Shooting in the Dark

without her now she’s arrived, but it’s good to have a job to get away from her at least some of the time, that’s number two.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Geordie agreed. ‘Horrible thing to say, but it’s the truth.’
    Venus, Janet’s black-and-white cat, nudged Geordie’s leg with her nose. Her black sister, Orchid, watched from her perch on the windowsill.
    They walked through the university grounds together, around the frozen lake. Echo was sleeping in her pram, not visible to passers-by or the ducks that skidded on the ice. Janet waited with him until his bus came, and then walked back again with her daughter. Barney, Geordie’s dog, looked back once or twice, wondering why he couldn’t do the bus ride.
    Geordie blew on his fingernails and remembered dreaming that he’d turned up Salman Rushdie by mistake. He’d been on a case with Marie, which involved knocking on doors, looking for a witness to a miscarriage of justice. He’d come to a house with a large oak door and boarded-up windows.
    ‘Go round the back,’ he told Marie. ‘He might skip out that way.’
    But the guy didn’t even try to escape. He came to the door in a dressing gown and a night-cap with a long tail and a pom-pom at the end. Round spectacles. His cheeks were red, as though they’d been scrubbed, but his grey-streaked beard looked greasy and unkempt. ‘Is it time?’ he asked Geordie.
    ‘No,’ Geordie told him. ‘I thought you were somebody else.’
    Salman did a bit of a twinkle. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am most of the time.’
    Geordie couldn’t make out when the dream had been. As far as he remembered, he hadn’t slept for thirty hours. Maybe he’d dropped off while walking Echo round the sitting room.
    He got off the bus at Clifford Street and cut through High Ousegate to Parliament Street. The pavements and roads were littered with shoppers, seemingly normal, healthy people who had suddenly been infected by the Christmas bug. The spending fever hadn’t got to Geordie. It felt to him as though there were still several weeks to go.
    As he drew level with Feasegate there was a prickling sensation at the back of his neck, and he turned suddenly. A large woman with two parcels, one under each arm, collided with him, and Geordie and her packages clattered to the ground. ‘Holy mother,’ she said.
    ‘Sorry,’ Geordie said, scrambling to his feet. He retrieved her parcels and sent her on her way.
    ‘Great clumsy oaf.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said after her. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
    What it was, that prickling sensation, it was the feeling you get when someone is watching you. It was one of those psychic things he’d talked to Celia about. There were these people who could talk to the dead, and others who could read your mind, and there were young people who could make glasses shatter if they got mad. All kinds of things. Phenomena, that lived in the world. Most of it couldn’t be explained. It was just out there, like the wind or a shower of rain. It happened, and then it passed on, maybe visited somebody else.
    Geordie hadn’t felt threatened. There was nothing that was particularly weird or scary about it. He had thought that somebody he knew was behind him, and when he turned he’d expected that he’d see whoever it was.
    But a large Catholic lady had ploughed him down.
     

5
     
    When Marie arrived at the office, they were all there. Sam was talking on the phone, and Geordie and JD were locked in some deep conversation about drugs that make you sleep. Celia was pouring steaming coffee into their mugs, humming to herself, an old Burt Bacharach/Hal David number, ‘Twenty-four Hours from Tulsa’.
    ‘Like your hair, Celia,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should do the same?’
    ‘I wouldn’t,’ Celia said. ‘Wait until the grey hairs start arriving. Then you can have it any colour you like.’
    ‘Something happening?’ Marie asked, glancing at the men around the room. She took her mug from the counter top.
    ‘New job, dear,’ said Celia. ‘Ladies in peril.’
    ‘More than one?’
    Celia lifted an eyebrow. ‘Well, one in particular.’ Marie smiled, glancing sideways at Sam, still engrossed in his phone conversation. ‘As in, a young lady in peril.’
    ‘Keep going. You’re on the right track.’
    Marie took a sip from her mug. ‘Sam interviewed her this morning, right?’
    ‘No more clues.’
    ‘OK, we’re talking about a gorgeous young lady in peril?’
    ‘Right,’ said Celia. ‘But there’s