Cold Light by John Harvey Read Free Book Online

see what social services have to say. Oh, and Lynn …”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œThis business at home—whatever it is—if you need to talk about it …”
    For the first time in a while, she found something close to a smile. “Thanks.”
    Back across the CID room her phone once again was ringing. Someone was humming “Silent Night.” From somewhere, Divine had acquired a paper hat, red and green, and he was wearing it as he read off an entry from the VDU, a sprig of mistletoe poking hopefully from his breast pocket.

Six
    â€œSo what was he like?” Nancy’s flatmate, Dana, asked, her voice blurred beneath the rush and splatter of the shower.
    â€œWhat was who like?”
    â€œYour kidnapper, who else?”
    Nancy pulled her head clear from the spray of water. Opaque, through the thick, flowered plastic of the curtain, she could see Dana on the loo, all but naked, taking a pee. Six months ago, when they had started sharing, Nancy would have been, well, not shocked, but certainly embarrassed. Neither would she have felt comfortable doing what she was doing now, turning off the shower and pulling back the curtain, stepping out on to the tiled floor to dry herself down.
    â€œSo?” Dana said, glancing up. “Was he sexy or what?”
    Nancy gave a wry smile. “Hardly.” She remembered the patchy hair, faint around his mouth, the way he had perspired, the nervous jerki-ness of his hands, hollow of his eyes. “Besides, situations like that, sexiness doesn’t come into it.”
    â€œDoesn’t it?” Dana said. Pulling off a length of toilet paper, she folded the sheets again and then again before dabbing between her legs. “Somehow I thought it did.”
    Nancy was vigorously toweling her hair. “That’s because you think it comes into everything.”
    Dana laughed and sent water flushing round the bowl. “What was he like then?” she said.
    â€œA boy. A kid.”
    â€œSo?” Dana arched a camp eyebrow and laughed some more.
    The time Nancy had come home unexpected and found her flatmate grappling with a seventeen-year-old on the living-room carpet had been, in more ways than one, a revelation. “He’s advanced for his age,” Dana had explained. “Two A-levels already. Working hard for his Cambridge entrance.”
    â€œI noticed,” Nancy had said. What she’d noticed were the marks on the youth’s back as he’d pulled his Simple Minds T-shirt on over his head.
    â€œDidn’t I tell you,” Nancy said now, “this Gary, we went to the same school?”
    â€œNo, really?”
    â€œYes, two years below me.”
    â€œAnd that’s his name? Gary?”
    â€œUh-hum.”
    â€œAnd you remembered him?” Dana was standing slightly on tiptoe before the bathroom mirror, examining her breasts.
    â€œNot at all.”
    â€œThen he remembered you.”
    Nancy wound the first towel around her head and reached for another. “I used to go out with this boy, he was a friend of Gary’s big brother.”
    â€œYou see, it all makes sense. There he was, Gary, adoring you from afar and you never as much as noticed him. The stuff that pimply wet dreams are made of.”
    Nancy grimaced and laughed and pretended to throw up over the toilet bowl.
    â€œYou don’t think this is a lump, do you? Look, here?”
    Serious, Nancy stared at her friend’s left breast. “I don’t know. I can’t see any …”’
    â€œFeel.”
    Nancy reached out a hand and Dana took it, guiding it to the right spot.
    â€œWell?”
    Pressing down with her fingertips, Nancy rolled the flesh across and back; there was something there, the smallest knot of muscle possibly, not a lump. “No,” she said, “I think you’re fine. Nothing to worry about at all.”
    â€œOf course not,” Dana smiled. Another of her friends, just