Flesh Wounds by Brookmyre Chris

Author:Brookmyre, Chris [Brookmyre, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2013-07-31T22:00:00+00:00

Last Man Standing

Jasmine was led through the restaurant, conscious of a drop in the volume of discussion as those gathered noted the new arrival. She felt almost every eye in the place take her in, and from this rapidly deduced that everybody here knew everybody else. They were all similarly over-dressed for the time of day, though the women’s colours were generally sober. It looked like a wake, but she knew that Fullerton’s body would not yet have been released. This was some kind of informal memorial that was being hosted in the meantime.

Despite the upmarket décor and the name of the award-winning chef boasted on the menu she still couldn’t picture her mum in this place, even in its present incarnation. To put it politely, these were not her mother’s kind of people. It was a strangely paradoxical effect that to put a suit or a posh frock on certain individuals only served to emphasise the less presentable elements of their appearance. It was like prefixing the term ‘businessman’ with the word ‘legitimate’.

There were women drinking glasses of wine and men downing pints, and it wasn’t yet half-ten in the morning. Jasmine could smell the alcohol off the spillage traps on the bar and felt queasy. She recalled Josie’s voice whenever she encountered jakeys on the street supping Special Brew or Buckfast while she was still digesting breakfast: ‘I can’t say the sun’s quite over the yardarm.’

The mum who brought her up belonged to Josie’s world. How the hell did she ever end up in this one?

She was led to the brasserie’s compact but high-ceilinged private dining room, where several mirrors contributed to an artificial sense of space around the single long table. It was a neat trick, important not to make a group paying through the nose for the VIP treatment feel like they were being shoehorned in. Nonetheless, Jasmine feared she was going to be feeling pretty claustrophobic in here before the end.

Sheila pulled out a chair for her, significantly on the other side of the table from the exit, then sat down opposite. David, or ‘Doke’ as Sheila called him, remained standing against the wall, close to the door. Jasmine got the unmistakable impression that she was very much under scrutiny, and quite possibly under their guard.

Jasmine produced the photograph of her mum with Sheila’s late husband.

‘I believe you took this,’ she said, placing it on the table and turning it around to face her hosts.

She watched Sheila place a hand over her mouth at this ancient artefact that had found its way to her here and now as though through a wormhole in time. Doke leaned over to examine the photo also, letting out a surprised chuckle.

‘Jesus. I remember her right enough,’ he said, a tinge of pleasure creeping into his voice. ‘That’s Stevie and Nico.’

Sheila looked a little more haunted by the image, the sight of her late husband in his youth perhaps cutting a little too deep right then.

Her eyes lifted from the picture to regard Jasmine once more.

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