Shooting Elvis Read Free Page B

other side, near the trees. Three of these belonged to dog walkers and the other was mine. I padded up to it and rested my head on my folded arms on the car roof, sucking in air like a black hole. After a few seconds her arm fell across my shoulders and I turned to her, our faces barely an inch apart. Perspiration was glistening on the side of her nose and she smelled of perfume and something else. Something that I thought I liked.
    ‘Are you OK, love?’ she said.
    ‘Yeah,’ I managed to mumble. ‘I’m OK. I’m very OK.’
     
    After we’d showered and eaten I cut the orange wire into four equal lengths and bared the conductors on one of them, just like I’d seen earlier in the day. I asked Sonia to sit in an easy chair and gave her the ends of the wire.
    ‘Right,’ I said. ‘The cat has choked to death after eating the goldfish, the milkman has left you semi-skimmed instead of full cream and that new dress you’d ordered from Grattan’s catalogue for thecompany Christmas party is the wrong colour, so you’ve decided to end it all. By electrocution. I want you to wrap the wires around your thumbs, nice and tight, please.’
    She took hold of the cable. ‘Like this?’
    ‘Um, no. The copper bit. Round the thumb first, then twist it. And we’ll do it like he did, for the sake of accuracy: put the blue around your right and the brown around your left. That’s the way.’
    Sonia held her hands up. ‘Are you going to turn me on?’
    ‘Ah! Any other time, yes, but tonight your luck has changed. Your last payment to the electricity people was lost in the post and they’ve cut off your supply. You live to fight another day. Let me just make a sketch of the way you’ve done it.’
    I noted the way she’d wrapped the wire around each thumb and then the direction she’d twisted it to make it secure.
    ‘Can I take it off now?’ she asked as I closed my notebook.
    ‘Yes, thank you. That was a big help.’
    ‘Did I do it the same as him?’
    ‘Not quite.’
    ‘Oh. So what does that prove?’
    ‘It proves that Sonia Thornton is unique, but I already knew that.’ I placed my hand on the back of her neck, letting her short hair run through my fingers, and moved my face closer to hers. ‘What did you think of the run?’ I asked.
    She smiled at me, resting her forehead against mine, and something churned in my stomach. Sonia smiles like a spring morning, when the daffodils are in full bloom, and when it’s just for me I wonder what I’ve done to deserve such riches. ‘It was good,’ she said. ‘I felt…I don’t know, I haven’t the vocabulary, but running does something to me. I feel as if I’m flying, as if I could take off and soar. Thanks, Charlie. I’d forgotten the joy of it, but tonight I felt it again. You made it possible, brought it back to me.’
    ‘It’s been a long day,’ I whispered. ‘I think we should have an early…’ But by then the room was falling end over end, and I never got to tell her what we should have an early one of.
     
    Alfred Armitage was a bit of a nuisance, I learned next morning when we gathered in the classroom at the nick. His wife had died in 1997, less than a year after he retired, and since then he’d turned to alcohol for solace and gone into a slow decline. Four landlords in the vicinity of his home told how he would come into their pubs early in the evening and slowly get drunk. Then he’d start berating customers about anything that he’d read in the papers – asylum seekers, lenient penalties for murderers, hospital waiting lists – all the usual right-wing scare-mongering that the tabloids indulge in. Most of the customers agreed with him, the landlords said, but they came out of the houseto get away from it, not have it rammed down their throats night after night. Two of them had asked him to either moderate his opinions or find somewhere else to drink.
    ‘So had he enemies?’ I asked.
    Apparently not. He was regarded as harmless, they assured