Sympathy for the Devil Read Free Page B

their hoodies to buy a stone or a sixteenth, moving off into the alleys behind. But tonight with the cordon in place the pitch was deserted, no sign of passing trade.
    It was the watching unseen that had first turned Catrin on to police work, that and seeing patterns where there didn’t seem to be any at first. But now there wasn’t much for them to look at, just the fading posters on the wall, the view across the bay shut out by the fog. She reached her hand across in the darkness, held Rhys’s, letting her face rest against his chest. He opened the glove compartment and took out a tube of Fruit Pastilles.
    ‘Want one?’
    She took a lime one, slipped it in her mouth without chewing.
    ‘You knew there’d be nothing here tonight,’ she said. She held the pastille against her cheek with her tongue. ‘Why come down? What were you expecting to see?’
    Rhys lowered the binoculars.
    ‘I don’t know. I’ll only know when I see it.’
    A few insubstantial flakes landed on the car window, melting almost immediately. Catrin shivered, hunkered down inside her parka. Only ten minutes had passed, but her feet already felt cold.
    ‘This is all just bullshit.’ She pointed at the empty street. ‘You came down because you knew she would be here.’
    ‘Who’s she?’ he said casually.
    ‘Oh please.’ Catrin put her hand in Rhys’s pocket, and felt his hand on her wrist. She thought he was going to stop her, but he didn’t. At first her fingers found only the little folded papers he used to make his origami birds. Immediately she began to feel ashamed for doing this, for doubting him. She laid the papers out on her palm. A swan, an owl, a raven. Then she felt something else, wrapped in cellophane. She knew what it was before she even took it out.
    ‘What the fuck’s this? Why isn’t it in an evidence bag?’
    He shrugged, said nothing. It would have been so easy for him to lie, but he just said nothing. She held it closer to the light. It was a wrap, just as she’d thought, the cellophane transparent, burnt at the corner to seal in the brown heroin powder.
    ‘Della gave this to you, didn’t she?’
    Rhys was looking away down the street, avoiding her eyes. She felt a pain now in her temple as at the onset of a fever, a sudden emptiness in her stomach, that feeling she had whenever she looked down from heights and there was nothing dividing her from the fatal emptiness beneath.
    She touched his cheek, tried to make him look at her. ‘What’s so bad,’ she said softly, ‘that you have to do this to yourself? Is it a case? I thought we shared everything.’
    He remained still as a stone, staring out into the night. She tried to force herself to think positively. He’s never lied to me. He could have, but he didn’t. Maybe he wanted me to know, maybe he was just waiting for this to happen. Maybe he couldn’t bear to hide it from me any more .
    ‘Whatever’s hurting you, I can handle it,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to protect me, not any more.’ He still said nothing. She heard her own voice trailing off. Sometimes the truth couldn’t be sugar-coated. He’d been using and she hadn’t even seen the signs. She’d been trained to read those signs, but so had he, he’d known how to cover up. He’d committed original sin for a drugs officer, and what was worse he hadn’t turned to her for help, he’d kept it hidden.
    She tried to swallow her anger but couldn’t stop herself. She heard her heels on the pavement, the slam of the car door behind her before she was even aware she was moving.
    She walked fast through streets she had known all her life. She could have kept her eyes closed and still found her way home. On the other side of the street she saw a solitary figure, a young girl. A stray from the crowds at the docks maybe. It was late for her to be out. The child was doing everything to avoid drawing attention to herself, head down, taking fast, small steps. Catrin wanted to follow the girl to make