Behind Dead Eyes (DC Ian Bradshaw #2) - Howard Linskey Page 0,26

which, in the cold light of day, Helen was able to shrug off, particularly as the damage to her knee was less serious than she first thought. Aside from painful stiffness when she went up and down stairs, it was already on the mend. The time off was to accommodate her boyfriend, who had been granted a couple of free days by his father in return for all the hard work he had put in lately at the family business – a small chain of carpet stores in Surrey that Peter had been wholly dismissive of when they first met. He was not going to work for the old man, Peter had told her firmly. He was going to start up his own business. She had believed him.

A year after graduation, reality set in and Peter told her he was going to work for the business after all. It seemed the prospect of entry-level jobs while he saved up and planned his own venture was not that appealing. ‘This way I get proper hands-on experience before branching out on my own,’ he’d enthused. A few years down the line and Peter no longer talked about his own dreams, only the intricacies of the carpet retailing business he was being groomed to take over, and Helen no longer asked about them.

They were walking down by the river together. A bracing breeze travelled along the Tyne towards them. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful city?’ she remarked about her adopted home.

Her boyfriend snorted, ‘What’s beautiful about it? Half of it’s a building site.’

‘They’re regenerating the place. When it’s done it will look amazing. They are going to build a massive concert hall on the banks of the Tyne and they reckon they can get funding from that new lottery. They’re going to convert the Baltic Flour Mill,’ she pointed across the river to the imposing old building, ‘into an art gallery.’ When Peter offered no further thoughts, she continued, ‘Of course, that will take years …’

‘If it ever gets beyond the planning stage.’

‘But when it’s done it will be fantastic. Anyway I still think it’s beautiful, down here by the river beneath the bridges.’ And she did. As well as the famous Tyne Bridge there was Robert Stephenson’s High Level Bridge, a wrought-iron engineering miracle that still supported both road traffic and the trains from the railway in a single, two-tier construction, which had spanned the river since the days of Queen Victoria. She was about to tell him this was the bridge they used in Get Carter, but he might ask her how she knew that and it had been Tom Carney who told her, as they had raced over it on the way back from seeing the key surviving witness in the Sean Donnellan case. Peter didn’t like her mentioning Tom. He wasn’t jealous, he told her, he just didn’t like her ‘banging on’ about the guys she worked with and anyway, Peter wasn’t looking at the bridges. He was frowning at some young girls in short skirts who were laughing raucously on their way to a pub.

‘Does anyone ever wear a coat round here?’

She wondered if he was going to say they would all probably catch their deaths. When she didn’t immediately answer him, Peter turned to look at her as if he’d been slighted somehow. ‘Just because I don’t find this northern outpost at the end of the known universe beautiful,’ he was doing his exaggerated I-was-only-joking voice with accompanying winning smile, the one that had worked on her the night they first met in the bar of their student union, ‘doesn’t mean I’m not happy to be here. It might not be beautiful but you are.’ He put his hands on her waist then kissed her on the forehead, which she supposed was sweet but it did have the effect of making her feel like a little girl being counselled by a man who considered himself older and wiser, even though they were the same age.

‘I’m also bloody freezing,’ he told her then he shivered melodramatically, ‘so can we please find a pub or something?’ He was still talking in that breezy manner, as if everything was just too silly to get upset about. ‘You know, one without sawdust on the floor.’

She wanted to say she had never been to a pub in Newcastle with sawdust on its floor but Helen knew he would sigh and say, ‘I was joking,’ before going into one of his sulks, so she