Ten Year Stretch by Martin Edwards & Adrian Muller

Author:Martin Edwards & Adrian Muller [Edwards, Martin & Muller, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press, Inc.
Published: 2019-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

The pub was busy with after-work drinkers, outside and in; smokers blocking the pavement, spilling out into the street. The majority men, white men between twenty-five and fifty; a sprinkling of women drinking and smoking hard to keep up and laughing too loud at jokes that were often at their own expense.

Kiley found space on the upper floor, a corner table wedged between a grimy window looking out onto a blank wall and the secondary toilet door.

‘I didn’t realise anything was up,’ Carpenter said, ‘until she texted me, her, that…woman…’

‘Leah.’

‘Yes, Leah. And I thought, bloody great, she’s coming to her senses at last, keeping her distance. But then, just today, Andrew phoned. Rang me at work. He never calls at work. Wanted to know had I heard from his mum. Seems they’ve been in touch pretty regular since he went down to Bristol…’

‘Bristol?’

‘Uni. Classical Studies. Don’t ask me why.’ Carpenter lifted his glass, didn’t drink. ‘Like I say, they kept in touch. Facebook, Twitter. He hadn’t heard from her in—what?—getting on for a couple of weeks. Wanted to know had I heard anything? Was she ill or something? Told him I’d be the last one to know.’

‘But that’s not true, is it?’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘From what I hear, you’ve been keeping pretty close tabs.’

‘Want to stop her making any more of a fool of herself, that’s all.’

‘Fool?’

‘This…’ Carpenter made a face like his beer had gone abruptly sour. ‘This pathetic…I don’t know…cry for attention, whatever it is.’

‘The relationship with Leah, you think that’s what it is?’

‘What else? Hanging round with that…She’s not gay, for Christ’s sake, Ellen. She’s no more fucking gay than I am. If she was, twenty-five years of fucking marriage, don’t you think I’d know?’

Several heads turned in their direction and the toilet door banged.

‘The argument that Friday,’ Kiley said, wanting to bring things back on track, ‘what was that about?’

Carpenter drank, wiped his mouth with finger and thumb. ‘I’d been…what was the expression you used?…keeping tabs on her. Following her, I suppose. And she said if I stopped, kept right away, then she’d agree to meeting, sitting down somewhere, just the two of us, civilised, talking things over. Everything. And I agreed. Agreed and kept waiting for her to get in touch and say okay, you know, a date and everything, and she never did. So I went round there, when I pretty much knew she’d be leaving work and said how about it, this meeting you promised? And she said she wasn’t ready, things were happening, I don’t know, some new stuff she had to consider, and I said, well when the fuck are you going to be ready? And she said she didn’t know, I’d have to be patient, and that’s when it kicked off. I lost my temper and for a minute, just for a minute, it all got nasty.’

‘You pushed her up against the wall.’

‘I pushed her up against the wall and it was all I could do to stop myself taking a swing at her.

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