Sorrow Bound by David Mark Read Free Book Online Page B

with one swift tug. Being prince of the city depends on staying in the good graces of the powers behind the throne.
    He drains his whisky. It burns, and tastes like shite.
    He snatches the ticket from Hakan’s hand. Looks at the words. ‘Snips and Rips – alterations a speciality’.
    Downey grunts.
    ‘Story of my fucking life.’

4
    ‘If you weren’t such a pansy you would be a hell of a Romeo.’
    ‘Guv?’
    ‘Women. They bloody love you, don’t they? One look at those big sad eyes and they’re pussy in your hand.’
    ‘Putty, you mean.’
    ‘I know what I mean. It’s just funny. They don’t know what they want to do with you, do they? Don’t know whether they want you to throw them around like a ragdoll or put them in the bath and wash their hair.’
    McAvoy keeps his eyes on the road. He swallows, and is aware of his Adam’s apple rubbing against his shirt collar.
    ‘Do you do that? Do you wash Roisin’s hair?’
    He can feel his boss staring at the side of his face. Senses that she is shaking her head slightly, and smiling with only one half of her mouth.
    ‘Paint her nails? Read her bedtime stories? Cut her fish fingers up for her …’
    McAvoy turns in the driver’s seat and looks into Pharaoh’s blue eyes. She’s gone too far, and she raises her hands, acknowledging it. She does this, sometimes. Teases until she feels bad. He hascome to understand her pretty well these past months. He knows all about so-called ‘gallows humour’ – cops cracking off-colour gags so the misery of their jobs has to work harder to reach their souls. With Trish it’s different. Her job does affect her. The sights she sees make her cry. She never makes jokes about the dead. She just performs with the living the way she has learned to in two decades of policing. She’s Trish Fucking Pharaoh: brash and seductive, loud and maternal, hard as fucking nails. She gets the job done, and then she goes home to her four kids and crippled husband and drinks until the screaming in her head goes away.
    ‘Sorry. It’s the heat.’
    He nods. Turns back to the road. Tries to be jolly British about the whole thing and move the conversation on to the weather. ‘It’s just so sticky, isn’t it? Back home, there would be clouds of midges in this heat. You rub your hand over your face and it comes away black with the little sods.’
    ‘I’ve heard. Coming back with bites is not my idea of a holiday. Not unless they’re on your thigh, anyway.’
    McAvoy gives the tiniest of laughs, and that seems to satisfy her. She goes back to reading her phone.
    Home
, he thinks. Why did I call the Highlands ‘home’? Roisin is
home
. The kids are
home
. What did I mean by that? What would Sabine make of it …
    McAvoy gets annoyed with himself and curtails the train of introspection. Concentrates on driving, his hands where they should be at a precise ten-to-two on the steering wheel. Looks out through dead flies and dust. It’s a boring road, all bland fields, four-house hamlets and dead farms. It seems popular with boy racers intent on risking their lives on hairpin bends, and McAvoy has winced several times in anticipation of a horrific smash assouped-up Vauxhall Corsas and Subarus tore past him at 90 mph.
    The journey is giving him the beginnings of a migraine. He’s been squinting for half an hour. The windscreen wash is empty. He is staring through grease and dirt, smeared into a khaki, blood-speckled rainbow by the wipers that squeak across the glass.
    ‘I’m getting a stuffy nose,’ says Pharaoh, giving a sniff.
    ‘It’s the rape fields,’ says McAvoy, waving a hand in the direction of the luminous yellow crops either side of the winding B-road.
    ‘
Rape Fields
? Think I rented that from Lovefilm …’
    ‘Rapeseed, Guv. A lot of people are allergic to it. Really, you should plant a blue crop called borage nearby to counteract it, but the European Union didn’t insist, so nobody does. A lot of people think they