Dark Side Read Free

notion that children – we still thought of ourselves as sort of kids for some strange reason, even though Patrick was eighteen by then – couldn’t make babies. Naive wasn’t the word for it – my mother refused to talk about such things. It was a miracle that I didn’t get pregnant.
    We married when we were both in our early twenties. But by then my new husband was in the army, a junior officer rising through the ranks like bread dough on a hot day. There was a whole world out there for him to explore, and he did not really want to be tied down. After a very stormy relationship there was one last terrible row which ended with me throwing his classical guitar down the stairs and then him out of my cottage – bought with my writing earnings and money left to me by my father – into the rain. We got divorced.
    He served abroad, the second youngest major in the British Army, and was horribly injured in an accident – not his fault – with a hand grenade, finally having to have the lower part of his right leg amputated. Just before this, out of hospital and in agony as the pins in the repaired smashed limb were not holding, he had turned up on my doorstep to tell me that he had been offered a job with MI5. A stipulation was that he had to find a working partner, female, as socializing was involved and it was thought that lone men did not merge easily into a crowd. We had always got on famously in public, he had reminded me brightly – which was perfectly true – so did I want the job? It was well paid, and there would be lots of potential for ideas for future plots in my novels, he had wheedled.
    I had found all this utterly unbearable and not just because he had fainted at my feet from pain and weakness not five minutes after crossing the threshold. It was somehow knowing that the real reason he was right here in front of me, almost literally on his knees, was to ask me, although he was maimed, to take him back.
    I had taken him back and accepted the job offer. We rediscovered the old magic that had been between us and I soon found that I needed him just as much, if not more, than he needed me. These days he is almost as mobile as he was before his injuries thanks to a man-made construction below the knee with its tiny in-house computer, powered by lithium batteries, that reacts to his every movement. It cost roughly the same as a family car.
    â€˜So you’d left the bother magnet switched on,’ Detective Chief Inspector James Carrick of Bath CID said darkly. He seems to be convinced that we go looking for trouble. We were in the Ring o’ Bells, the pub in Hinton Littlemoor, a village in Somerset where we live, having returned home from London the previous day.
    Patrick chuckled and shook his head. ‘Not this time.’
    â€˜D’you really think they might have been after Greenway?’
    â€˜It’s not impossible. He wasn’t interested in giving it any thought at the time but as we know all too well head mobsters are using rogue private investigators to access police files and have even had incriminating and sensitive information deleted courtesy of bent cops. Mike’s name has to be on several inquiries into enforcement operations where there’s been insider criminal activity – inquiries that have actually been very successful. The empire has struck back and the gang leaders don’t like it.’
    Carrick pulled a face. The police attitude to private investigators tends to be that of toleration as long as they stick to checking up on straying spouses and searching for lost relatives or stolen dogs.
    â€˜Another pint?’ Patrick asked him.
    The Ring o’ Bells was under new management, having been closed down for a while after the previous tenants had been convicted of using the business for money-laundering purposes. The DCI, an old friend, had called in to have a drink with us on his way home from work. A fondness for real