Kennedy 04 - The Broken Circle by Shirley Wells

Author:Shirley Wells [Wells, Shirley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: police, UK
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2010-04-30T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Snow had fallen. It was crisp and crunchy underfoot and the sun, almost set now, had shone all day. Not that Max had seen much of it. He’d spent most of the day at his desk, going over everything again and again.

He’d called on Jill more out of a sense of duty than anything else. He felt bad because he hadn’t seen much of her since the boys had returned from France. Come to that, he hadn’t seen much of Harry and Ben, either.

He walked with his hands in his pockets. Jill, beside him, had hers encased in black gloves. He was well aware of the foot of space that separated them.

‘You OK?’ she asked.

‘Me? Fine?’

‘Right,’ she said in a way that made it clear she didn’t believe him but, if he couldn’t be bothered to tell her, she couldn’t be bothered to ask.

Max wasn’t fine. Hadn’t been fine since his chat with Barbara McQueen, in fact.

With one look, one reminder, she’d brought back memories that Max had chosen to forget. Painful memories.

Back then, his marriage, along with several others he’d known about, had been hell. He hadn’t understood the reasons for it, either. Most of the time, he’d accepted that it was his own fault for working long, erratic hours and drinking too much. Linda had hated that. But surely, there had been more to it than that. All he had known was that, given the choice, he would never be part of a relationship again.

Obviously, he would have given all he had for the doctors to find a miracle cure. Linda had been the mother of his boys and, if strength of will could have saved her, she would still be his wife, and still be loving his sons. As it turned out, strength of will had been as ineffective as medical treatment.

Since her death, he’d forgotten the hell that was their marriage and only remembered the sense of guilt and loss her death had left him with.

How effortlessly Barbara McQueen had reminded him of the man he had been then.

Would he have left Linda if she’d lived? Would she have walked out on him? It was impossible to know. Yet Max had known he couldn’t have taken much more of it.

What madness, he wondered, was pushing him into a relationship with Jill?

He was happy with his lot. Why change it?

People said that kids were a tie. His weren’t. They never complained about the limited time they had with him. Instead, they enjoyed what little there was to the full. Linda, he recalled, had wasted many a free evening complaining about how few there were …

Thank God he had his work. With so many other things demanding his attention, he didn’t have to think about the future.

‘That was a big sigh for someone who’s fine,’ Jill said drily.

‘Sorry, I was miles away.’ Or years away. ‘I was just wondering if you’d had any more thoughts on Bradley Johnson’s killer?’

‘I’m not on the case,’ she reminded him, ‘so I only know what you’ve told me.

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