Shooting in the Dark

imagined, a sexual fantasy. A sexual partner is never a woman or a man in the whole kernel of his or her being. You don’t get the other person, you get what you imagine the other person is.’
    ‘Yeah,’ said Sam.
    ‘Yeah, what?’
    ‘I know you don’t get the other person. I’ve known that all my life- The real problem is when you don’t get anything at all, you don’t get reality and you can’t catch the illusion either. What d’you do then?’
    ‘Easy,’ said JD. ‘You write a book.’
     

8
     
    Marie Dickens didn’t sleep well that night. Dreams littered with erotic, sometimes horrific images left her in a misty, lemurian landscape from which there seemed to be no escape. A cup of hot chocolate at three o’clock seemed to help, but when she went back to sleep a warm dream involving her new boyfriend turned into the sadistic gang-rape of a blind child between two goalposts. More hot chocolate, watching the clock grind its way from a quarter after four to the croak of dawn. Then, as inexplicably as before, two-and-a-half hours of deep, uninterrupted sleep.
    When she’d finished breakfast she put the cereal bowl in the sink and took her coffee over to the window alcove, looked out at the river. She picked up the phone and dialled Sam’s home number. He answered on the seventh ring.
    ‘Did I interrupt something?’ she asked.
    ‘Yeah. I was in the shower.’
    ‘Alone?’
    ‘That’s how I seem to do it these days, Marie. I’m still dripping here. Something I can help you with before the carpet rots?’
    ‘Yes, I thought I’d talk to Isabel’s boyfriend, Russell Harvey, but I wanted to check if she’d turned up yet.’
    ‘No sign of her. I talked with Angeles about half an hour ago. She’d already rung the husband, Reeves.’
    ‘Quintin?’
    ‘Quintin Reeves, yeah. You find that funny?’
    Marie laughed. ‘You know how words give rise to images, especially names? There’s something decidedly porcine about Quintin.’
    ‘When’re you thinking of seeing him, the boyfriend?’
    ‘I’ll give him a ring now. See if I can go this morning. Maybe Isabel’s there?’
    ‘Hope so,’ Sam said. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about her. If she doesn’t turn up soon, I’m gonna tell Angeles to bring the police in.’
    Russell Harvey didn’t answer his telephone. Marie tried five times in the next forty minutes and each time she got the engaged signal. If Isabel had decided to leave her husband and set up house with the boyfriend, that would explain why the guy didn’t answer his phone. They wouldn’t want Quintin Reeves ringing in, looking for his wife, and maybe they were playing at being the only people in the world. Living together on sex and French bread and sex and booze and sex and whatever it was that turned them on.
    When Marie drove out to Russell Harvey’s house in Fulford and knocked on the door she fully expected it to be opened by Mrs Isabel Reeves clad in little more than an apron.
    What she got, however, was something quite different. First, the sound of an uncurling chain, and then what might have been a grizzly bear hitting the other side of the door, followed by a rattling series of snarls and barks. She took a step back as the invisible, but seemingly huge canine presence on the inside of the door tried to break its way through to her.
    The rumpus was momentarily quelled and superseded by a high-pitched, but masculine voice. ‘Emperor, shut the fuck up. Get back in this basket. NOW.’
    The scratching at the door continued, and the hound let go with a howl of rage and frustration that would have scattered a colony of ghouls. There was a loud slapping sound, like the crack of a whip, and the human voice came through the door again. ‘Emperor. Basket. Now.’
    The canine sounds were muted. Small whimpers receding from the door, the links of a chain dragging over a paved area. Finally the door was opened two or three inches, and from the gloom inside the house there appeared a thin, chiselled, unshaven face. ‘What’s up?’ the man said.
    Marie took a hesitant step forward. ‘My name’s Marie Dickens,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for Isabel Reeves.’
    The man opened the door wider and motioned her to follow him. Marie stepped inside, closed the door behind her and followed his hunched form down the narrow corridor. A leather strap hung from his right hand, longer than a belt, more like something one might use to keep a trunk fastened. With each step the odour of