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

whorl, no crumpled, nightmarish shroud. There was something light and luminous about her, which he hoped wasn’t simply a facet of being temporary.
    ‘Detective Sergeant,’ she said, her brown eyes checking both his hands, left then right, for signs of the first cigarette.
    Satisfied, she turned her back to face the mirror; neat blonde hair, cut short, with that happy habit of always falling into place. Neat wasn’t quite right but it was the word everyone used. Tidy perhaps, compact even. And brisk. The uniform was as yet unfamiliar, and she re-jigged the scarf, readjusted the cap, tucking in a stray hair.
    Valentine had long harboured the fantasy that the mirrors in the house stored the images from the past which only he was blessed, or cursed, to see. If he stole a glance over Jan’s shoulder now, would he catch Julie’s face looking out; assessing, disappointed, approving?
    Jan’s husband, DC Paul Clay, had been Valentine’s partner in what he liked to refer to, with a Churchillian flourish, as his ‘Wilderness Years’ – when he’d been banished from the CID unit at Lynn to the north Norfolk coast after making a spectacular hash of a murder inquiry, fetching up finally at Wells-next-the-Sea, to spend a decade going quietly to seed, investigating petty thefts, Saturday night brawls, second-home burglaries.
    DC Clay hadn’t been his kind of copper, or his kind of man; but he’d envied him his life, the teetotal rectitude, the easy good humour, the dutiful wife, the two children. He’d seen the kids grow up, leave home. Then DC Clay’s health had started to decline, marked by a long series of vaguely mysterious ailments, and his wife had begun soliciting for odd jobs to supplement the single salary, now bereft of overtime. She’d taken in washing, offered to clean houses, and so Valentine’s bedsit had been one of her first tasks. She’d seen the minutiae of a widower’s life: the single Christmas card from Valentine’s sister, the armchair in front of the TV, the empty bottles, the takeaway cartons.

    How different, he’d thought at the time, it must all be to Jan Clay’s own home, but time told a different story. DC Clay, it turned out, was a secret alcoholic who died of liver cancer after a long, final illness which was anything but bravely borne, and Jan had spent their life together, she later confessed, envying him his job; policing it turned out, was in her blood at just about the same concentration as alcohol was in his.
    ‘What’s on today then, Georgie?’ she asked, pulling down the front of her tunic and opening the fridge to retrieve a yogurt pot.
    Valentine yawned. The fact that she wanted to talk about The Job wasn’t a problem. The problem was that she wanted to talk about it at seven fifteen in the morning. But he liked being called Georgie; it made him feel twenty years younger, and it was thrillingly intimate after nearly twenty years of watching other people’s lives, as if through a half-open door. Flattered too, as almost any fifty-something widower would have been, by an attentive lover. Pressing his left foot down hard on the lino, he made an effort to straighten his back and felt the visceral ‘click’ of his vertebrae reshuffling, his spine uncurling.
    ‘Walsingham, planning for the pilgrimage,’ he said.
    Valentine had a head like a hatchet – two-dimensional, so that when he turned it now to track the disappearance of Zebra over a rooftop, his face seemed to move from light to dark with no intervening shadows. ‘Meetings all day. Tea cups. Biscuits. Agendas. God squad. Vicars – worse, monks. Neighbourhood Witch. PowerPoint presentations. Can it get any better? Especially when we’ve still got two GBHs and an attempted murder on the books.’
    It was his turn to let his image fall upon the silvered glass and it gave him a moment to recover: jet-black receding hair, narrow features fighting a losing battle with gravity, grey eyes with an icy splinter of reflected