Shooting in the Dark

I’ll bear it in mind.’
    ‘Is there anything you don’t do? You don’t drive a fast car, anything like that?’
    There was humour in his voice. Restrained, but it was there. ‘Roller skating,’ she said. ‘I like that, but it’s not really a fast car.’
    ‘Skiing?’
    ‘I’ve tried it,’ she said. ‘In Italy, but I never got off the beginners’ slopes.’
    ‘Sounds better than me,’ he said. ‘I never got off my ass.’
    She laughed with him.
    ‘What else is there?’ he said. ‘Ice skating?’
    A tremor went through her.
    ‘I’ve done it again,’ he said. ‘What’d I say?’
    She fought to control her breathing, mastered it quickly, but could only speak in short sentences. ‘Nothing. It’s all right.’
    ‘C’mon. What’d I say?’
    ‘Ice skating,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s the one thing I can’t face.’
    ‘No big deal,’ he said. ‘You do the things you like, the rest you leave to the other guys.’
    She went inside herself. She didn’t tell him about the couple of times she’d been on the ice. How she’d sat there 3 and screamed until they’d carried her back to dry land.
     

7
     
    Sam had never been to Skewsby, so he drove out to Malton first. Put a few extra miles on the clock, but the Montego had already done 50,000, so it was past complaining. There were still leaves on some trees, but most of them were skeletal now. The sun had been strong enough to chase the early morning frost away, but had spent itself and was pale, hanging low in the sky.
    He stopped briefly in Malton, parked by the railway station, took ten minutes to walk around the market place. He’d done it before, three or four times, fascinated by the lack of identifiable life forms. A red-nosed toff dressed from head to foot in checks came out of the Green Man. Sam shot him dead, but the guy didn’t notice, went on to his next drink with a neat hole between his eyes, tiny trickle of blood running into his eyebrows. Next time Sam felt like dying, it wouldn’t be a problem: he’d come here. Wouldn’t take long.
    But compared to the tiny village of Skewsby, Malton was like Belgrade on a Saturday night.
    There was a sharp hill for a couple of miles before the declamatory landscape flattened out for long enough to build a main street and a few houses. If there was a shop there, it wasn’t drawing attention to itself. The place looked as though it had never recovered from Dutch elm disease.
    Sam found the house where Angeles’ sister, Isabel, lived with her husband. A reconstituted building, parts of it looking like authentic Elizabethan, but the bulk of it composed of twentieth-century materials. It wasn’t a big place; Sam guessed three or four bedrooms, a couple of baths. The front door was stained oak, and there was a fake bell-pull, which chimed electronically.
    Quintin Reeves looked like a young cabinet minister. He was soft and overweight, and came with a prepacked: facial kit of twinkling eyes, pink complexion and silky hair gone silver grey at the temples. He smiled broadly and extended his hand, stood aside so that Sam could come inside the house, get out of the cold morning air.
    Sam sighed. He’d been here before, with this kind of guy, really difficult to pin down. Quintin Reeves was the type, he’d ask you to give him a tenner for two fives; and you’d give him the tenner and look at the two fives, examine them minutely. They’d have the little strip of metal in them, and there’d be the watermark. They’d look and smell and feel like genuine fives. You’d bet your life on them being kosher. But at the same time you’d never shake the feeling that the guy was ripping you off. You wouldn’t know how he’d done it, but you’d have lost something in the transaction and he’d have made a killing.
    He was wearing a white shirt with those expandable bracelets that keep the sleeves from falling down, midnight-blue trousers with creases to cut bread with and a silver-grey tie with a knot that looked like a machine had tied it. It was time for an epiphany and something akin to bells ringing occurred in Sam’s consciousness. He knew suddenly and certainly that the guy never appeared anywhere without a tie. You wanted to catch this man without a necktie, you’d have to sleep with him. Quintin and his ilk were one of the main reasons Sam Turner believed in bloody revolution.
    In the living room the carpet was white and the pile came up to Sam’s armpits. Could’ve drowned in it if