If Snow Hadn't Fallen (a Lacey Flint short story)

surrounded by walled college gardens and the river Cam. It was probably one of the quietest streets in Cambridge.
    There was no one in sight, and nothing to hear but traffic in the next street and the wind in the nearby trees.
    It was late. Nine o’clock on a Friday evening and it simply hadn’t been possible to stay at work any longer. Her new colleagues had already written her off as a sad, semi-crippled spinster, old before her time, with no life of her own outside work. They wouldn’t exactly be wrong about that. But what really kept Evi at her desk until security closed down the building wasn’t the emptiness of the rest of her life. It was fear.

3
    I WAS AWARE of sniggers around us, a few curious glances. I half heard Joesbury tell the bloke behind the bar that he’d have a pint of IPA and the lady would have a refill. When I finally got my breath and had wiped my eyes, Joesbury was looking puzzled.
    ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you laugh before,’ he said. Shaking his head softly, as though it was me who was nuts, he was watching the barman pour my drink. Bombay Sapphire over lots of ice in a tall glass. He slid it to me, eyebrows high.
    ‘You drink neat gin?’ he asked me.
    ‘No. I drink it with ice and lemon,’ I replied, as I realized the man at the bar, and several others near by, were watching us. What the hell was Joesbury playing at?
    ‘What the hell are you playing at?’ I asked him. ‘Are you planning on wearing that thing all night?’
    ‘Nah, it makes my head itch.’ He pulled the wig off, dropped it on to the bar and picked up his glass. The discarded hairpiece lay in front of him like roadkill as he scratched behind his left ear. ‘I can put it back on later, though,’ he said. ‘If you want.’
    His hair had grown since I’d last seen him, just touching his collar at the back. It was darker brown than I remembered, with just the faintest kink in it. The longer style suited him, softening the lines of his skull and lengthening his cheekbones, making him infinitely better-looking. The soft light of the bar made the scar around his right eye barely visible. The muscles in my jaw were aching. All this time I’d been grinning at him.
    ‘And again I ask, what are you playing at?’ If I sounded grumpy, he might not realize how ridiculously pleased I was to see him. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be low-profile man?’
    ‘I thought it might break the ice,’ he replied, wiping beer foam off his upper lip. ‘Things were a bit tense last time I saw you.’
    Last time I’d seen Joesbury, he’d been minutes away from bleeding to death. So had I, come to that. I guess ‘a bit tense’ just about covered it.
    ‘How are you?’ I asked him, although I already had a pretty good idea. For the last couple of months I’d shamelessly begged updates from mutual acquaintances. I knew the gunshot he’d taken that night had torn a good chunk of lung tissue that surgeons, and time, had managed to repair. I knew he’d spent four weeks in hospital, that he would be on light duties for another three months, but fine to return to full duties after that.
    ‘I might give the London marathon a miss this year,’ he said, stretching out one hand and taking hold of mine, causing tightly stretched guitar strings to start twanging in my stomach. ‘Otherwise fine.’ He turned my wrist to see its underside and looked for a second at the heavy-duty plaster I still wore, more because I didn’t like looking at the scar beneath than because it needed to be covered. Three months on, it had healed as much as it ever would. Which would never be enough.
    ‘I thought you might come and see me,’ he went on. ‘Those hospital-issue pyjamas were quite fetching.’
    ‘I sent a teddy,’ I replied. ‘I expect it got lost in the post.’
    We both knew I was lying. What I’d never tell him was that I’d spent nearly an hour gazing at pictures on the Steiff of Germany website, picking out the exact teddy I would have sent, if such a thing were possible. The one I’d finally settled on was similar to the one he’d once given me, just bigger and cheekier. Last time I checked the site it had been marked
unavailable
. Couldn’t have put it better myself. He was looking at my face now, specifically at my newly modelled nose. It had been reset a month ago following a break and the post-op bruising had just about disappeared.
    ‘Nice work,’ he said. ‘Tiny bit longer than it was?’
    ‘I thought it made