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“Stop fretting,” Patrick said. “He’s sixteen, he’s spreading his wings.” Louise thought of Icarus. “And learning to fly.” Louise thought of the dead bird she had found outside the flat on the weekend. A bad omen. Little cock sparrow shot by a boy with a bow and arrow.
she just didn’t want him to end up as obsessed with Alison Needler as she was.
An amusement arcade owned by none other than the lovely Dr. Joanna Hunter’s husband, Neil.
“Which burned to the ground in the wee small hours when it was unattended.”
“Any of them catch fire?” “The café, actually. An electrical fault.”
Accident-prone, keeping bad company, all the signs there at the beginning. Why on earth would the lovely doctor go out with someone like that?
She didn’t say, “I’m reading my way through his father-in-law’s canon.” Certainly didn’t say, “I’m fascinated by Joanna Hunter, she’s the other side of me, the woman I never became—the good survivor, the good wife, the good mother.” “Let’s apply to the procurator fiscal for a warrant to get our hands on Hunter’s documentation.”
Louise’s superintendent had suggested it was time for her to “move on a little” from the Needler case, to start taking on other cases. “You’re obsessed with Alison Needler,” he said.
She had flirted briefly with bulimia in her teens, between the self- cutting and an early bout of binge drinking (Bacardi and Coke, the thought of it now made her want to throw up), but all those things felt like an addiction of one kind or another, so she had stopped. Only room for one addict in the family, and her mother had had no intention of giving up her place.
“A guy killed the mother and two of her kids in a field in Devon, Joanna ran away and hid and was found later unharmed. Joanna Hunter née Mason.”
Reggie felt something seize in her heart, a little convulsion of pain, and she wasn’t sure why exactly except that she thought it was sad (very sad, indeed) that no one could remember being a baby. What Reggie wouldn’t have given to be a baby, wrapped in Mum’s arms again.
You would hope two lives entwined would add up to more.
the embarrassingly revealing swimming costume in a horrible orange Lycra that would turn out to be the last outfit she ever wore, unless you counted the shroud she was buried in (because there was nothing in her wardrobe that seemed suitable for eternity).
Reggie could remember when they were both little and Billy was still her hero and defender, someone she looked up to and relied on, someone who looked after her. She couldn’t betray her memories of Billy, even though Billy himself betrayed them every day.
Anyone who could convert Billy these days would have to be a real miracle worker. He had been an embarrassment to Reggie, strutting around Ms. MacDonald’s cluttered house, running his fingers over the dusty books as if he were a person who knew something about cleanliness, which he most certainly wasn’t.
“Flesh and blood,” she could hear Mum saying. Rotten flesh.
Love wasn’t sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn’t patient, love wasn’t kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.
Jackson had innocently inquired whether the Fates were the same thing as the Furies, and Julia said darkly, “Don’t even go there.”
Her left eye was bloodshot, as if a red star had exploded in her brain.
Ms. MacDonald didn’t eat much anymore, now that she herself was being eaten.
Whenever some horrible tragedy happened, from the big stuff, like planes crashing and bombs exploding, to the smaller stuff, like a boy falling off his bike and drowning in the river or a crib death in the house at the end of the street, it would always be put down to “God’s work” by Ms. MacDonald. “Going about His mysterious business,” she would say and nod sagely as people ran from disasters on the television news, as if God were running a secretive office dealing in human misery.
She might not believe in all that stuff, but it was nice to know that someone was thinking about her welfare, even if it was Ms. MacDonald’s flock of loony tunes, who all felt sorry for Reggie on account of her orphan status, which was totally fine by Reggie—the
The awful thing was that Ms. MacDonald was the nearest thing that Reggie had to a family. Reggie Chase, orphan of the parish, poor Jenny Wren, Little Reggie, the infant phenomenon.
There was no point in preserving the earth, Ms. MacDonald explained in a kindly tone, because the Last Judgment couldn’t occur until every last thing on the planet had been destroyed,
He supposed time had expanded as it did in all accidents, but how long could it carry on for? What if it went on forever? What if this was hell? Was he dead? Did everything hurt this much when you were dead?
There were days that really surprised you with the way they turned out.
Quite
Somewhere, in some Utopian nowhere, women walked without fear. Louise would sure like to see that place. Give medals to all the women.
Joanna Hunter was lovely, her house was lovely, her baby was lovely. Everything about her life was just lovely. Apart from the whole family-massacred-in-childhood thing.
Howard Mason had married several times after his wife was murdered. How had the subsequent wives felt about their dead predecessor? The first wife. Gabrielle, beautiful, talented, a mother of three, and murdered into the bargain—that was an impossible act to follow.
time had gone by, Howard Mason had become more famous for his dead wives than for any literary talent that he possessed.
To Louise, it read like a rather spiteful revenge text. There was a thin line between fact and fiction in Howard Mason’s life.
you had to watch out for the ordinary ones. David Needler was ordinary. Decker was only fifty, he might have another good twenty years left in him of being ordinary. Still, look on the bright side—he had a degree in philosophy.
He was far too good for her. Too nice. It made her want to behave badly, to see how far she could push him, to smash the niceness.
Louise knocked back the rest of the wine in her glass and searched for her own inner adult. Found her. Lost her again.
Louise had a knee-jerk reaction to the accent of a dominant culture.
your name was the closest thing to your self. Sometimes your name was all you had.
The world wasn’t going to end this night. Not if Reggie had anything to do with it. What larks, Reggie!
Reggie didn’t believe in any of that hocus-pocus, but she believed in keeping the dead alive. There would be more candles to light now.
The Asian policeman was wrong, everybody was dead. It was like being cursed.
Parents were miserable buggers. It should be fair. It should be paradise.
Death, Jackson noticed, had made him crabbed. He shouldn’t be here, he should be with Niamh—wherever that was—the idyllic place where all the dead girls walked, risen up and honored. Fuck. His head really hurt. Not fair.
The dead were legion. He wished they would stop coming to see him.
in this case she was constantly being faced with food she couldn’t stomach.
Bridget didn’t say what she did with her time now and Louise didn’t ask because she suspected that the answer would irritate her. Patrick was good Irish, Bridget was bad Irish.
What did that make her—a complex Electra?
“Eat something, Louise,” Patrick coaxed. There he went again, Dada knows best. Love is patient, love is kind, she reminded herself. But should she really be taking marital advice from a misogynist first-century Roman?
a wolf in wolf’s clothing.
Twenty years ago she too would have found his moodiness attractive. Now she just wanted to punch him.
She liked it when guys like Neil Hunter got touchy with her because at the end of the day she was police and they weren’t. Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades, warrant. Trumps.
Everyone called it “the Paki shop,” racism so casual it sounded like affection. Mr. Hussain would patiently explain to anyone who would listen (which wasn’t many) that he was actually a Bangladeshi. “A country in turmoil,” he once said gloomily to Reggie.
