[PS & GV #6] Death on Demand Read Free

seconds to manufacture a smile to greet his wife.

TWO
    G eorge Valentine descended the uncarpeted stairs to a familiar sound; the cat flap flapping as Zebra made his customary early morning exit. The cat had been Julie’s as a kitten, and with her death the animal had seemed to take a violent dislike to her bereaved husband, as if the disease which had killed her so swiftly was in some moral sense his fault. Standing in the kitchen he lit the gas ring under the kettle with the match he would have used to fire up his first cigarette of the day, if he hadn’t promised himself that today was the day . Valentine was a stubborn man but he didn’t fight losing battles. Emphysema was making him increasingly breathless. The quack at St James’ had made him take a scan at the Great Eastern Hospital, an experience so alien, antiseptic, and claustrophobic he’d vowed to quit for good while his old bones were still inside the machine, his head outside.
    ‘I’ve quit,’ he announced to the kitchen, although his eyes flitted across the Formica table and worktops until he remembered he’d thrown his last packet of Silk Cut into a bin on the Boal Quay the night before. Outside the cat caught his eye, treading its sinuous feline path along the fence, paw in front of paw, like a tightrope walker. The movement of featherweight bones apparent beneath the skinny flesh reminded Valentine that they were both of a certain age. He noted that the cat’s bowl was still full of yesterday’s food.
    While the aluminium kettle fidgeted on the gas ring he walked to the front door to pick up the paper, only remembering when he’d got to the end of the gloomy hallway that he’d been persuaded to cancel it. The Daily Mail –apparently – enhanced a cynical tendency, a mean view of the world, dominated by a morbid anxiety towards the concept of change. He stood for a moment, looking at his black slip-on leather shoes, and thought that while that might be true, what were the alternatives? He’d rather be suspected of necrophilia than being a Guardian reader. He’d have to do without. Something else he’d have to do without. It occurred to him that life had a certain symmetry, because you spent the first twenty years doing things for the first time, and the final twenty years doing them for the last.

    Back in the kitchen he found a new chopping board and a loaf of bread wrapped in slightly greasy tissue paper with a watermark, which must mean it was organic, and therefore almost certainly inedible. He cut some, noting with distaste the embedded shards of gritty husk, and popped it in the toaster, beginning to count the seconds before the slice was launched briefly into orbit. Outside, distinctly, he heard a child’s voice in play; so pellucid, so sharp, she could have been in the room. Whitefriars’ primary school was a street away and ran a breakfast club for kids with working parents. He’d grown up in these streets, between the river and the London Gate, and the playground simply provided part of the soundtrack to his life. If he’d been born in the country it would have been birdsong.
    Upstairs, the shower unit cut out, the sudden silence emphasizing the loss of the buzzing electric motor. He imagined the woman standing beneath the final drops of water, eyes closed, hands covering her mouth, and felt the stab of guilt that it wasn’t Julie he saw, that the water drops didn’t slide over her skin. The bathroom door opened and footsteps ran to the bedroom. In less than a minute she was coming down the stairs, with a smart rat-a-tat-tat ; and then, there she was in the black-and-white uniform: creased trousers, polished shoes, a black-and-white chequered scarf, body belt, summer tunic, radio: Probationary Police Constable Jan Clay.

    She was the only thing in the kitchen that wasn’t stale, including the organic bread.
    ‘Morning, Constable,’ he said, thinking that when she got out of bed she never left an impression; no nest-like