Dead Man's Time

choice to leave him, wasn’t it?’
    ‘I didn’t think he’d replace me with some bloody bitch.’
    Dr Eberstark sat impassively, his face revealing nothing. After several minutes he asked, ‘What did you expect after nine years? For him to be celibate for the rest of his life?’
    It was Sandy’s turn to be silent for some minutes. Then she said, ‘I did something else horrible too.’
    ‘What did you do?’
    ‘I vandalized the bitch’s car. What’s her name? Cleo? I carved on the bonnet, with a chisel.
COPPER’S TART. UR BABY IS NEXT
.’
    ‘Nine years after you’d left him?’
    ‘Almost ten years, actually.’
    ‘What did you think you would achieve by doing that?’
    ‘Sometimes I feel I’m like the scorpion in that fable.’
    ‘Which fable?’
    ‘The one where the scorpion asks the turtle to give him a ride across a river to the other side. The turtle replies, “I can’t do that. You might sting me to death.”
    ‘The scorpion says, “Look, I’m not dumb. If you carry me across the river and I sting you, we will both die – you from my sting, and I will drown.”
    ‘So the turtle says, “Okay, that makes sense!”
    ‘They get halfway across the river and the scorpion stings the turtle. The turtle, in agony and starting to sink, turns and looks at the scorpion and says, “Why did you do that? Now
we’re both going to die.”
    ‘The scorpion replies, “I know. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. It’s in my nature.”’
    ‘So you’re the scorpion, you think?’
    She said nothing.
    ‘Is that what you like to think, to justify your anger?’
    ‘It’s not rational, I know. I should be happy that he has moved on, but I’m not.’
    ‘Do you want him back? Does he represent the past, something you want but can’t have back? None of us can.’
    ‘Maybe I’m a psycho and should be locked away,’ she said.
    ‘The fact that you recognize that tells me you are not. You have all this anger inside you, and it has to go somewhere, so you vent it on him, and on the woman you think is stopping him
coming back to you.’
    She sat, thinking, in silence.
    After some moments, changing the subject, he said, ‘In our last session you were going to tell me something about the baby. Do you want to tell me now?’
    She shrugged. Then she said, ‘The thing is, I’m not sure it was Roy’s.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘I was having an affair. With one of his colleagues.’

59
    ‘Eamonn Pollock’s not been flavour of the month for a long time,’ Glenn Branson said. ‘Not among the Brighton antiques fraternity. Your mate Donny
Loncrane was right.’
    Grace turned the car in through the entrance to the Downs Crematorium. Of Brighton’s two multi-denomination crematoriums, Roy Grace much preferred the municipal one, Woodvale, with its air
of a village parish church, and its woodland setting. But the private one, the Downs, was the one chosen by most of the city’s wealthier people.
    He had always considered it a courtesy to attend the funeral of murder victims whose cases he was working on, but he always had another, ulterior motive, which was to scrutinize all those
attending, and any lurkers in the background who might be watching. Sometimes, sick killers turned up to observe. And the perps who had killed Aileen Mcwhirter were, unquestionably, very sick
indeed.
    He reversed the unmarked Ford into a space, giving himself and Glenn Branson beside him a clear view of the arriving cortege.
    It wasn’t a long procession. Out of the first limousine following the hearse emerged Gavin Daly, his son Lucas and his wife Sarah. From the next a couple emerged, along with two young
children. Aileen McWhirter’s granddaughter and her husband, Nicki and Matt Spiers, Grace presumed, and her great-grandchildren, Jamie and Isobel. From the one behind that emerged a number of
elderly people, one of whom Grace recognized as Gavin Daly’s housekeeper; he wondered if two of the others were Aileen’s housekeeper and her gardener.
    They were followed inside by a woman he knew and liked a lot, Carolyn Randall, the hardworking Area Manager of Sussex Crime-stoppers, presumably one of the charities the dead woman had
supported. Next he recognized the Head of Fundraising for Brighton’s hospice, the Martlets.
    Glenn Branson unclipped his seat belt, slipped his hand inside his suit jacket and took out an envelope, which he handed to Grace. ‘His mugshot. Eamonn Pollock.’
    Grace shook it out of the envelope and