A Matter of Blood (6 page)

The bathroom door opened. Her hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail and she kept her robe tightly closed as she returned to her side of the bed. For a while they lay there in silence. Although Cass’s eyes ached with tiredness, the clock was only just ticking round to half-past nine. It was too early to sleep, and too late to get up again. The awkwardness that was the only child of their strange marriage embraced Cass and he felt tension knot in his shoulders. His breathing sounded irregular in his chest, and he could barely hear hers.

‘Why did you do it, Cass?’

He rubbed his tired eyes and then rested his arm across them. He didn’t need to ask what she meant. It was the same question, always. It was the only question. It was the cause of the rot in their marriage, hidden deep. It was like a corpse dumped and left to bloat on a riverbed, but it was there all the same.

‘I don’t want to talk about it, Kate.’ He tried not to let a long sigh escape with his words, but he failed.

‘I do.’

The mattress creaked. In the darkness behind his closed, covered eyes, he thought perhaps she’d sat up.

‘Well, I don’t. It’s been a shit day in the middle of a shit week.’

‘You never want to talk about it.’

Her tone had hardened and his skin prickled. Great. Just what they needed. A post-sex argument. Echoes of colour swirled behind his closed lids and he thought he saw the outline of wide, dark eyes in them. He opened his own before those from the memory could take shape completely. She was right. He never did want to talk about it.

‘Just not tonight, Kate. Okay?’

‘It’s never any night.’ The words were hot and angry. ‘I need to understand it.’

‘Kate, you know there’s nothing more I can say.’ He stared at the ceiling. ‘And I don’t see why you need to discuss it tonight. Just let it go.’

‘If only we could.’ She rolled onto her back, mirroring his position. The invisible divide down the middle of the bed had never felt more pronounced to Cass, as if the mattress itself were straining to tear itself in two and make the break definite.

‘I’ve had to live with it too, you know. All these years,’ she said, ‘the looks at parties. The whispers among the other wives. The way they left me out of everything as if I was
tainted
by what you’d done.’ She swallowed hard. ‘I stood by you, Cass, when they said it was over for you. That even if you kept your job, you’d never be promoted. And then even after . . . after
the thing
that happened with us . . . I stood by you.’

You didn’t really have anywhere else to go
. He bit the retort back. This was an old argument that refused to die and there was nothing new to throw at each other in the ring, primarily because he rarely joined in. He wasn’t going to make matters worse by starting now.

‘But I did get promoted. And now the wives would speak to you, if you’d let them. Although God only knows why you’d want to hang around with the tennis club brigade.’

She let out a derisive snort. ‘You should be a DCI by now. They were only forced to promote you this far because you’re so bloody good at your job.’ She made it sound like an insult, and the words stung like one. ‘You might as well live at the station, and for what? You think they don’t still all talk about it? Talk about you?’ She barely paused for breath. ‘I hate the way they look down on us. And I hate that you don’t care.’

She’d run out of steam. Cass sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He didn’t turn to look at her; he knew her face pinched tight when she was angry, her delicate features pulling in on themselves and making her look mean and bitter. He didn’t need to see that.

‘That’s not
living with it
, Kate. That’s just living with the consequences of it. It’s a different thing entirely.’ He searched in the gloom for his underwear and pulled it on. ‘Trust me.’

‘Why can’t you just tell me why you did it? Why can’t you just tell me that?’

He tugged his jeans on and a sweatshirt. ‘I’m going for a drive.’

She stared at him and her shoulders slumped forward. He’d seen Macintyre do just that movement on the grainy film of the boys’ shooting. The fight had gone out of her. The argument was over, for today at least.

He left her sitting silently in the gloom, but when he reached the bedroom door he turned. She looked tiny and fragile on the vast bed, and he thought for a moment that her eyes were shining with the hint of tears. He hadn’t seen her cry for a long time.

‘I’m sorry, Kate,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you, because I can’t remember. You know that. I don’t
know
why I did it, and that’s all there is to it. Some days I don’t know what were my reasons and what were those they told me to say, or what I thought I should say. It’s all a mixed-up mess in my head. It was a long time ago. I was a different man.’
And I really don’t want to think about it
.

Downstairs, the lights were still on, and the brightness felt almost judgemental as Cass passed by. He picked up his car keys and Artie Mullins’ envelope. He shook out the bunches of notes that would be dished out to the team on Friday night in the car park at the back of The Swan on Kilburn High Road. He rummaged through until finally he saw a small folded wrap of shiny paper probably cut from some trashy porn magazine. Inside it would be a gram of cocaine, maybe two.

Right at that moment he was grateful to Artie for his occasional gifts. He didn’t have a habit, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t have an occasional hobby. He listened for sounds of movement from upstairs before quickly chopping a line on the back of the envelope. The house remained silent.

He pulled a note from its batch and rolled it before quickly snorting the white powder up through his right nostril. By the time he’d replaced the note and resealed the envelope, his front tooth was going numb and the powder was trickling pleasantly down the back of his throat, dispelling his tiredness as it powered its way into his system. Cass smiled. It was strong stuff, cleanly cut.

He looked upwards, seeing through the bland plaster-work to the memory of the tiny figure on the bed upstairs. Would she ask him to stay? He lingered for a moment, almost willing her to scream at him, but Kate stayed silent. The door clicked shut behind him. As the buzz reached his head, he found it easier not to care.

 

Brian Freeman grins back, the expression making a Picasso portrait of his face. Brian ‘the brain’ Freeman had had his nose broken four times by the time he was seventeen. His jaw is slightly misaligned on the left side, shattered during a fight with three Chelsea football fans, back in the day when he was a young man and football hooliganism was how a respectable bloke spent his weekends. Brian had once said that the fighting gave blokes
purpose
, whatever that was. A grin cracking his wrecked face, he’d said there was nothing like the buzz of kicking a few heads in on a Saturday afternoon to get you ready for a night on the town. He is fond of the memories, even the painful ones, the simple pleasures to be had in the thrill of a kick-in.