Shooting in the Dark

over how to interpret the image. The thought that there was a conventional response which somehow didn’t connect with his feelings. The result was paralysis, an inability to opt for either alternative. He couldn’t help wondering what was behind the closed lid of the woman’s other eye. If she were suddenly reanimated, would the wink reveal an empty socket?
    ‘We’d better tell somebody,’ Amber said.
    ‘Yeah.’ Dave followed her back up the hill. ‘No point hanging round here.’ Somehow he couldn’t keep up with Amber’s pace. When they found the track of the Cleveland Way, she went even further ahead, well out of earshot. ‘This’s a real ball-breaker,’ Dave said to himself.
     
    Sam got to Angeles’ house a few minutes after receiving her message. He’d been to see the physiotherapist at the hospital, and arrived at the office an hour late. His hand was healing slowly, he seemed to be able to do more with it every day.
    She was wearing a dark shirt and a striped Breton jumper. There must be some way she could tell what looked good when she dressed in the morning, but he couldn’t imagine what it was. It isn’t possible to feel colours, yet she never wore combinations that clashed. Always looked as though she’d been personally dressed by one of those couturier guys.
    She was calm and collected but the tension in her facial muscles betrayed the effort involved in maintaining the mask. ‘I want you to drive me,’ she said. ‘I have to identify the body, that’s number one, then I want you to find out who killed her.’
    ‘Shall we take it a step at a time?’ Sam said. ‘It might not be Isabel.’
    ‘We’ll soon know,’ she said. ‘Can we go now?’
    ‘Yeah. The car’s outside. What about her husband? Shouldn’t he be involved in this?’
    ‘Quintin’s not here,’ Angeles said. ‘He went on a business trip last night. The police are trying to contact him, but he’s not due back until tomorrow.’ She pulled a beanie hat down on her head and slipped into an ankle-length fitted coat. She did it nonchalantly, without thinking, but in a way that made Sam want to share his life and prejudices with her.
    He followed her through the door. ‘So he doesn’t know about the body being found?’
    ‘No.’ She took his arm and let him lead her to the car. He opened the passenger door and waited until she’d settled herself inside. He watched her smooth out the wrinkles in her skirt. As he walked round to the driver’s door he wondered if there was anything else in the world apart from sex. No, he mused, not a lot, apart from birth and death. Music? The politics of power came into the equation somewhere. And starvation was always good. Homelessness? OK, the world was a complicated place, full of joys and disappointments, an infinite variety of emotions and experiences. It was just that sex was the best.
    She’d been at the bottle. There was the minted mask which only drew attention to her breath. There was the careful walk, the conscious placing of one foot in front of the other. And there was the slight tremor of the hand. Sam couldn’t leave it alone.
    ‘I’m an alcoholic,’ he said.
    She didn’t respond, her eyes seemed as though they were following the road.
    ‘Booze isn’t going to help,’ he said. ‘It might seem like it will, but at the end of the day you have to get yourself through this.’
    ‘I had a stiff drink,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’
    He drove the car, nodding inwardly. She’d had at least three. Big ones. But the real danger sign was that she could hold it.
     
    What it looked like, apparently, if you were a policeman, was that Isabel Reeves drove up to the moors, parked her car, took an overdose of sleeping tablets, and wandered off into the bracken.
    ‘Part of her face had been eaten,’ Angeles said. ‘Birds had pecked out her eye. It was the only time in my life that I was glad I couldn’t see.’
    ‘Could you identify the body?’ Sam asked.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘How did you do that?’
    Angeles sighed. ‘She was my sister. I know her body, her hands, her jewellery. There is a birthmark on her thigh. There’s no doubt. It was Isabel.’
    ‘They can’t have held a PM already. There’ll have to be an inquest.’
    Angeles put her hands forward and rested them on the dashboard. She jumped when a huge truck with airbrakes went into a sneezing fit beside them.
    ‘They said the preliminary results show she died from the combined