My Brother's Keeper - By Donna Malane Page 0,42

works. An actual hairdresser had done the job, with scissors, instead of his usual efforts with a scalpel. Eye-wateringly, he’d even gone under the nasal tweezers. A new love interest when you’re in your late sixties will do that to you. With relief I saw Smithy’s little potbelly was back again and straining for attention between two perilously loose shirt buttons. The body’s biological determination to return to its natural state is impressive. He’d ditched the contacts and gone back to glasses, which was a relief. The blinking mannerism that contact lenses had forced on him was one too many an addition to his already impressive repertoire of nervous ticks and gestures he used to punctuate his sentences. Smithy’s previous glasses, those he’d stubbornly refused to replace for over twenty years, had been held together with an assortment of plasters, sticky tape and fuse wire, none of which really did the trick and had forced him to adopt strange nose-bridge prods and easily misinterpreted angled head movements to assist his focus. These new specs seemed to work fine but the habit of years of poking and shifting them around his face had clearly been hard to break. Despite all his eccentrics and oddities, Smithy was a brilliant pathologist. The best. I was very fond of him and I think he had a soft spot for me, too.

We sat in his small glass-walled office and simultaneously dunked ginger nuts into our mugs of insipid tea. After a decent passage of time dunking and slurping I asked after his love life. He sucked on his drooping ginger nut for some time before answering.

‘May-Lyn is rather demanding,’ he finally offered.

‘In a good or a bad way?’ I asked, dunking my last half crescent.

Smithy considered this as if I’d asked him about an intra-parenchymal haematoma. I was coming to that. ‘I’ve reached the conclusion that I’ve become rather selfish in my older years, Diane. I must admit to having found it difficult to include another individual in my own personal domain.’

I performed a quick translation into normal speech. ‘Oh, shit. I didn’t know you’d moved in together. Bloody hell. That was a big step.’

‘Rather bigger than I imagined,’ he agreed morosely.

‘How’s Blinky?’ I asked, hoping to cheer him up. Blinky was Smithy’s spoilt, overweight, grumpy black cat. He adored her.

‘May-Lyn is allergic,’ he said, and slumped into a depressed silence. I decided it was safer not to ask if that meant poor old Blinky had gone permanently.

‘How’s that lovely big dog of yours?’ Smithy chirped up at the thought of Wolf. I did, too. Wolf had thrown me a pathetic, hard-done-by look when I dropped him at Gemma’s. But then he’d spotted a block of sunshine by her glass patio doors and trotted off contentedly to spend the rest of the day lying in it.

‘He’s still gorgeous.’ I conjured the sweetness of him. Grey muzzle. ‘Getting old,’ I added, realising with a gulp the awful truth of it. Wolf was getting old. It occurred to me I might not have him for much longer. ‘I like old dogs,’ I added, warding off the juju of Wolf’s death. ‘All dogs are smart, but old dogs are the smartest. They’re busy when they need to be, but they’re just as happy to sit in the sun all day and have their tummies scratched. He’s definitely my kind of dog.’

Smithy removed his glasses to wipe the back of his hand across his eyes. For some reason he’d become all emotional. I hoped he didn’t think my old dog reverie was an oblique reference to him. I avoided looking at his, no doubt scratchable, little protruding tummy just in case. ‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Are you and the young policeman you were seeing planning to cohabit?’

‘It’s been suggested.’ Now it was my turn to slump. He nodded sagely and we sat in companionable despondency until he held the ginger nut packet out to me. Third biscuit and refilled mugs cheered us both up.

‘Hey, you did the post on Karen Mackie today, didn’t you?’

He wasn’t fooled for a moment by my casualness. ‘You knew her?’ His eyebrows puckered to form an unbroken hedge all the way from temple to temple.

‘Uh-huh. Professionally.’ That was true. ‘She hired me to check up on her daughter.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Smithy said. ‘How long ago was this?’

‘Last week,’ I admitted. I would never lie to Smithy.

‘I see,’ he repeated, more slowly this time. ‘And you’d like me to give you a preliminary report on