StillWaters:Book4oftheSophieGreenMysteries (13 page)

I didn’t realise I was crying until someone brushed the tears from my face, waking me, and I saw Luke looking at me with concern.

“You were crying,” he said. “I could hear you from the next room.”

Sniffing, feeling wretched, I found my arms around him. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled tearfully.

“Bad dream?”

“Tammy was dead.”

“Tammy’s fine. She’s asleep on my bed.” Luke stroked my hair. “Everything’s okay.”

Okay? How could he say that? My parents were…and Chalker was… And even if those were dreams, then what about the airport and MI6, and my job and my flat, and Luke…

“It’s not okay,” I tried to say, but I was crying so hard the words disintegrated, and Luke held me as I sobbed out all my misery and frustration and wretchedness, mourning for the things I’d wanted, the things I’d lost.

And damn Luke for being there, for being so kind, so warm and hard and wonderful and making me want him so damn much.

I sent him back to the spare room and told myself not to be such an idiot.

When I woke up my eyes were prickling and my throat was raw. For a few seconds, I thought the last week had been a dream, and I was back in Cornwall, freshly drowned, but then I opened my eyes and saw my parents’ room, softly creamy and familiar.

And then I saw Luke, sitting in the rocking chair, elbow on knee and chin on fist, watching me.

“Feeling better?”

I sniffed. “Did I really wake you up?”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t asleep.”

“Where did you go?”

He indicated Tammy, curled up into a tiny little tabby ball at the end of the bed. “Milady here kept trying to eat my face. So I got up and gave her something tastier. Norma Jean wanted to go out. And I wanted coffee. I brought you some.” He indicated a mug by the bed. I reached out, and it was lukewarm.

“Thanks,” I said, sipping it anyway. “Sorry I cried all over you.”

“I have a vague memory of doing the same on Thursday night.”

I dropped my eyes. God, that embarrassed me. It must be killing Luke.

“So we’re both dealing with this really well,” I remarked.

“Crying’s good,” Luke said unexpectedly. “Just so long as you don’t tell anyone about Thursday.”

I found a smile, and it wasn’t too hard. “My lips are sealed.”

“That would probably be the coffee. I made it about forty minutes ago. Want me to nuke it for you?”

I nodded; he took the mug and was gone.

I stretched out, trying to figure out exactly how weird this all was. That old chestnut about only wanting something while it was gone, well that was us. Actually, no, I wanted him when I had him, it was just that I knew we shouldn’t be together.

We should probably never have got together in the first place. I never did quite understand what he saw in me.

Luke came back up with my coffee. “I think the heating’s fucked,” he said as he handed me the mug. “I re-ignited the pilot but it doesn’t seem to have worked.”

“You have to do it for about fifteen minutes,” I said. “Keep alternating hands so you don’t get cramp. It’s quite…slow…”

He caught my eye. “We’re still talking about heating, right?”

Well, I was certainly getting warmer. “I thought so.”

He grinned and nodded. “Listen, I thought we’d go back to my place to look those printouts over. Unless you have a plumber on speed-dial.”

“Number eight on the hall phone,” I said, and I think Luke thought I was joking. “No, we’ll go to yours. It can take days to reinitialise the system.”

“You sound like you should be on the bridge of the Enterprise.”

“I tell you, if they had the plumbing and electrics we have here, they’d never get out of space dock.”

I dragged myself into the shower, got dressed and took some time making my makeup subtle. Okay, so I knew I shouldn’t be trying, but it was Luke, and he was hot, and I didn’t want to embarrass him by looking a mess.

Okay, I wanted to impress him. Happy now?

I walked Norma Jean around the field, dried her off and put her in the kitchen, behind her baby gate so she wouldn’t make a mess of the furniture. She looked up at me mournfully through the bars.

“Don’t,” I warned her, picking up the keys for the Corsa. “No puppy-dog eyes.”

She sighed and put her head on her paws. I waved a stern finger at her.

“You’re mean,” Luke said.

“Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for her, too.”

“Can’t help it.” He blew a kiss at the pretty dog. “She stole my heart.”

Lucky Norma.

We walked to the pub to pick up the Corsa, and Luke winced when I started the engine. He always does. I think it’s a reflex action: I actually hardly ever crash. Well, there was that one time, when the car flipped over and Luke and Harvey needed hospital treatment (not to mention poor old Ted), but that wasn’t my fault. Honestly it wasn’t.

