to him that the bloke was queer. He though Querashi was supposed to be marrying Akran Malik's daughter. So were the cops sure they ha> their facts sorted out?
Nothing's ever sure in an investigation till a suspect's in the nick, Grey informed him.
And Waters added that if he remembered anything that he thought the police needed to know . . .
Cliff assured them that he'd have a proper think. He'd phone if anything popped into his head.
You do that, Grey told him. He gave a final look round the shop. When he and Waters stepped outside, he said, Flaming dung-puncher, just loud enough to be certain that Cliff overheard it.
Cliff watched them walk off. When they disappeared into the joinery across the pitted lane, he allowed himself to move. He went behind the counter, where his order desk was, and he thunked down onto the wooden chair.
His heart was racing, but he hadn't noticed while the cops were there. Once they left, though, he could feel it pounding so hard and so fast that it felt like it might leap straight through his chest to lay throbbing on the blue lino floor. He had to get a grip, he told himself. There was Gerry to think of. He had to keep his mind on Gerry.
His lover hadn't slept at home on the previous night. Cliff had awakened in the morning to find his side of the bed unruffled and he'd known at once that Gerry had never returned from Balford.
His guts greeted this knowledge with a sickening twist. And despite the early heat of the day, his hands and feet had gone cold as dead fish at the thought of what Gerry's absence might mean.
He'd tried at first to tell himself that the other gj^ft man had simply decided to work through the night and into the next day. After all, he was trying to complete the pier-end restaurant before the next bank holiday. And at the same time, he was working after hours on that house renovation in Balford. So Gerry had a good enough reason to be away from home. He might have gone directly from the first job to the second one, which was something he did quite often, in fact, sometimes working till three in the morning if he was anywhere close to completing a stage of the second project. But he'd never worked round the clock before. And in the past whenever he'd planned to work late into the night, he'd always phoned.
He hadn't phoned this time. He hadn't corm home. And as Cliff had sat on the edge of th< bed that morning, he sought clues within his las conversation with Gerry, details that might tel him of Gerry's whereabouts and of the conditioi of his heart and his mind.
Except he had to admi that they hadn't had so much a conversation a an argument, one of those verbal brawls in whic past behaviours suddenly become a bench mar for measuring present doubts.
Everything about their shared and individu: pasts had been dragged out, aired, and laid dow for a lengthy and intimate examination. The ma ket square in Clacton. The gentlemen's toile Leather and Lace at the Castle. Gerry's endle work in that pishposh Balford house. Cliffs ii furiating walks and his drives and his pints Foster at Never Say Die. Who used the mote cycle had been brought up, as well as who toi the boat out and when and why. And when they'd run out of accusations to hurl, they went on to shout about whose family accepted that one of their sons was a poofter and whose dad would try to beat the living shit out of his son if he knew the truth.
Gerry usually backed down from a fight, but he hadn't backed down from this one. And Cliff was left wondering what it meant that his lover -- usually so mild and so earnest -
had altered into a yobbo ready to take him on if taking him on was necessary.
So the day had started out bad and had only got worse: waking up to find that Gerry'd done a bunk and looking out the shop window to see the coppers putting the cosh on everyone in sight.
Now, at the jigsaw, Cliff tried to give his mind to the work. There were orders to fill and puzzles to be cut, dodgy pictures to assess for their potential as future puzzles and decisions to be made about ordering in an array