Makes You Stronger by Guy Adams

Author:Guy Adams [Adams, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781162521
Publisher: Titan

11

MAX

1.

We let ourselves out and sat on Charlie’s wall to wait for a taxi. I smoked cigarettes and flicked the butts at the Starship Enterprise wind chime he keeps hanging in an arthritic apple tree. The tree looked miserable. Perhaps the weeds picked on it.

“The requisite component,” said Tom, doing his best to seem wise and contemplative. I ignored him. If he was going to perform his detective routine again he could do it to passing suburbanites.

It often surprised me that Charlie chose to live out here. If you want to hide, the best place to do it is most certainly not suburbia. They were voracious for gossip, these people. Starved of any other stimulation, they stared out of their windows and traded stories over back fences. I wonder what they said about the crumbling dead man at number thirty-four? No doubt they had him pegged as a dirty old git and just tugged their children faster past his front gate.

The taxi pulled up and Tom gave the guy Thackeray’s address. The driver grunted, though as a comment on the place we were departing from, or our planned destination, only the cleverest of urban translators could know. Perhaps he was afraid he didn’t fit the dress code for Highbury.

Sitting in the back, Tom and I still didn’t talk much. No doubt he was thinking up suitably oblique statements, pompous nonsense he could spout on street corners before dashing into the shadows. Like Sherlock Holmes if Sherlock Holmes was a bit of a twat.

Me? I was becoming quite convinced that everything I had thus far been through would turn out to be for nothing. Clearly not everything was right within the world of Lloyd & Bryson, but it was an act of insane overconfidence to think Tom and I could do anything about it. There is a reason policemen train to perform their duties: it takes more than half a bottle of gin and a hard-on for Agatha Christie to solve crimes. Tom and I had made a point of never knowing what we were doing in life. This had never previously been a problem because with fuck-all power comes no responsibility. Now we were sticking our noses into something we shouldn’t. Something that probably should be investigated, but by someone with the faculties to do a proper job of it. I was feeling out of my depth and guilty.

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