Walking with Ghosts

band. Drums. Band called Fried and the Behaviourists.’
    ‘Freud, surely?’
    ‘No, that’s what I said. Freud and the Behaviourists. But it isn’t, it’s fried.'
    ‘As in egg?’
    Sam nodded. ‘He’s a real character. Talks like someone who’s just walked out of an American crime novel, sometimes like a man in a western.’
    Dora squeezed his hand and closed her eyes. She smiled, and Sam knew she would be asleep in a moment. ‘J.D.?’ she Said, opening her eyes. ‘Is he fried?’
    Sam left a long gap there, so she’d have to go back, look at that last sentence all over again. He said, ‘Can I get back to you on that one?’
    She closed her eyes and Sam watched her. She shoo^ gently with laughter; she was radiant like an overblown plant at the end of a glorious summer. A rose with heavy lush petals, in those final hours before they begin to fall. ’ When her breathing eased into a regular pattern, he let g0 of her hand and left the room.
    J.D. was probably OK, but you could never take coincidences for granted. If J.D. owed Edward Blake money, and if Blake wanted to know how the investigation was proceeding this would be an easy way of finding out. Sam didn’t think that was what was happening, but he couldn’t discount it either. Not at this stage of the game. J.D. Pears would have to be watched, and by a more critical eye than Marie’s.
    He slipped Bringing It All Back Home into the CD player and selected track eleven. Didn’t know why, but he listened to the words until the beginning of the second verse. Then he smiled. He’d tell Marie tomorrow, or the next day. Maybe the day after that. Whenever there was an opening so it didn’t sound like he was preaching. The highway is for gamblers.
    Marie thought things through, anyway. She didn’t need Sam to tell her to use her sense. And if passion had the upper hand at the moment, she wouldn’t appreciate Sam getting in her face. He knew better than to do that. Catch Sam Turner standing in the way of a tenacious hormone? No way, he’d heard the music himself from time to time; it’d be easier to stop a bull.
    Something else he’d learned from J.D.: Blake was on the Millennium Committee. The guy moved in exalted circles. He was perfect for the villain of the piece. As a lobbyist he paid MPs to put pressure on ministers, so that his big-money clients could screw the electorate. He was a moral scumbag-But would someone like him go the extra yard and kill his wife?
    Sam shook his head. He didn’t know the answer. But he know that you can’t rule anyone out. And when some-was killed with violence, statistically the perpetrator was the person they were married to.
    Sam took the CD out of the player and put it back in its case. He went quietly up the stairs and stood by Dora’s bed. Her eyes flickered for a moment, then opened. She said: ‘Sam, I’d like to see Billy again.’
    Her son, Billy. She hadn’t seen him or heard from him for years. Sam had never met him. ‘I’ll try,’ he said. ‘Maybe Diana’ll have an address? But if he doesn’t want to be found, I won’t be able to do much about it.’
    Dora had gone back to sleep. Maybe she hadn’t been awake. She knew too much to argue.
    An hour later Sam was sitting in a chair downstairs, the television with the sound switched down to drooling level, wondering if he should go to bed. He pressed the buttons on the telephone without lifting the receiver. Practising.
     

10
     
    She was white, looking thinner than normal, especially her face, her eyes wide and dark. ‘I feel sick,’ Janet said. Geordie panicked momentarily, a quick flutter at his breast, a tightening around his hairline. Then he breathed again. Something she’d eaten, or too much work.
    ‘Why don’t you go back to bed?’ he asked. ‘I’ll give Marie and J.D. a bell. They can manage without me for a day.’
    ‘No.’ Janet shook her head. ‘I’m going to work. We’re expecting deliveries. It’ll be chaos if I’m not there.’
    ‘But if you’re being sick—’
    ‘I’m not being sick, Geordie. I feel queasy. It’ll pass.’ Geordie was standing in the doorway to the bathroom, Janet with her back to the wash basin. She went over to him and touched his face, and he leaned forward to kiss her forehead.
    ‘You sure?’ he said.
    ‘Yeah. I’ll be all right.’
    ‘I should go in, as well. I said J.D. could come with me today. I’m gonna see the woman who used to be Edward Blake’s secretary.’ He looked