Rush of Blood by Mark Billingham Read Free Book Online

sandwich
     bar below their office, and Dave envied the casual way he slurped at it and moaned in pleasure. The slightly smug look on
     his face as he savoured the hit, just like he was a proper Italian or something. Maybe Kevin was only pretending to like it
     too, but if he was, he made a damn good job of it.
    ‘This is
nice
,’ Kevin would say. Something like that. ‘
Really
hitting the spot.’
    Dave pushed the stupid little cup to one side, went back to the counter and ordered a latte with extra vanilla syrup. Over
     the months he had come to know the guy who was serving pretty well. His name was Devon, or it might have been Deron.
    ‘Looks nice out there today.’
    ‘It’s great,’ Dave said. It was certainly one of the warmest days of the year so far. Dave was wearing the cargo shorts he
     had last worn in Florida, a T-shirt with the name of a band he’d seen once on
Jools Holland
.
    ‘What you got on this evening, anything exciting?’
    ‘Just dinner with some friends,’ Dave said. ‘Well, not friends, people we met on holiday.’ He put extra sugar in his coffee.
     ‘Might be good fun, might be bloody awful.’
    Devon or Deron laughed. ‘You got to approach these things with the right attitude,’ he said. ‘All about the attitude.’
    Dave carried his coffee across to his table and continued trawling through the Saturday
Guardian
.
    If he were being honest, he felt much the same about the posh papers as he did about the coffee. He checked results in the
     sports pages and looked at the TV and film stuff, and he would read anything gadget- or computer-related – obviously – but
     he just glanced at what was in the rest of it. He skipped anything that looked like news or comment. Life was just too short
     to plough through it all. He might occasionally catch the evening news on TV, but mostly he picked up what was going on in
     the world from discarded copies of the
Standard
or
Metro
on the train. Enough to hold his own with Kevin, or anybody else if it came to it.
    He had certainly been the smartest one of that Sarasota group. Or he’d appeared to be at any rate, which was as good as. Not
     that he’d needed to show off or anything, it had just been pretty obvious. He couldn’t
stand
people who showed off.
    Fitting in was always the most important thing.
    He drew out the review section from the main body of the paper and slipped it into his shoulder bag. He always kept it for
     Marina. She liked to look through the book and theatre reviews, see if there was anything she might like to read or a play
     she fancied. If she did pick something out, he was usually happy enough to tag along, but it was very hit and miss. Stuff
     in the West End was stupidly expensive, so they tended to go for the fringe end of things, upstairs in pubs, and to be honest
     a lot of it was rubbish. Last thing they went to see was just some woman in a floaty nightdress droning on about being raped.
     I mean, he understood it was a serious subject and all that, but he’d still spent the last twenty minutes asleep, and Marina
     had had a real go at him in the pub afterwards.
    He wasn’t sure why she carried on going to these things. He knew very well that all she did was sit there wishing it was her.
     Thinking she could make a better job of it.
    The truth was he didn’t know whether Marina was any sort of a decent actress or not. He always said the right thing of course,
     but he’dnever really seen her in anything, only when he was testing her on lines for her lessons or whatever. Same thing went for
     the writing, those short stories she’d given him to read.
    He had no idea.
    Problem was, he didn’t read enough to compare it with anything, not enough ‘stories’ anyway, because he only really ever bothered
     with non-fiction. He picked up the odd graphic novel occasionally, but even then he would have been happier with a few less
     words. Again, not enough hours in the day. He’d still managed to join in when