Shooting in the Dark

she’ll have gone away with her boyfriend.’
    ‘Does she think she’s being watched?’
    ‘If she does, she hasn’t said so. I think if Isabel was being stalked in any way, she would have mentioned it to me. We don’t live in each other’s pockets, as I’ve said. But we are married.’
    Time to go. Sam got to his feet and said goodbye. He blazed a trail through the carpeting to the front door. It was true and he’d always known it: the chain of wedlock is so heavy that it takes two to carry it, sometimes three.
     
    When he left the house, Sam passed a pond in the garden, its surface frozen hard. Someone had broken the ice with an iron bar that leaned against the fence, but it had frozen over again. Now the surface was ridged, the fresh ice welded around chunks of the old, forming peaks and an opaque natural patchwork which hid everything beneath it.
    It triggered a memory which took time to surface, and Sam hesitated, watching the crystal patterning to give it time. Angeles’ response to his question about ice skating. Other physical activities she’d been open about, glad of the chance to show that she was fit and able, but as soon as he mentioned ice skating she’d clammed up.
    Sam turned towards the house, thinking to ask Reeves why she would do that. But he stopped and made his way back to the car. He’d had enough of the guy for one day.
    So the lady didn’t like ice. People are allowed to have their little phobias. Even private detectives have no-go areas, subjects they’d prefer not to talk about.
    It wouldn’t leave him alone, though. There was a frozen pond in his mind, and the picture of the lady sucking in her breath when he mentioned ice skating. Had to shake his head real hard to get it out of there.
     
    But Quintin Reeves’ last words carried on working in Sam’s head as he drove back to York. Sam had had more partners than his own sense of credibility allowed. It’s » always possible to make a fundamental mistake in the choice of a woman, and with more or less average luck at this point in history, you could get it wrong twice. But Sam Turner, if he had the space and thought really hard about it, had set himself up with almost as many partners i as the fingers on his hands.
    Some of them were dead, and others had walked off into the distance. A couple of them he’d abandoned for what seemed like good reasons at the time. And there were two - or was ft three? - he couldn’t immediately remember their names.
    Not a good record. But one he couldn’t do much to change. Usually he’d lie about it. If it came up in conversation, he’d make reference to ‘my first partner’ or ‘my second partner’, but he never got around to talking about his ‘eighth partner’. Christ, people would think he was Bluebeard.
    He felt better about it at the moment, because he hadn’t been involved with a woman for nearly twelve months. Since Dora died. A pragmatist, Sam had dealt with the problem of his emotional life in the same way he had dealt with his alcoholism. Abstention.
    The blind woman had picked up on it. He couldn’t remember her exact words, something about doubting if he made his women happy. What was it with her, anyway? Was she some kind of seer? No one had ever before suggested that Sam might have a fundamental flaw. Except Sam himself, who’d always suspected it.
    There was always the chance, of course, that Reeves was right, that she imagined things. Sam didn’t think so, but there had been times in his own life when he had lived with visions stoked by booze.
    He liked thinking about Angeles Falco. Putting her image together inside his head. It was warm and comforting and exciting at the same time. He liked the ambiguity of her vulnerability and fierce independence. He’d once or twice fallen for weak women, kittens who needed constant attention, and known suddenly, just after it was too late, that he would never manage to carry them.
    But that wouldn’t happen again. Next time he’d... refuse the drink. Find a good book. Eat an apple.
    ‘You ever read Descartes?’ JD said, when Sam had climbed into the passenger seat of his van.
    ‘Cogito ergo sum?'
    ‘That’s the guy, yeah.’
    ‘What about him?’
    JD’s van was in the middle of the parking lot outside the! Haxby Road offices of Falco’s soft-drinks factory. He had a camera with a large zoom, a pair of binoculars, two A4 notepads and a selection of different coloured pens. ‘I was thinking,’ he said.