Scar Tissue Read Free Page A

unnecessary risks leaning to the side, I decided to quit after ten minutes to shift the ladder a little. I’d forgotten, as I always did, just how heavy it was. It’d be so easy to let it slip the tiniest bit and put one of the sides through the window. So very easy. And so very tempting. But before I could let my nosiness overcome my professional pride, I found another pair of hands was helping me. Paula’s. And Paula’s hands did not let ladders slip within half a mile of vulnerable glass.
    ‘Working late,’ she observed, treading on the bottom rung to plant the end firmly in the earth.
    Paula didn’t ask questions. She made statements. You had to respond to the statement.
    ‘There was a little problem earlier,’ I admitted. ‘So I thought I’d put in a bit extra to finish off.’
    She waited, unsmiling. Although she’d only be about ten or twelve years older me, mid to late thirties perhaps, she had this nasty habit of making me feel about thirteen again, having sneaked back into school for a bit and then being carpeted by my headteacher for not going more often and staying longer. Perhaps it was Paula’s size: she was about five foot ten and strongly built. She dwarfed me, although I turned in atfive-five and eight and a bit stone. To be fair, Paula had shown more kindness while I’d been with the Pots than the headmistress had the whole time I’d been technically in school. But I wouldn’t push my luck.
    ‘As a matter of fact, it’s easier now – the sun’s at a better angle.’
    ‘Quite.’ She still didn’t smile. There was more to come. If not now, later.
    I put my foot on the first rung.
    ‘Client confidentiality, Caffy.’
    Honestly, she made us sound like plastic surgeons or bank managers. I took a risk and shot upwards. Perhaps that’d be the sum total of my bollocking. Perhaps it wouldn’t.
    To be fair, she didn’t leave me to tidy up on my own, but busied herself down below while I finished my section and rather more than made up the time I’d lost. Lost? Wasted? Used doing what I saw as my duty?
    Risking a snub, when I was on terra firma again I asked, ‘Fancy a drink? Down at the Hop Vine?’
    She nodded. ‘I’ll meet you there.’ She locked the garage, checking the padlock twice before she was satisfied, and set off in her hatchback.
    Forgiven but not quite not forgotten. I, too, gave one last check round, then another, pressing my nose against the windows. There was something wrong somewhere, wasn’t there? Surely? If only it showed.
     
    To my amazement – she was usually slow getting to the bar – Paula had set up the drinks on one of the Hop Vine’s outside tables, the one furthest, as it happened, from thechildren’s play area. She even smiled as I straddled the bench.
    ‘I didn’t think you’d be able to wait for your Bishop’s Finger,’ she said, toasting me with her glass, which held her usual tipple, red wine. She claimed this had medicinal qualities.
    I raised my glass and drank deep. The beer was just the right temperature.
    ‘The trouble is,’ she said, ‘that mud-stirring sometimes means the stirrer gets splashed.’ If she’d had spectacles she’d have looked over them, meaningfully.
    She didn’t need to. She was referring to my past, wasn’t she?
    ‘The police came to you and told you to shut me up.’ I could make statements, too.
    ‘They came for the house keys, originally,’ she conceded. ‘And then started talking about you and wondering whether I was employing the right sort of person. You were very brave not to change your name, Caffy.’ She sounded as if she meant it.
    ‘Or naïve. But then, who’d have thought I’d be doing anything that’d make the police want to look me up on their computer? I’m only painting up that ladder, you know.’
    ‘Quite. And what interests me is that they knew all about you when they came to see me. Funny they should bother when you’d have thought they might be more interested in looking for this