Not Dead Yet

127

On the Wednesday morning, Roy Grace drove Cleo and Noah home. Cleo sat in the back of his unmarked Ford Focus, with Noah strapped in the baby seat he had fitted temporarily into the vehicle.

There were few moments when he could remember feeling the sense of the richness of human life that he was experiencing at this moment. He had a lump in his throat, tears welling in his eyes as he drove around past the Pavilion; with all the film trucks gone, it seemed strangely quiet. Cleo’s tantrum over Gaia seemed long ago now, and she had totally accepted that nothing had happened beyond his having had a drink with the icon.

He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw her smiling at him. She blew him a kiss. He mouthed one back.

The obituary in the Argus remained a mystery for the moment. Apparently it had been delivered by a taxi driver who had not yet been traced, the instructions inside an envelope, printed on a local funeral director’s headed paper, which turned out to have been forged.

Of course he had his prime suspect. Although it beggared belief that, if it was him, Smallbone could be so stupid – or perhaps so brazen.

Noah made a gurgling sound, as if he, too, was excited at going home, for the first time in his life. The sound made Grace think of the enormity of the task that lay ahead of them. Bringing up their child and protecting him in a world that was as dark and dangerous as it always had been, and probably always would be.

He remembered something he had been told, long ago, by the then Chief Constable who had invited him in for a talk during those first terrible weeks after Sandy had gone missing. The Chief had been a surprisingly spiritual man. He said something Roy had never forgotten, and the words he often returned to strengthened him at tough moments.

The light can only shine in darkness.