Dead Man's Grip

where it was getting her down. But she couldn’t help that. Good marriages, like theirs had been, gave you a wonderful inner strength and sense of fulfilment in life. Bad marriages, as she encountered every day, in the tears and trembling voices and shakily signed statements of her clients, were a prison.
    The Argus had been running stories on the accident every day, except today, when, being a Sunday, fortunately it wasn’t printed. The front-page headline on Thursday had been the $100,000 reward put up by the dead boy’s family for information leading to the van driver’s identity. Her photograph had been on the second page: Brighton Solicitor Arrested At Death Crash .
    She’d been in the paper again on Friday, yesterday too. It had made the national press also, with a big splash in the tabloids, as well as being in the Sunday Times today. It was big news that Tony Revere was the grandson of the New York Mafia capo Sal Giordino. She’d even had reporters phoning her at the office, but on the advice of Acott, her colleague and also her solicitor, she had not spoken with them. Although she had badly wanted to – to point out that she had not caused the accident, or even collided with the cyclist.
    It seemed that everything that could possibly go wrong, in the house and in her life, was all going wrong at once. A dark gloom swirled inside her. That Monday morning feeling arriving an unwelcome twelve hours early, as it had done for as far back in her life as she could remember, way into early childhood.
    Sunday evenings had been worse for her since Kes had died. It had been around this time, five years ago, that two police officers had turned up at her front door. They’d been contacted, via Interpol, by an RCMP officer from Whistler in Canada, asked to inform her that her husband was missing, presumed dead, in an avalanche while heli-skiing. It had been a further four days of anxious waiting,
hoping against hope for some miracle, before they had recovered his body.
    She often thought of selling the house and moving to a different part of the city. But she wanted to give Tyler some continuity and stability, and several of her friends, and her mother, whom she adored, had advised her in the months immediately following Kes’s death not to make any hasty decisions. So she was still here, five years on.
    The house wasn’t particularly attractive from the outside. It was 1960s red brick, with a double garage beneath it, a clumsy extension, plus ugly secondary double-glazing put in by the previous owners which Carly and Kes had been planning to change. But they had both particularly loved the huge living room, with its patio doors opening on to the large, pretty sloping garden. There were two small ponds, a rockery and a summer house at the top which Kes and Tyler had made into a male domain. Tyler liked to play his drums there, while Kes liked to sit and do his thinking and smoke his cigars.
    Kes and Tyler had been close, not just father and son, but proper mates. They went to football together to support the Albion every home match during the season. In the summer they went fishing, or to the cricket, or more often than not to Tyler’s favourite place in Brighton, the Booth Museum of Natural History. They were so close that at times she’d found herself almost feeling jealous, thinking that she was being left out of some of their secrets.
    After Kes’s death, Tyler had moved his drum kit indoors, up to his room, and she had never seen him go to the summer house again. He’d been withdrawn for a long time. She had made a big effort, even taking him to football and to cricket herself, and on a fishing trip on a boat out of Brighton Marina – and she had been violently seasick for her troubles. They’d developed a certain closeness, but there was still a distance between them, a gap she could never quite close. As if the ghost of his father would always be the elephant in the room.
    She stared at a spreading brown stain on the wallpaper opposite her. Damp coming in. The house was falling apart around her. She was going to have to get to grips with it, either give it a massive
makeover or finally move. But where? And besides, she still liked the place. She liked the feel of Kes’s presence. Particularly in this living room.
    They’d made it cosy, with two big sofas in front of the television and a modern electric fire with dancing flames. On the mantelpiece above it were invitations to parties and weddings