Sticks and Stones by Steve Burford

Author:Steve Burford [Burford, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LGBTQIA+, Contemporary, crime/thriller, family-drama, genre, police
Publisher: NineStar Press, LLC
Published: 2021-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

By the time she got back home that night, the threatening ache in Claire’s temple had developed into a well-settled stabbing pain that no paracetamol or cold beer could touch. Once, not that long ago surely, she’d have asked Ian for some kind of massage, and he’d have been only too happy to help. Time was he would have offered before she needed to ask. Now, he didn’t offer, and because he didn’t offer, she felt she couldn’t ask. When had that ease of communication stopped? When Sam had come along? But even before Sam, as far as Ian was concerned there had always been Tony. No, Claire didn’t think it was down to the kids that the days of massages and roses had petered out. If she let herself think about it, she knew it had happened about the same time all of Ian’s long meetings had begun.

Claire closed her eyes, massaged her temple, and refused to think about that. God knew she had plenty of other material crowding her brain, the sheer volume of it more than explaining her splitting headache.

Sitting at her kitchen table now with her husband and boys, she pecked at the microwaved meal that was all she’d had time to make for them. “It’s fusion!” she’d told Tony as he’d wrinkled his nose at the combination of spaghetti Bolognese and chow mein. After a muttered complaint from Ian about high sugar and fat content that she’d shut down with a murderous glare, everyone had lapsed into a moody silence. Sam had been hyperactive since returning from the childminder. Claire suspected the minder’s policy of no sugar or food additives was far from rigorously upheld. Now, the four-year-old was clearly on the down side of a sugar spike, and obviously struggling to stay awake as he pushed his food around his plate, more of it ending up on his table mat than in his mouth.

Claire speared a bean sprout with her fork and tried to wrap it in a strand of spaghetti. It was getting harder to deny that something was wrong with her family, broken even, and she hadn’t got a clue what to do about it. Or the energy. But she knew she had to try.

It would be highly unethical to talk to her family in any detail about cases she was working on, and that wasn’t something she normally ever wanted to do. Work and home should be two different worlds and Claire worked hard to keep those worlds separate. But work right now seemed determined to force itself into her private life. First, a boy from the school her son attended and where her husband taught had been killed. Now, a second young man linked to that family had been murdered, and the daughter of Ian and Tony’s headmaster had gone missing. It was inevitable that she was going to have more to do with Monastery Grove. At least mentioning that possibility now might give both Tony and Ian a chance to ready themselves for seeing her on their turf as cop rather than mum.

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