Shooting in the Dark

near ready to sleep. He got a blanket and stretched out on the sofa and listened to one of Janet’s CDs. Dinah Washington, Mad about the Boy. Made you forget who you were, fooled you into thinking everything was all right and the world was benign.
    Before Echo was born Geordie had been learning a new word every week. What you did, you got the word, out of a book, say, or off Celia or JD. And every day for that week you found a way of using the word in the right place. Benign had been one of those words, and, hey, look at that, it’d stuck.
    Except the world wasn’t benign.
    Which was one of the reasons you had to pretend it was from time to time.
    Geordie couldn’t work out if he’d been thinking about the world being benign or if he’d been dreaming about it. The CD had finished and the blanket had slipped off the sofa and there was a knocking sound coming from somewhere. Sounded like one of the neighbours was doing a spot of DIY in the middle of the night.
    They’d had a mad neighbour once who got up and played the piano before dawn. He couldn’t remember her name now, but she’d had a tumour in her head.
    The banging stopped. It had sounded like someone knocking nails into a piece of wood. But the night plays tricks and as soon as the noise had gone Geordie couldn’t be sure he’d heard it at all. If Echo’d woken up, then he could’ve been sure, maybe even done something about it. But there wasn’t a peep out of Echo.
    Oh, hell, there it was again. And not far away. He got off the couch and moved over to the window. He pulled back the curtain and watched a shaft of light dart along the length of the garden. There was one more bang, as if the light had been enough to warn off whoever was out there. A single hammer blow, the one that confirms the head of the nail is fully embedded.
    Geordie was ready to sleep now, but there was a possibility that someone was trying to break into a neighbour’s house. He put on a pair of shoes and a coat and found the torch that Janet kept in the kitchen. It was still outside and bitterly cold, the ground covered with a glittering layer of frost. Geordie played the beam of the torch over the fence and on to the facade of his neighbour’s house. The windows were tightly curtained and the door was closed and unmarked.
    He walked down the garden, shining the beam a couple of feet in front of him. He stopped when he discovered the step-ladder by the side of the shed. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said as he saw that the shed door had been forced. There you go, worrying about the neighbours and all the time there’s somebody breaking into your own shed.
    He folded the step-ladder and put it back in the shed. He closed the door as far as it would go and walked back towards the house. They’d probably taken all his tools.
    He turned around and looked back at the shed, wondering for a moment if the burglars were still there, watching him from the shadows. They’d probably have the steps away as soon as he got into the house. But there was nothing he could do about it now, not without waking everyone in the street.
    As he opened the door and stepped inside the house he heard the long wail that Echo gave when she woke up and wanted to be fed.
     

45
     
    JD turned the gas fire up as far as it would go. It threw out heat in a six-foot semi-circle and he and Sam pulled their chairs into the confines of the space. This meant burning your shins but JD preferred that to shivering and he knew that Sam had a similar value system to himself, at least in respect to body temperature.
    ‘I love this room in the summer,’ JD said. ‘In the winter I’m always making plans to move. But I’m slow, so by the time I’ve got around to doing something about it, the winter’s over and spring reminds me what a great room it is in summer.’
    ‘Me too,’ said Sam. ‘As soon as this case’s over I’m gonna unload Dora’s house. It’s more than I want to carry.’
    ‘If it wasn’t so big, you wouldn’t have Angeles living with you.’
    ‘I didn’t say it was totally negative,’ Sam said with a wink. ‘If there were no benefits, I’d’ve gotten rid of it years ago.’
    ‘Like a peacock’s tail,’ JD told him.
    Sam looked at the wall, seemed like he deliberately wasn’t going to ask JD to explain himself.
    ‘It’s to do with evolution,’ JD said. ‘The peacock’s tail is mostly useless, it uses up energy that the bird should be spending on survival. But instead it grows this