saying what everyone thinks. Another glass of wine, Wendy?’ ‘Always,’ Wendy said.)
‘I need to make a bit of a detour, if that’s okay, Vince,’ Steve said. It wasn’t really a question, Vince noticed. ‘A bit of business I have to see to. It won’t take long.’ Vince hoped not. The idea of lunch had perked him up. His insides felt hollow, as if they’d been scooped out with a sharp spoon, although that could be fear, he supposed. Despite being under suspicion of murder, he was surprised at how ravenously hungry he felt. Of course, he’d had nothing to eat since the toast in that bloke’s house last night. Vince was under such stress that he would have forgotten his name if the bloke hadn’t given him his card. Jackson Brodie – Brodie Investigations. ‘Call me,’ he’d said, ‘if you need to talk.’
They drove for quite a long time, through an increasingly decaying hinterland of run-down cafés, tattoo parlours, and lock-ups and garages that had, bizarrely, been transformed into funeral homes as if that were a natural evolution for them. He had a sudden, unexpected memory of his mother laid out in a dimly lit funeral parlour that had smelt of beeswax and something less pleasant – formaldehyde, perhaps, although he might have been recalling the preserved specimens in Biology class at school.
His mother had died of some unnamed cancer, something that had seemed shameful from the way it was discussed in low voices by her female friends and relatives. Vince was only fifteen and his mother had seemed old, but he realized that when she died she was considerably younger than he was now. She’d been a good cook, he could still conjure up the taste of her hot-pot and her steamed sponge puddings. After she died, Vince and his father lived off steak pies from the butcher’s and boil-in-the-bag cod, a diet that intensified their sense of loss. ‘I miss your mother’s cooking,’ his father said, but Vince supposed what he meant was that he missed the woman rather than her shepherd’s pie, although the two were inextricably mixed somehow, in the same way that Wendy was partially construed of bonsai and prosecco. What was Crystal Holroyd made of? he wondered. Sugar and spice and all things nice, probably. He imagined biting into her – a leg or an arm – and hearing the crisp snap of sugar. Jesus, Vince, get a grip, he thought. Was he going insane?
Eventually they reached the outskirts of town, and they were almost into open countryside when Steve took a left and drove down a long, curving driveway, bordered with overgrown bushes and trees. Wendy would have been itching to take a strimmer to it, Vince thought. But then he remembered that she was beyond wanting anything, beyond all feelings in this life. Was she in the next one, he wondered, pruning and lopping away at the shrubbery? He hoped she wasn’t in hell, although it was hard to imagine her in heaven. Not that Vince believed in either, but it was impossible to think of Wendy being nowhere at all. He hoped that, for her sake, if she was in heaven, it was staffed by a lower order of angels who would wait on her hand and foot after a hard day in the bonsai fields. (I’m knackered, Vince, fetch me a glass of prosecco, will you?) At least his mother had beached comfortably in a Baptist-run funeral parlour, whereas Wendy was still on a cold slab somewhere like a haddock slowly going off.
‘Vince – you all right?’
‘Yeah, sorry – miles away. Thinking about Wendy.’
‘She was a good woman.’
‘You think?’
Steve shrugged. ‘Seemed like it. I only met her couple of times, of course. It can take a lifetime to get to know a person. Sophie still surprises me.’ Vince thought of his cat. His Sophie, as opposed to Steve’s Sophie, used to bring Vince the gift of mice in her younger days as a hunter. They were tiny little velvety things that Sophie played with endlessly before biting their heads off. Was Vince a helpless mouse, being toyed with by Inspector Marriot? How long before she bit his head off?
A large neglected building loomed into view as they rounded a corner of the driveway. A weathered sign announced Silver Birches – a home from home. It seemed to have once been an institution of some kind, a mental hospital or a nursing home, long since unfit for purpose – it had