Shooting in the Dark

there.’
    ‘You don’t know who?’
    ‘You’re the detective, not me. But it’s my bike. Green Raleigh and CAM on the saddle. Christine Annabelle Moxey. There can’t be two bikes like that.’
    ‘So what did you do?’
    ‘What I wanted to do, I wanted to ask who’d brought it and scratch her eyes out. But I controlled myself. I told the boss I’d got period pains and came round here damn quick to collect the reward.’
    ‘Reward?’
    ‘Yeah, you told me if I found out who stole it, you’d give me a hundred quid.’
    JD didn’t remember making that promise. He took out his wallet and extracted two twenties, passed them over to her. ‘All I’ve got at the moment. When we get the guy you’ll get the other sixty.’
    ‘It’s not a guy,’ Christine said. ‘There’s no guys work at the café. We’re all girls.’
    ‘OK,’ JD said. ‘It was a girl rode the bike to work, but there’s a guy behind her.’
    ‘So what do we do now?’
    ‘You go back to work. Tell the boss you’re feeling better and keep your eye on the bike. Don’t ask any questions but at closing time make sure you see who takes the bike. I’ll be outside, and whoever it is, I’ll follow her, find out where she lives.’
    ‘What if you lose her? It’ll be dark.’
    ‘I won’t lose her. But if I do, you’ll already know who it is, so we can trace her.’
    ‘This is exciting,’ she said.
    JD did a double-take. For a moment or two he went with the fantasy, then reality came back to claim him. ‘Just routine,’ he said. ‘All in a day’s work.’
     

46
     
    When he left the AA meeting Sam saw himself as one of hundreds of thousands of people who were leaving similar meetings all over the world. Most of them had seen death close up. Some of them had been talking but the majority had been listening, seeking for that extra ounce of strength that can only be supplied by another.
    JD was waiting on the corner of Friargate. Sam detached himself from his sponsor, Max, and walked over to join JD. He’d never seen him on a bike before and the man and machine somehow didn’t fit. Without each other the bike and the man had, respectively, style and dignity. But together they excited only a comedic pathos.
    The meeting had gone well and Sam was convinced he’d never drink again. A danger sign in itself for an alcoholic. In a culture that reaches for ethanol whenever it feels a celebration coming on, any feelings of elation are to be watched with caution. One drink sounds innocuous, even tame, and it is for most people. But there’s a fairly sizeable tribe of others in the world for whom that one drink is a virtual death sentence.
    ‘This’s never happened to me before,’ Sam said. ‘I come out of an AA meeting and there’s a guy on a bike waiting for me. Is it symbolic?’
    ‘I didn’t want to miss you.’ JD told him about Christine Moxey’s visit and how the missing bicycle had turned up at the café.
    Sam grinned. ‘So she’ll be coming out around six o’clock. JD, you go there now, for half an hour or so. I’ll get Marie to relieve you. Then we’ll meet up at five and follow the girl home together.’
     
    All heiresses are beautiful. Angeles Falco was no exception. She had a face that could come back and haunt you. She was wearing a faded red cotton shirt, the top two buttons unfastened. Red lips and a faint blush to her cheeks, could’ve been painted on or it could’ve been natural. If he’d been forced to guess, Sam’d guess it didn’t really matter. Heavy cord strides, looked like they were three sizes too big for her, and abb socks in hand-spun, undyed wool.
    She looked like she was glad to see him. ‘Where’ve you been? I thought it was your day off.’
    ‘It is,’ he said. ‘I was with JD, talking philosophy, we solved a few global problems then I went to an AA meeting.’
    ‘Philosophy,’ she said, managing a satirical spin on the word.
    ‘You disapprove.’
    ‘No. It’s just that much of philosophy seems to cloak medium-sized ideas in large words.’
    He laughed. ‘You’re a jacket job, you know that?’ Angeles shook her head. ‘What’s that?’
    ‘A jacket job. Something that drives you mad.’
    ‘Oh. Thank you kindly. Men think all women are jacket jobs, don’t they?’
    ‘I don’t know what other men think.’
    ‘But you know what you think.’
    Jesus, he thought. We’re flirting. This’s not just me flirting with her. She’s coming back at me. He wondered briefly if