Blackwater - By Conn Iggulden Page 0,7
didn’t recognize it at first, but there was another one the following day. I pressed the buttons on the phone and I heard the girl’s voice – with him in the background, making a wisecrack. I think I probably knew then, as I wiped the message. Carol hadn’t heard it yet, but I just wanted it off the phone memory, as if I could wipe away my suspicions with a couple of quick clicks.
She hates me when I think something is going on. She says I pretend to be normal and friendly, but all the time there is a spite in my eyes that she can’t bear. She says it makes her want to get out of the house. Sometimes she does and comes back smelling of drink and too much perfume at two or three in the morning. When she’s drunk, I pretend to be asleep. If she sees I’m awake, she talks like a gutter whore and it’s all I can do to lie there and pretend I can’t hear every last word of it. It’s just another one of the little games we play with each other.
I think it took Denis about a week to ask her to come to a hotel with him. It might have been sooner if he’d known her, of course, but I think he probably felt like the luckiest man in the world as she dropped her skirt to her ankles and stepped out of it. I’ve been on the receiving end of the best she has to offer, and it caught me. I mean, I’m still here after some pretty vicious years, so I can sort of appreciate what Denis went through, you know? I’m not saying I understand the man. He was a taker and I knew it from the first time I met him. Like my brother, he was one of those people who use those around them, for fun, for sex, for friendship.
Sometimes they make a mistake and think they’ve found something more important than it really is. Denis did that with Carol, the moment he woke up in the hotel and found out she’d gone. She’d come home to me in the small hours and Denis was not the sort to understand that kind of relationship. Hell, I don’t understand it and I’m in it.
She came home to me because she always comes home to me. She doesn’t stay till the morning, not after they’ve gone to sleep. After all, a hotel morning is just bad breath, crumpled clothes and a full English breakfast with too much salt and burned coffee. To be honest, I don’t really care why she trusts me enough to keep coming back. Maybe she even loves me as much as I love her.
That great love of hers didn’t stop it happening again, of course. I don’t know whether it was another hotel, or maybe even his own house. The difference from my point of view was that the second time she spent an evening away that week, Denis arranged for me to have a friendly visitor. While he was bending Carol over a bed somewhere plush, I actually opened the door with a piece of buttered toast in my hand. Can you imagine anything more middle class and harmless? I had a mouthful of bread and Marmite as I recognized Michael and I was in the middle of trying to say something when he took a step forward and shoved me onto my back. I think he trod on one of my feet first, but I didn’t take much in as I smacked my head on the hall floor. If it had been carpeted I might have been a little sharper for the next few minutes. Unfortunately it was block wood, and one of the things that sold us the house when we first saw it.
It was the casual nature of it that was so insulting. I think most of us have wondered how we would handle a burglar, say, if we confronted one. I thoroughly enjoy politicians talking about ‘reasonable force’ for those moments in life. You can take it from me that terror makes a mockery of anything resembling reason. I opened the door with some vague thought about a football match on the television. A moment later I was half-stunned and blinded by the hall light directly above me. I felt a hand grab my shirt collar and I found myself sliding along the wooden floor towards the kitchen.