Dead Man's Grip

her. She’d try and have a long chat
with him as soon as she got home. She rang for a taxi, then left the office.
     
     
    In the taxi on the way home, Carly sat immersed in her thoughts. The driver, a neatly dressed man in a suit, seemed a chatty fellow and he kept trying to make conversation, but she did not respond. She wasn’t in the mood for conversation.
    Ken Acott had been right about the magistrate. She’d got a one-year ban and a £1,000 fine, which Ken Acott said afterwards was about as lenient as it could get. She’d also accepted the court’s offer for her to go on a driver-education course which would reduce her ban to nine months.
    She’d felt an idiot, hobbling up to the dock on her uneven shoes and out again. Then, just when she was looking forward to lunch with Sarah Ellis, to cheer her up, Sarah had phoned with the news that her elderly father, who lived alone, had had a fall, and a suspected broken wrist, and she was on her way to hospital with him.
    So Carly had thought, sod it, and instead of going to find a shoe repair place, she stumbled along to a store in Duke’s Lane for a spot of retail therapy. She was wearing the result now, a pair of reassuringly expensive and absurdly high-heeled Christian Louboutins in black patent leather with twin ankle straps and red soles. They were the only thing today that had made her feel good.
    She looked out of the window. They were moving steadily in the heavy rush-hour traffic along the Old Shoreham Road. She texted Tyler to say she’d be home in ten minutes and signed it with a smile and a row of kisses.
    ‘You’re towards the Goldstone Crescent end, aren’t you, with your number?’
    ‘Yes. Well done.’
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    The driver’s radio briefly burst into life, then was silent. After a few moments he said, ‘Do you have a low-flush or high-flush toilet in your house?’
    ‘A high-flush or low-flush toilet, did you say?’
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    ‘I’ve no idea,’ she replied.
    She got a text back from Tyler: U haven’t got Mapper on
    She replied: Sorry. Horrible day. Love you XXXX
    ‘High flush, you’d have a chain. Low flush, a handle.’
    ‘We have handles. So low flush, I guess.’
    ‘Why?’
    The man’s voice was chirpy and intrusive. If he didn’t shut up about toilets he wasn’t going to get a damned tip.
    Mercifully he remained silent until they had halted outside her house. The meter showed £9. She gave him £10 and told him to keep the change. Then, as she stepped out on to the pavement, he called out, ‘Nice shoes! Christian Louboutin? Size six? Uh-huh?’
    ‘Good guess,’ she said, smiling despite herself.
    He didn’t smile back. He just nodded and unscrewed the cap of a Thermos flask.
    Creepy guy. She was minded to tell the taxi company that she didn’t want that driver again. But maybe she was being mean; he was just trying to be friendly.
    As she climbed up the steps to her front door, she did not look back. She entered the porch and fumbled in her bag for her key.
    On the other side of the road, Tooth, in his dark grey rental Toyota that was in need of a wash, made a note on his electronic pad: Boy 4.45 p.m. home. Mother 6 p.m. home.
    Then he yawned. It had been a very long day. He started the car and pulled out into the street. As he drove off, he saw a police car heading down slowly, in the opposite direction. He tugged his baseball cap lower over his face as they crossed, then he watched in his rear-view mirror. He saw its brake lights come on.

69
    Carly could hear the clatter of dishes in the kitchen, which sounded like her mother clearing up Tyler’s supper. There was a smell of cooked food. Lasagne. Sunlight was streaking in through the window. Summer was coming, Carly thought, entering the house with a heavy heart. Normally her spirits lifted this time of year, after the clocks had gone forward and the days were noticeably longer. She liked the early-morning light, and the dawn chorus, too. In those first terrible years after Kes died, the winters had been the worst. Somehow, coping with her grief had been a little easier in the summer.
    But what the hell was normally any more?
    Normally Tyler would come running out of the school gates to greet her. Normally he would come rushing to the front door to hug her if she had been out. But now she stood alone in the hallway, staring at the Victorian coat stand that still had Kes’s panama hat slung on a hook, and the fedora he’d once bought on a whim, and