The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes Read Free Book Online Page B

to laugh a little, and smile a lot, and chew her gum vigorously; she was doing all three now.
    I hadn’t exactly fainted, but I had swayed a little out there on the doorstep, unsteady on my feet, clutching the door frame as the woman I thought was my ex-wife tried to shut the door on my hand, and then my scalp had sparked with sweat, and my tongue felt too large for my mouth, and I knew I was going to be sick. And had I not managed to blurt out Patrick Hutton’s name, I would never have been let past the door, let alone allowed to use the bathroom to throw up, and then wash my face, and now sit by the fire in the living room with the dark burgundy and racing-green walls and the dark wood floorboards and the paintings and framed photographs of horses and jockeys on the walls and ask my questions. Because Miranda Hart was Patrick Hutton’s widow.
    She sat in a pair of skinny jeans and black boots with low heels and a black wraparound top over a dark wine-colored camisole with six silver bracelets on one slender wrist and seven on the other and no wedding ring. Her nails were painted dark red, but they were bitten and the varnish was cracked; her mascara had run into smudges around her huge brown eyes; her lipstick had smeared a little around her mouth. There was mud and straw and what looked like shredded paper on her boots. She had poured herself a large gin, and she gulped it enthusiastically now and spilled some of it down her chin, which she wiped with the back of her hand. I didn’t tell her she looked like my ex-wife; instead I said I’d had a sandwich that must have disagreed with me, but she didn’t seem at all interested; maybe strangers threw up regularly in her bathroom.
    "So you’re a private detective who used to live in L.A., and you’re looking for Patrick, and you can’t, or won’t say who hired you," she said. Her accent was an Anglo drawl; she said
cawn’t
for "can’t" and gave
Patrick
such a clipped reading she made it sound like a name rarely heard outside South Kensington and Chelsea.
    "That’s right," I said.
    "The last private detective was fuck all use. Or rather, I suppose he was a great deal of use, since he turned up fuck all."
    "When was that?" I said.
    "About two years ago. I wanted to have Patrick declared dead. More like, needed: I ran out of cash for a while, and couldn’t keep the mortgage on this little kip up. We’d bought it together, and he’d been gone longer than seven years."
    "And who insisted on the detective, the insurance company?"
    "That’s right. Big-arsed ex-cop in an anorak, Christ, he was a gruesome old heap, watching him get out of a chair was nerve-racking. Anyway, he went through the motions, checked Patrick’s bank records and credit history and so forth, and came up with what we all knew: he vanished off the face of the earth ten years ago. Ten years ago today, as a matter of fact. And now all this is mine."
    She rolled her eyes and lit a cigarette, a More, and offered me one, which I refused; I didn’t think my system would be up to it yet. I finished the tea and reached for the whiskey; the fumes didn’t make me gag: a good sign.
    "Lucky to have the place, I suppose, particularly since we bought before the boom. I got left some money in ’92, not long after we were married. Girlfriends said, don’t put Patrick’s name on it, but it’s just as well I did. ’Cause I’d still have a mortgage to pay if I hadn’t."
    "He disappeared ten years ago today?"
    "Twenty-third of December, 1996."
    "Will you tell me about it?"
    "I don’t know," she said. She took a hit of her drink, and a drag of her cigarette, and looked around for somewhere to tap the ash, and popped her gum out of her mouth and molded it into a bowl shape and flicked her ash in it and laid it on the arm of her chair.
    "I don’t know if I want Patrick back. That is, if he were alive and you found him."
    "You had him declared dead. Do you think he’s still alive?"
    She laughed, as if she’d