Shooting in the Dark

that she’d longed for seemed to be turning into a reality.
    But now Ralph had turned up. There was always a Ralph waiting just around the corner. Someone who’d never give you a second look in other circumstances, but when you least wanted him he’d be there with his tongue hanging out.
    She didn’t know how to handle the situation. Geordie was so overwhelmed by the fact that his brother had found him. So happy to have discovered a link to the past. If she told Geordie that Ralph was angling to get her into bed after he’d been in the house less than fifteen hours, what would happen?
    They’d fight, that’s what would happen.
    It didn’t matter who won or lost, Geordie would be hurt. He’d re-learn all over again that there was nothing to insulate him against the pain of existence. Just when you think that things are taking a turn for the better, you find that the devil’s got you by the tail. Geordie would learn the lesson well enough, because he already knew it. He’d withdraw a little more into the thin shell that shielded him against the world. There’d be one more thing that he wouldn’t want to talk about.
    Janet was the only person in the world who knew Geordie. Lots of people thought they knew him: Sam, Celia, Marie, JD. Ralph thought he knew Geordie even though they hadn’t met for more than a decade. But Geordie wasn’t as easy as he appeared. He made himself into a clown to disguise his disappointment with the world. He pretended to be stupid, because it disarmed people.
    But he was no more vulnerable than anyone else. He had spent several years on the street after the children’s home, and he’d survived. He’d lived with people who had frozen to death in shop doorways, with others who had been raped and sodomized. He’d seen friends die with AIDS-related illnesses while they were still in their teens.
    The thing about Geordie that no one recognized was that he was not vulnerable. He was one of the strongest people she had met in her life. He was too strong for his own good.
    He’d softened up since they’d met, and he’d softened up considerably more since Echo had been born. Now Ralph was in danger of undoing all that, of sending the more human Geordie scurrying back to the crustaceous existence he knew so well.
    Janet’s first thought was to visit Margaret and Trudy, a pair of working girls who had always been good friends. But Margaret would tell her again what shits men were and that she should let Geordie do his own worrying. Janet wasn’t in the mood for that message this morning. She wanted to get away from Ralph, to leave reality behind for a while.
    After walking for half an hour she found herself close to the street where Angeles Falco lived. She’d been thinking what it must be like to be blind since the case had come up, and she’d wondered if Angeles had had much contact with babies, how she would be with Echo.
    Geordie had said that Angeles was heavy with people who treated blindness in a sentimental way, that she’d torn a strip off Sam for patronizing her. If Geordie hadn’t said that, Janet would’ve rung earlier in the week and made an arrangement to go see her. She couldn’t help feeling that the woman must be in need of company since her sister had been murdered. Angeles was a virtual prisoner, under constant surveillance.
    Rich, though. The real-estate value of the street with its individually designed houses would’ve kicked a hole in the capital of a Colombian drugs cartel. In the first drive was a new Ford Testosteroni bulging with technological gimmicks; the pear-shaped man gazing at it from his window bristled with an air of received pronunciation and right-wing ideologies.
     
    There was a brass bell by the side of the front door. One of those bells you pull. It set up a tinkling sound inside the house. When the chimes faded away Janet thought she heard a sound from the other side of the door. The blind woman clearing her throat? Then nothing.
    She made to pull the bell again, but as she did so there was the same sound. It was not someone clearing her throat.
    Janet tried the door. It was locked.
    She moved back to look at the upper windows of the house, but found nothing there. When she returned to the front door the sound had stopped. She had a vague memory, something she had read in a newspaper, about a woman who got an electric shock in her kitchen and went into a convulsion, ended up having a heart attack.
     

18
     
    As she worked at the