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“There you go. That’s my office number at the bottom—I’m a journalist and I work from home. You’ll always find me on either that or my mobile. And that one”—she pointed at the other business card, underneath—“that’s my husband’s. He’s a solicitor.”
“Great,” DS Malik said. “Thanks. And Jack, thanks for being so patient. I know this has been a horrendous experience. We’ll be in touch very soon, and you’ll be assigned a family liaison officer who’ll be able to help you through the process and hopefully answer any questions you have. She’ll be in contact sometime on Monday, I imagine. Is there anything else I can do before we leave you?”
I shook my head. I wanted nothing more than to curl up in the small white bed in Hel’s spare room and cry myself to sleep. But the tears still wouldn’t come.
* * *
WHEN I WOKE, THE STREET lamps were lit in the road outside, the yellow rays slanting under the curtains Helena must have drawn before she left the room. They fell on my face, making me blink and struggle to sit up, squinting against the glow.
For a moment I knew where I was—Hel’s attic room was as familiar to me as my own bed—but not why, and I sat there, feeling an ache in my head and a bone-deep tiredness in my limbs, and trying to remember what had happened and why I felt such a strange sense of dread. The clock by the bedside said 6:45 and I rubbed my eyes confusedly as I realized—the street lamps must have only just come on—it was dusk, not morning. The realization gave me an odd sliding sense of everything being upside down, out of kilter, off-balance.
Then it came to me. Or no, came is the wrong word. It didn’t just come, it hit me—sucker-punched me with a blow to the gut that left me doubled up and gasping with grief.
Gabe was dead. Gabe was dead.
For a long time I simply sat there, curled over my knees, my head in my hands, trying to make sense of it, trying to cram the fact into my brain. Was this going to be what it was like, every morning from now on? Was every day going to be a process of waking up, reaching for his warmth, and losing him all over again?
I remembered how my grandfather had been after my parents died. The way he would look around vaguely, ask for our mother, and Hel would say gently, “Mum’s dead, remember, Grandad? She and Dad died two years ago.” And then three years ago. And then four.
And every time, he would react with the same grief, his face crumpling, his blue eyes filling with unexpected tears. The shock wore off a little as the years passed—as if the knowledge had lodged in there somewhere, in spite of his Alzheimer’s—but the grief… the grief never lessened.
After a while, as his memory deteriorated even further and the dementia made its last ravages on his brain, we simply stopped telling him.
“They’re on their way, Grandad,” Hel would say. Or, “I don’t know, Grandad. Do you know where Mum is?” and he’d say, comfortably, “Oh, she’ll be making tea, I expect. Would you like a cup?”
Maybe that would be me. Hel coming in with a cup of coffee. Gabe just rang. Said he’d call back later. And the strange thing was, I could almost imagine it. If I shut my eyes, I could picture him—back at the house, hunched over his computer, typing away on some impenetrable bit of code, utterly absorbed. The thought gave me a kind of peace, the idea that he could be out there somewhere—just beyond my reach. But it was a dishonest peace, and I knew that as much as I could fool myself if I tried hard enough, all I was doing was pushing the pain further down the line until the moment I stopped pretending and let the agony wash back over me.
At last, I forced myself out from under the covers and stood up, swaying a little. I stank. Mostly of sweat. The smell was the combined exertions of a night spent running around Arden Alliance, evading security guards, and then a morning in a hot interview room being interrogated by two police officers, and then a day passed out in the same clothes under a winter duvet. I smelled of adrenaline and fear—a smell I knew well from my fairly frequent brushes with tricky situations, though I had never been so scared as I was last night.
Someone had killed Gabe. But why? What could sweet, funny, loving Gabe have possibly done to upset anyone to that extent? Had they got him mixed up with someone else? But how—how could a case of mistaken identity get taken as far as murder? It didn’t seem credible. But then, neither did any of the alternatives.
As the room settled around me, I tried to push the questions away. I couldn’t answer them—I had spent half the night and most of the morning going over variants of the same in my own head and with the police. And I realized now that I was extremely hungry—almost faint with hunger, in fact. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything apart from coffee for more than twenty-four hours.
The smell of something deeply savory—sausages, perhaps—was wafting up the stairs. And suddenly I had the strangest feeling of disassociation. Because how could I be hungry when Gabe was lying in a police morgue somewhere, dead and gone forever? How could anything as mundane as food possibly matter?
And yet it did, and I was. The smell of the sausages brought water to my mouth, leaving me almost dizzy with hunger. And I knew that Gabe would be the first to understand that. You’ve got to eat, he would always tell me before a job. You can’t think on an empty stomach. And I needed to think. I needed to think very badly indeed.
Hel had left towels and a change of clothes—not mine; they must be hers—on the foot of the bed, and I took them into the shower with me, dumping them onto the toilet lid before stepping into the cubicle and turning on the water.
It was hot and fast—much better than the stuttering pressure at my house—and I turned my face into the blast and closed my eyes, hearing the deafening hiss of the water in my ears, and feeling the jets pummeling my face—and for a moment I wished that I could stay there, muffled away from the world, eyes closed, ears blocked with water, unable to feel anything except the stinging needles of hot water against my skin.
But I couldn’t. And at last I soaped my hair, dried myself off, and got dressed, ready to go downstairs and face a world without Gabe.
* * *
“OH, JACK.”
Roland looked up as I stepped into the kitchen, my wet hair combed behind my ears, my stomach growling. As I tried for a smile, he stood and held open his arms, and I felt my throat close up. I shook my head, even as I walked into his hug, no, no, no. Please don’t be nice to me, Roland.
But he was—and something about his hug, the feel of his arms around me, made me choke up like nothing else had. He wasn’t Gabe—he was about six inches shorter and a couple of stone lighter, and he didn’t have Gabe’s beard or his heat or his indefinably comforting smell. But he was a man, and he was kind, and he wanted to comfort me—and that was so painfully close to what I wanted right now, just not from him, that it was almost unbearable.
At last I pulled myself away. Roland let me go, but there was something sad in his expression as he did.
“Please, don’t be too nice to me, Rols. I just—” I swallowed, trying to find the words. “I’m only just holding it together, and I can’t—I can’t lose it. If I do, I might not—”
“Got it,” Roland said. His eyes were full of an anguished sympathy, but I saw the way he squared his shoulders, and the smile he tried to put on his lips. “Operation Stiff Upper Lip commences.”
Hel was at the cooker, her back to me, but I knew that she’d seen the little exchange play out, and I knew that she knew that what I needed right now wasn’t sympathy but just to get through the evening without breaking down—and the best way to do that was a semblance of normality.
