Ramsay 04 - Killjoy by Ann Cleeves Read Free Book Online Page B

‘I’ve had a hell of a day. Aren’t you going to let me in first?’
    She stood aside and let him in to the kitchen. His breakfast plates were still in the sink and he thought wryly that she was slipping. She must be anxious not to have washed them up for him.
    ‘I need a drink,’ he said. ‘A bloody big drink.’
    He walked through to his living room and stood by the uncurtained window and looked out at the boat moored against the quay. When he was young he had haunted the quay on Saturdays, picking up casual work gutting fish. In the boats’ romantic names he had imagined adventure. Now he was back here, only a couple of miles from the house where he’d been brought up. It didn’t feel much like success.
    Jackie had been watching the television and Lynch heard an announcer on the late local news talk about a ram-raid attack on the Metro Centre in Gateshead. He stopped to switch off the television and the silence was broken immediately by the foghorn at the end of the pier.
    ‘You’re so late,’ she said, following him into the room with a drink. She stood close beside him. ‘I was worried. You hear such dreadful things. All this violence …’
    ‘Oh,’ he said automatically. ‘You listen too much to your old man.’ Then he realized what he had said and how close he had been to violence and he started to laugh.
    ‘It’s not fair,’ she said. ‘You know how hard it is to get away. I need to talk to you …’
    He looked down into the street and watched two drunks stagger from the pub two hundred yards away as they made their way along the quay, stumbling on the cobbles.
    ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Jackie cried. ‘ Did you speak to Mrs Wood? What did she say?’
    ‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t listen.’
    ‘What are we going to do?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It hardly seems to matter now.’
    ‘Of course it matters!’ She was beside herself with frustration. ‘We’re talking about your future. Our future.’
    He turned back to her, suddenly sad and calm, he saw with detachment that she was a nuisance, that he could never be happy with her.
    ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I can’t talk about it now. Gabriella Paston’s dead.’
    Amelia Wood’s husband was an architect. When she had married him as a young woman this had seemed a promising career, glamorous even. She had imagined him as an artist, creating brilliant designs in glass and steel. She had been working as a secretary in a solicitor’s office and saw marriage as a romantic escape. The reality had been rather different. The loft conversions and garage extensions which comprised her husband’s bread and butter work did little to inspire her and she soon decided that if she wanted glamour and excitement she would have to provide them herself. She had few qualifications—the small private girls’ school she had attended prided itself on its caring atmosphere rather than its academic achievement—and she knew she would never have the persistence to take a lowly position in a company and work her way up.
    Her background made her turn naturally to voluntary work, community service. Confidence and an ability to get things done were all that seemed needed in that sector and she had those qualities in abundance. As her three children grew up she became steadily more influential. She chose high-profile projects with a satisfying element of social contact. In the organization of luncheons and celebrity appearances she became indispensable. The Grace Darling Project became her favourite charity. It brought her into contact with artists, musicians. She loved the bustle of the place, the strains of music, the younger people in leotards and tights gathering for the dance classes, the press attention. It made her feel important.
    When the local councillor resigned she allowed herself, with some modesty, to be persuaded to stand as Conservative candidate for Martin’s Dene, one of the few safe wards in Hallowgate. She