Mostly.

I stopped at the bakery for some pick-me-ups. Luke asked for a danish and I got one of each kind of doughnut and muffin. It was okay for him to pretend to be pure, but I knew he’d nick half of them.

His car had been brought back to his house at some point, and I parked the Corsa next to it, feeling very normal. It was like a Vauxhall Club meeting. I needed Ted to come and break the line-up.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Luke said as he unlocked the door. “Try not to eat everything.”

Just for that I emptied the hot water from the kettle so he’d have to wait for his coffee. Hah!

I’d just carried my own mug of black nectar over to the chesterfield, the better to pair it with the delights of the bakery bag, when the phone rang. I ignored it. I always do, even in my own house. If I just pounce on the phone, then people will think I’m always at home. Plus then I might have to actually speak to people. Blegh.

The answer phone kicked on, Luke’s short message intoned, then it bleeped.

“Hi, Luke, it’s me.” Pause. “Caro.”

Uh-oh.

“Um, well, I was just wondering if you’re free tonight. We could go out, or you could come over, or I could come to your place, I still haven’t seen it yet…”

Thank God for small mercies.

“Well, anyway. Give me a call, or a text or whatever. Don’t e-mail me, I can’t pick them up at work. Erm. Okay, well, see you.”

Click. Beep. I sat there in silence. So that was what had been nagging at the back of my mind. Luke’s girlfriend. The tall, long-legged, blonde, busty Caro.

The fact that I was also all of those things completely bypassed me. In my mind she was a Barbie doll, a perfect, beautiful, toned specimen of womanhood. She’d be capable and successful and clever and witty and all the things I basically couldn’t be arsed to be.

By the time Luke emerged from the bedroom, looking sexy in a crew-neck and jeans and smelling divine, I’d shredded a whole muffin into tiny little pieces.

“Make yourself at home,” he said drily, noting the zone I’d spread around me: coffee and muffins and doughnuts and papers and phone and bag. So I’m a nester. So what? “Is there any more coffee?”

“No.”

He picked up the jar and flicked on the kettle. It gave a death rattle, trying to boil on empty.

“Thanks for filling it up.”

“Welcome.”

He frowned. “Did I say something…?”

“Not you,” I said, still staring at the dead muffin crumbling all over its case. “Your girlfriend.”

“What girlfriend?” Luke asked, sounding confused.

“What girlfriend? Shall I call her up and tell her you said that?”

Luke’s gaze went from my face, to my fingers killing the muffin, and then back up. “Sophie, what are you talking about?” he asked in the sort of voice you might use to talk to someone on a ledge.

“Caro. Caroline? She just called. Wants to know what you’re doing tonight.”

“Probably looking at pictures of dead bodies with you,” Luke said, passing his hands wearily over his face. “Sophie, she’s not my girlfriend. I’ve met her three times and one of those was by accident.”

“Accident?”

“I saw her in Waitrose. She keeps calling me up and I don’t know how to tell her I’m just not interested. She’s a nice girl and all, but…”

Why didn’t I believe him?

“Okay,” I said slowly, picking up the phone and dialling 1471.

“What are you doing?” Luke asked warily. “Sophie?”

I held up a hand to him as I listened to Caro’s number and wrote it down. Then I replaced the receiver and looked at him.

“You don’t want to go out with her?”

“Not really.”

“You’re stringing her along.”

“I am not! She’s seeing a relationship where there is none.”

“So you won’t mind me calling her up and telling her you’re not interested?” I lifted the phone.

“What?” Luke dashed over. “Are you crazy?”

Well, duh.

“It’s mean of you,” I said. “She deserves to know.”

He looked conflicted.

“I can’t tell her.”

“Luke, you’ve infiltrated drug rings and foreign embassies and flown planes in storms. You can tell a girl you don’t like her.”

He looked sulky. At least it was a new face.

“Okay,” he said, taking the phone from my hands and glancing down at the number. “This is her?”

I nodded.

“What did she say on the message?”

I replayed it. Caro sounded awfully perky.

Luke sighed, then
dialled
.

“Caro? It’s Luke… Yeah, hi… Yeah, I did. Listen, Caro, there’s something I have to tell you… Well, maybe that’s because it is ominous. I, uh, can’t see you any more. You remember the ex-girlfriend I told you about? Well, we’re sort of getting back together…Yeah. Now.”

