Thursday legends

73

It was just after three a.m. when he slipped silently into the moonlit bedroom. The window was open slightly and a draught of air was wafting the curtain gently, in and out, in and out, yet the room was still oppressively warm. Karen was sleeping on her back; she was naked, half-covered by a single sheet, having thrown or kicked the duvet to the floor.

As he undressed, he smiled at her, at the woman who had saved his life, and who had enriched it since with her unconditional love, bringing him a kind of tranquillity which he had never imagined before, yet for which, he knew now, he had been searching through all of his adult days.

He slipped under the sheet beside her, trying not to touch her, not to waken her. He felt a desperate need to look at her in the night light, to savour the statuesque lines of her body, to imprint the perfection of her profile in his mind for ever. And he needed something else too; he needed her once more as a shield, to force away the horrors of the last few hours, as long shots and far-out suppositions had turned into terrible, chilling certainty, as he had finally seized the separate strands of the multiple investigations and woven them into the blackest cloak of truth.

From somewhere in the sleeping Village outside came a muffled sound, as a car engine barked into life, then settled into a steady ticking-over throb. But nothing could have broken into his reverie as he lay there, imagining the life that he and Mrs Karen Martin would have together.

'Well?' she whispered softly. She had not moved, and he wondered for how long she had been awake. 'Do you look like a right bloody idiot?' She turned her face towards him on the pillow, smiling, gently. 'Or did you live up to the bullshit you fed Spike Thomson?'

She saw his grin, and through it to the trauma which lay behind it. 'Andy…' she said, sitting up, anxious now.

'Yeah,' he said, slowly, laying a hand on her thigh, his eyes softening, beginning to lose their haunted look. 'We are the true forensic scientist, you and I… We are, together at least, the great detective… We have, when we need it most, the magic ingredient…'

'You got a result, then?'

'Oh yes, I know who slaughtered Alec Smith, and I know who diddled the Diddler, and I know who tried to kill Bob… and I know why.'

She was wide awake now, intent. 'Well? Who?' she demanded.

His smile widened further. His eyes shone in the dark. 'The answer's downstairs,' he told her. 'In my briefcase, in our living room.

'Go on,' he challenged her, mischievously. 'Work it out for yourself.'