He stared at the cakes.
She pushed. ‘Okay, no more one-sided conversations. Ask me anything and I’ll tell you.’
He turned towards her with interest. ‘Married, kids?’
‘Separated and a daughter,’ she said, looking over at the girls. She lowered her gaze. It was a good work of fiction that would bring them closer. She needed that affinity of being separated from a child.
He caught her subtlety. ‘Where’s the kid?’
‘With her father. It’s his weekend.’ She looked away.
‘Look, I’m sorry …’
She waved away his apologies. ‘It’s okay. Breaking up a family is always painful but we’re trying to work it out.’
Fantastic, she thought. Now he felt guilty that he’d caused her pain and he’d be more likely to open up.
She already knew his story inside out. Barry had been an amateur boxer with a young wife. Under pressure from his wife to quit the sport, he started driving a delivery van. Some time later his wife became pregnant, but eight months in, the baby stopped breathing. His wife went through labour to give birth to a dead child.
Barry had tried to be strong but had returned to boxing to alleviate the rage. Every fight saw him more damaged, but he couldn’t stop. During the time Barry should have been comforting his wife, his brother had been doing it instead.
When he caught them, Barry had beaten his brother so badly he was paralysed from the waist down. Seven months later, Lisa gave birth to Barry’s child. A daughter.
‘What did your husband do?’ Barry asked, quietly.
She looked him square in the eyes. ‘Hazard a wild one.’
‘Affair?’
She nodded.
He shook his head. ‘Anyone you know?’
Alex considered inventing a best friend to fit into her fictional scenario but she felt that was stretching credibility a little too far. ‘No, some girl he met at a coffee shop. She’s a barista, whatever that is. Apparently, she’s less challenging.’
‘Bet that makes you feel good.’
‘Tremendous.’ She smiled at him. ‘Hey, who’s the shrink here? I’m half expecting you to present me with a bill before I leave.’
‘Yeah, a cool coupla hundred quid for me,’ he quipped.
‘Anyway, enough about me. How are you doing?’ she asked, eager to resume her experiment.
‘Not good, they’re married now,’ he said, miserably.
‘Oh, Barry. I’m so sorry. I had no idea.’
He waved away her apology. ‘Not your fault.’
Alex sat in silence beside him for just a minute, allowing his mind to linger on what he’d said.
But now it was time to begin.
‘Does she love him?’ she asked, softly.
That question pained him, as she’d intended. And a flash of confusion registered in his eyes.
‘I don’t know. I mean … I assume so. She married him.’
‘Do you think Lisa married him due to a sense of responsibility?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It would to me if I was still in love with her,’ Alex said, gently.
He shook his head. ‘She’d never take me back.’
Alex paused for a few seconds. ‘Hmm … did you and your brother fight as children?’
Barry smiled. ‘That’s the first shrink thing you’ve said.’
‘I apologise. I’m just interested in whether this was purely accidental.’
He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Aah, hang on, you told me I couldn’t be a shrink. Make your mind up.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, sometimes siblings compete throughout their childhood, normally for the affection or validation of a parent. If a child feels their brother or sister is more intelligent, attractive or favoured, they try to compete and emulate the more successful sibling. Normally this naturally dies out as siblings take different directions outside of the childhood home, but occasionally envy continues into adulthood.’
Alex could see he was giving this serious thought. Of course he was. Every person with a sibling could remember fights over toys, clothes and CDs. It was perfectly normal.
She shrugged as though she couldn’t care less either way. ‘It just sounds as though you’re taking full responsibility for the whole situation yet you don’t know if part of it was by design. So, I ask again. Does she love him?’
‘I still don’t understand how that matters. She could never forgive me.’
‘It doesn’t matter at all if you’ve given up.’
‘But what can I …’
‘You’ve said you would have forgiven her anything to be a family. How do you know that she wouldn’t do the same? At the moment, your brother has stolen your life. He’s taken your wife and is father to your daughter and you don’t even know if she’s in love with him.’
One hundred and eighty. Now just one last jab.
‘You shouldn’t envy him. I mean, what’s his quality of life? He is unable to leave that chair. It might have been kinder if he hadn’t survived.’ She paused for a few seconds. ‘It would probably have been kinder to your wife.’
Barry was staring at her intently. Fresh hope hovered behind his eyes.
Alex shrugged and sighed. ‘Perhaps she regrets it all and wants you back; a strong, able-bodied man that she loves and is the true father to her child, but can’t extricate herself from the obligation of taking care of your brother.’
Barry looked confused and restless. ‘I dunno …’
‘You know,’ she said, bending her legs and leaning slightly into him. ‘I told my husband I would never forgive him, but if he turned up tomorrow genuinely sorry for what he’d done, I’d have to consider giving him another chance. I love him, miss him and he’s the father of my child. Basically, I’d want my family back.’
Barry was silent for a few minutes. He stood. ‘I think I’ll go for a walk. I just need to clear my head a bit.’
Alex nodded and smiled. She reached for one of the pastries. This experiment was a bit like playing with a spinning top. You wound it as tightly as you could and put it down with no idea of the direction in which it would go.
FOURTEEN
Kim threw down the last report. ‘Absolutely bloody nothing, taxi drivers, bus drivers, residents. A man gets knifed to death and no one saw or heard a damn thing.’
‘There’s that one report,’ Bryant said, searching through his own pile.
‘Of course, an eighteen-year-old lad, totally wasted, thought he saw someone sitting on the wall just before eleven fifteen, right by the bus stop.’
‘Yeah but the last bus went past at …’
‘Not really a smoking gun is it? Someone sitting on a wall at a bus stop.’
Bryant sighed. ‘Maybe the knockers did it.’
‘Huh?’
Bryant took both their mugs and stood at the coffee maker. ‘The miners had fairies they called “knockers”. If they got upset they’d hide the tools, steal the candles, jump out from behind pillars of coal and generally cause a nuisance. No one ever saw them but there was no doubt in the mines that they existed.’
‘Very helpful. So, now we’re looking for bloody Tinkerbell …’
‘Carrying a five-inch kitchen knife, judging by the wound,’ Dawson added.
‘The preliminary examination supposes the fatal stab wound was the first and that the knife pierced the lining of the lung.’
A phone rang. Kim ignored it. Bryant picked it up.
‘So, the killer either stabbed upwards because they knew what they were doing or because there was a substantial height difference. The other wounds were rage or frustration.’
‘Guv …’
She turned to Bryant. ‘What?’
‘Potential murder weapon’s on its way in.’
‘Where was it found?’ she asked, her mind already piecing together the fragments of information they had.