A Bed of Scorpions Read Free

reddish-blond hair shining out in that dark labyrinth.
    Aidan’s voice was hoarse. ‘There was blood. Across the wall, a huge spray of it.’ He was still staring at where I’d been sitting, as if he hadn’t noticed I’d moved.
    A black gun appeared in my picture, on the scuffed floorboards, the body in one of Frank’s smooth, dark Italian suits thrown back by the violence Aidan was describing, the blood-red spray like an abstract painting on the wall behind him.
    I tried to wipe it away by concentrating on practicalities.‘Was he ill?’ I asked. ‘Or depressed? Did you know?’
    Something shifted in Aidan. ‘I hope the bastard was depressed.’ He wasn’t looking at me, but he must have felt me flinch, because his tone became argumentative, as if I’d protested out loud. ‘He knew I would find him, me or Myra. Why would he do that to us? I’ve worked with him, we’ve been friends, for twenty years. Myra’s sixty and got a weak heart.’ He became pugnacious. ‘What kind of bastard leaves someone to find that?’
    I had no answer. Instead, ‘Did he leave a note? Do you know why?’ Why – why kill yourself, and why kill yourself that way, and why there – seemed suddenly very important.
    Aidan clenched his hands into fists. He clearly wanted to hit out. At Frank, though, not at me for asking. He barely knew I was there. ‘He left a note, if you can call it that. His computer was open and he’d typed “I’m sorry”. That’s it. “I’m sorry”.’
    I answered the pain, not the anger. ‘Oh Aidan, that’s terrible.’ I put my arm around him and we sat there without speaking.
    The lovely eastern European waitress who had worked at the café for as long as we’d been customers hovered by the table. She looked questioningly at the closed menus and then at the two of us, Aidan with his hands over his eyes again, me just staring blankly ahead. I leapt at the return of normality, grasping onto ordering lunch as something useful I could do.
    I named a bunch of things at random. It didn’t matter what, we weren’t going to be able to eat anyway. I turned to Aidan. ‘Do you want a drink?’
    ‘God, yes,’ he said, looking at me properly for the firsttime. I smiled back at him and ordered a bottle of wine, then moved back to my original seat.
    Maybe focusing on detail, on the practicalities, would help. ‘What happened? Did you call the police? And how’s Toby?’ Toby was Frank’s partner. They’d been a couple as long as I’d known Frank. Toby was a civil servant, but I knew nothing else about him. I didn’t know them nearly as well as I knew Aidan and Anna. It was more the kind of friendship where we kissed warmly when we bumped into each other somewhere, saying how good it was to meet, and we must get together, and then none of us ever followed up. Not from anything except busy lives and, really, ultimately, lack of interest. Not dislike, but not like, or at least not affection either.
    Aidan brought me back to the present. ‘Of course I called the police. What do you think, we worked around him for the rest of the day?’
    I shrugged an acknowledgement. My question hadn’t made much sense, and the anger in Aidan’s reply was still for Frank, not me.
    ‘We didn’t open yesterday, and so far not today either. They’ve been there, taking pictures, going through the files. They’re talking to his doctor, but if he was ill, he hadn’t told Toby. Who says the two of them were very happy – as happy as any couple who have been together for nearly twenty years can be, at least, is the way he put it, whatever that means. So …’ He shifted his weight, and I realised that only now had he got to whatever it was he wanted to talk to me about ‘So, they think it must be business problems.’
    ‘And were there any?’ He wanted me to ask, or he wouldn’t have told me that much.
    ‘If there are,’ he said, and I noticed the change in the verb tense, although I wasn’t sure if he did, ‘if