Shooting in the Dark

fall to their knees and lift their voices to the heavens. A silent utterance was just as effective; a ghost moving over the lips for the ghost of the one who has been taken.
    Marie shook her head. Big problem in the twenty-first century. We’ve forgotten how to pray. The space where the prayer took place remains, but it is an empty place. The dead body before us is like a mirror. We see emptiness where there was life, and we know in that moment that there is the same emptiness inside ourselves. We can try to ignore it or we can fill it with rubbish, but it will remain there nevertheless, always empty, until our time comes round.
    A trick of light passed over the coffin and Marie shifted uneasily on her chair. For a moment she thought the body of Russell Harvey had moved. He’d blinked, perhaps, or unselfconsciously wrinkled up his nose. But nothing had happened, his make-up was still intact, his lungs and heart and the synapses in his brain had closed for business. The shutters were down. The proprietor had gone away.
    It was here, in this very room, that she had come to find the body of Gus and contemplate the end of her marriage. At the time it had seemed like the end of her life. It was, she reasoned, the end of the life she had led up to the moment that Gus looked into the gunman’s eyes. Her first act had been to leave the hospital and take up Gus’s place as Sam’s partner. A role in which she excelled, and for which she had no regrets.
    What had proved altogether more difficult was to plug the hole in her emotional life. There had been a more or less constant trickle of men and from time to time one of them seemed like he’d been designed for the job. Only use and familiarity would reveal a series of tiny errors or omissions that made life on a day-to-day basis impossible. An inability to change his socks, perhaps, or the gift of walking through a room and laying it to waste. There had been Clancy, she remembered, who could not, even for one night, lie from the head to the foot of the bed, but would shuffle around until his body was across it, and her. He had additional failings too, dear man.
    Other men, usually the ones who seemed eminently possible at first, had more serious drawbacks, like wives and families. God knows, Gus, her philandering, now long-dead husband, had not approached perfection, but he had been like a prince compared to the fare she had been offered since he’d gone.
    ‘Is it just luck?’ she asked him in the coffin, there, thinking he looked strangely different and then realizing that it wasn’t Gus at all she was keeping company tonight, but Russell Harvey.
    ‘Is it just luck, Russell?’ she asked. ‘Did you meet a selection of slimy ladies before you found your Isabel?’
    With more selective lighting, a candle, say, Russell might have made a sign. But there were no shadows in the room apart from the corpse himself. And Gus, of course, somewhere indistinct, rather as he had been as a husband.
    Deep breath. Sit up straight. Get your act together, girl. Dwell not on the bloody past.
    The current man was David Styles, Steiner school teacher, very hairy. Gentle. He was away for three days at a conference in Forest Row.
    He’d been married once, briefly, to a mistake. No children. He was tall but not gangly, which was nice. Had hair on his head as well as everywhere else, which was also nice. He was a thinker, but not an intellectual. Read philosophy and was able to reinterpret it into everyday language. Of course, he was a teacher.
    The best thing about him was his sense of humour, which was always present. He could make her laugh, and did so frequently, sometimes so much that she’d clutch her belly and beg him to stop.
    The other thing, of course, the thing that clinched it for Marie, was his lack of materialism. He wasn’t interested in the things that money could buy. Didn’t own a car.
    If there was a questionnaire, something you could fill in to describe your ideal mate, Marie would end up with something very similar to David Styles. He’d look more or less the same, but be broader across the shoulders. He’d have the same sense of humour and the same contempt for the world that puts things before people.
    Only he’d be rougher. More like Sam. Not Sam himself, of course, that’d never work. He’d probably be a lorry driver rather than a Steiner school teacher. She didn’t know why, couldn’t work it out. David Styles, in some inexplicable way, was not man