol it would’ve worked, except Bobby found her and called an ambulance, the stupid bastard, literally the only thing he ever did for her, and it was just about the one thing she hadn’t wanted him to do.
Having said that, the following three weeks had been one of the times of a level playing field, and then, and then... what did it matter? There was always something.
Her eyes open. Small bedroom, a clutter, there’s a spider that’s been up in the corner for the last couple of weeks, large, a giant house spider, and she’s been too scared to move it, and every time she opens her eyes, the first thing she does is look up there to see if it’s still in position, and she feels a shudder of fear at seeing it if it is, and an even bigger shudder if it’s not. If it’s not, she sits straight up in bed, looking around, in case it’s by her head.
So far, on the few occasions it has moved, it’s always come back. It must like the spot in the corner.
She gets all the sounds of Main Street in this room. Cars and motorbikes, chucking out time, sometimes fights, more often arguments that go nowhere, crying children, the parade of life. Used to sleeping with the curtains open, the window open a little. Maybe, she thinks, if she leaves the window open the spider will leave.
In My Time Of Dying: DS Hutton Book 5 Page 14
