The Blood Is Still by Douglas Skelton

Author:Douglas Skelton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781951627621
Publisher: Arcade Crimewise
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

32

The thing that had always annoyed Val Roach about Joe was that he never seemed to look any older. Sure, there were lines around the eyes that hadn’t been there when they’d met at university (she was studying sociology, he physics) – but even now, more than twenty years later, he still more or less looked the same. Even his hair hadn’t begun to turn grey. Unless of course he was into the Grecian 2000. He had taken to sporting some designer stubble, though, perhaps in a bid to disguise a sagging jawline. There was still something boyish about him, a quality that endeared him to a number of women, including a 25-year-old lab assistant with whom he was now shacked up. It was such a cliché – older man meets younger woman, their eyes meet over a flaming Bunsen burner, or whatever the hell physicists use in the lab. He finds that her youthful spirit reignites things he thought had either died or gone into hibernation in his forty-year-old body. Blah, blah, blah. Etc., etc., etc. But that’s the thing about clichés – they only become clichés by being commonplace.

When he had told her about the affair – it had been going on for over a year by that time – Val had wanted him dead. After the divorce she had decided to pull a Jean-Luc Picard and made it so, even if only in her mind. He was, as the saying went, dead to her. She had never taken his name and that helped distance herself. She knew it was a coping mechanism, a means of moving on. She knew he wasn’t really in that great physics laboratory in the sky but it helped to think of him as gone and not rutting away in Lolita’s bed.

And now, here he was. In Inverness. Standing on the doorstep of her Culloden semi-detached, giving her that boyish grin. When he had phoned that afternoon, he’d said he wanted to meet up. She wasn’t terribly keen but he was insistent, said there was something they needed to talk about and he didn’t want to do it on the phone. She could have said no way, she didn’t like communicating with the dead, but she’d held her tongue. She was at work anyway and there were things to be done, so she gave him her address and told him to be there by 6.30 p.m. That was fifteen minutes ago. He was always late. The Late Dr Maguire, they used to call him.

There was that smile. She loved that smile. She hated that smile. ‘Sorry, got a wee bit lost.’

‘Really? It’s not that big a place.’

Smile. Love. Hate. ‘Well, you know me …’

Yes, she did. His complete inability to get anywhere without becoming totally confused by which direction he was travelling had been cute at one time. Now it was just irritating.

She stepped back. ‘You’d better come in.’

She had to admit she was curious as to what was so important that he needed to see her.

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