The Vows of Silence Read Free Page A

the fish out of the oven. “Give Chris a shout, will you? He’s probably fallen asleep with Felix. Chris does jet lag like nobody else.”
    But Chris Deerbon walked into the kitchen as she spoke, rubbing his hand through his hair. “I think I must have gone to sleep.” He looked puzzled.
    “So long as Felix has too.”
    “Half an hour ago.” He poured the wine into glasses and handed one to Simon.
    “Here’s to home.”
    “In Australia, we had supper outside nearly all thetime. We had barbecues on the beach. We had a barbecue in the garden, it went with the house. Everyone there has barbecues—they call them barbies, like Hannah’s puke dolls.”
    “Wish you were still there, Sam?”
    “Sort of.”
    “I don’t,” Hannah said. “I missed my friends and my pony and my bed and I missed Uncle Simon most of everything.”
    Sam made a loud sucking noise.
    Simon looked round the table at them all. He felt a burst of pure and extraordinary happiness.
    “Do you get a lot more money being a Detective Chief Superintendent?” Sam asked.
    “I get a bit more.”
    “Do you get to do more interesting things? More important cases?”
    “Some. My really important cases are likely to be with SIFT though.”
    “Why?”
    “We get called in precisely because they’re important—”
    “Serious Incident Flying Taskforce. I thought everything a policeman did was serious.”
    “It is.”
    “Then I don’t see—”
    “Eat your fish, Sam.”
    “Is it because they’ve had no luck solving them, so you’re their last resort?”
    “Not usually. They might need more minds focused on something, if it’s very difficult. They might need adetached point of view and a fresh eye, they might need us because their own resources are becoming overstretched—all sorts of reasons. The best thing for me about SIFT is that we’re out there doing , not sitting behind a desk. The higher you get in rank, the easier it is to get trapped in an office all day.”
    “In Australia, the police wear fleeces and baseball caps.”
    “Ever seen your uncle in a baseball cap, Sam?”
    “He’d be cool.”
    “This,” Hannah said, “is blah-blah boring talk.”
    “Go to bed, then. You shouldn’t be at grown-up supper if you get bored with grown-up conversation, you should be playing puke pink Barbies.”
    Cat sighed. The bickering between her son and daughter had got worse in Australia.
    Wondering now if it was to be a permanent and tiresome feature of their relationship, she turned to her own brother. “Did we wind each other up like this?”
    “No. Ivo wound me up. I wound Ivo up. Not you.”
    Cat had spent two separate periods with their triplet brother, who worked as a flying doctor in Australia, and had come away each time feeling that they might well not be related at all. Ivo seemed to be from a different planet. He was brash, stubborn, opinionated, tough. She had left him both times with relief and some bewilderment.
    “Dad,” she said now, her fork to her mouth. “I suppose that’s the answer. It was staring at me. Ivo is like Dad.”
    “Could have told you that,” Chris said.
    *
    After the children had gone to bed, they opened another bottle and Mephisto the cat bumped in through the flap and settled on Simon’s stomach.
    “Did this boy take to strangers living in his house?”
    “Apparently he was absolutely fine.”
    “Traitor,” Simon said, stroking him. Mephisto half closed his eyes. “How have they settled back to school?”
    “Hannah strolled in as if she’d never been away. Sam a bit less easily. His class has split into different groups so he’s lost some of his old friends and there are new boys … but he’ll be fine. It’s sport, sport, sport now anyway—he was rarely within four walls all the time we were in Sydney.”
    “You?”
    “Oh, I was within four walls. Chris and I were working, you know.”
    “I mean coming back.”
    “Good. Great in fact.”
    “OKish,” Chris said. He had been the one