I rolled my eyes. Pathetic.

Like I can talk.

Luke glanced at me. “Well, yes, she is, but I… No, I was in the shower… No,
not
with her… I suppose she did… Well, answer phones speak out loud… I don’t think… No, Caro—”

He held the phone away from his ear, looking pained. “She wants to speak to you.”

“Me?” I squeaked. “What did I do?”

“Got back together with me.” He thrust the phone at me and I took it in a reflex.

I glared at him extra hard and said cautiously into the phone, “Hello?”

“Is this Sophie?” asked the voice of someone in a snit.

“Erm, yes.” So at some point he’d told her my name. Was I flattered by that?

“Did Luke tell you we were in a relationship before you came along?”

“Well, I—how much of a relationship?”

“A proper one! And then you came along and—”

“Wait, Caro, a proper relationship? When did you meet him?”

“A few weeks ago but I don’t—”

“Well, I met him eight months ago. We took a brief, er, hiatus.” Luke was nodding at me. “And now I’m afraid we’re back together. I hope you enjoyed your little fling with him.”

“Fling! It was more than—”

“Caro,” I interrupted in a flash of genius, “does he have a birthmark on his left or right leg?”

Luke looked confused. He had no such thing.

“I—I can’t remember, do you mean my left, or his—”

“Goodbye,” I said, and replaced the receiver, switching the answer phone on to take all calls, silently, without ringing.

“You owe me,” I said to Luke, who looked delighted. He jumped on the sofa and threw his arms around me.

“Anything! What do you want?”

You
.

“My job, my flat, my car, a cash windfall would also be nice…”

Luke kissed my neck. “I’ll do what I can.”

“Stop that.”

“Why, Sophie?”

He looked plaintive, and a wash of sorrow crashed over me.

It’s you or him, Sophie girl. You two can’t stop hurting each other.

“Because I said so,” I said bossily. “We have work to do.”

I picked up the pile of papers I’d printed off from Dr. Lucy’s e-mail and started reading. Beside me, Luke sighed and got up to make his coffee.

It wasn’t happy reading. Dr. Lucy had sent me her entire autopsy report, half of which I didn’t understand and had to get out a big dictionary to translate. Luke had a medical encyclopedia and we tried to work our way through that, but in essence the report wasn’t telling us anything Dr. Lucy hadn’t said on Thursday, apart from that Molly Stanton had had a big bump on her head. Not enough to kill her, but enough to stun her, presumably while she was strung up.

Outside the sky darkened, first with rain and then with night. I read through interviews with Molly’s boyfriend, Gavin Beasley, and the friends who’d been staying with them, Eleanor Duvalle, Michael Varley, Laura Jones and Jonathan Dempsey. It seemed that they all, except for Molly, worked together and had taken a holiday in much the same vein as we had, a week in Cornwall with your work friends before Christmas.

Molly had come along with her boyfriend, but any feelings I had about her not quite fitting in with the group were smothered by the interviews and their wall of solidarity: they all loved Molly, she was a great girl, they got on really well, so shocked to hear of her death, really didn’t think it was suicide because she wasn’t that kind of girl, and could the kind police try and catch the dreadful person who’d killed their bosom buddy?

“Do you believe this?” Luke asked, reading the Dempsey interview.

“Not entirely.”

“Try not at all. This is too…”

“Sickly?”

“Rehearsed. That’s what I’m looking for.”

I glanced at him. He was sitting on the other side of the sofa from me, coffee mug balanced on one knee, surrounded by papers.

“You’re a suspicious bastard,” I said fondly.

“And you’re a dog with a bone when you get the scent of a murder.”

“Thank you. I think.”

Luke put down his coffee and stood up and stretched. I watched, appreciatively.

“You hungry?” he asked.

God, yes.

“Uh, I could eat,” I squeaked.

“Takeaway?”

I bobbed my head in agreement. “Takeaway is good.”

“Chinese or Indian?”

I looked out of the window. It was raining.

“The Indian on Chapel Hill delivers.”

“Indian it is, then.”

He looked through some drawers for a menu, frowning. “I don’t have that one.”

“I think I do, at my flat. I could go and get it.”

Luke gave me an incredulous look and I mostly ignored it. They’re beginning to bounce right off me, now.