“Honestly? I have no idea. I know a conviction like that would be spent in terms of having to declare it, but I’d imagine it’s still logged somewhere—and probably somewhere a guy like Jeff could take a look. I don’t know what they keep on file, but I’d imagine date of birth, height, and so on are pretty much a given. Weight, well, Gabe’s put on a few stone since he was seventeen, but nothing you couldn’t size up from looking at him. And the rest…”
“As for the rest, you could probably make a pretty good guess. Fuck.” The realization felt like cold water on the back of my neck. I ought to feel—not happy, exactly, but at least a kind of grim satisfaction that I might be getting closer to finding out what had happened to Gabe, and who had set this up. But I didn’t—I felt instead a kind of unfolding horror. Because if it was Jeff, then the chance of the police solving this had just gone from slim to virtually nil.
It wasn’t that I thought Malik and Jeff were in cahoots—not exactly. I couldn’t see tough, driven Malik sitting down with a bent colleague and cooking up a plan to murder an innocent man and lock up his wife. That just didn’t seem plausible to me. But the idea that they wouldn’t push too hard to investigate one of their own, that they might treat a report from an unstable, hysterical girl with a history of “false” police reports against her ex with skepticism… yes. That seemed all too plausible indeed.
“If this is true,” I said blankly to Cole, “how the fuck do I prove it?”
“Look.” He put his arms around me, and I felt the same urge I’d felt the day before when he hugged me in the church—the urge to put my face on his chest and cry, as I would have done if he were Gabe. Only I still couldn’t cry. I couldn’t seem to let go enough to cry. “Jack,” I heard his voice, close to my ear, the warmth of his body, his height, his presence somehow so like Gabe’s, in spite of their differences, that it made a lump rise in my throat. “It’s going to be okay.”
We sat like that for a long time, Cole’s arms around me, my cheek pressed against his chest, listening to his heart. For the first time in days I felt… safe. But I knew that was an illusion. Cole couldn’t protect me from what might be coming any more than Gabe had been able to protect himself.
“I don’t think it is,” I whispered.
“Jack.” Cole touched my chin, tilting my face to look at him. “Listen to me—it’s going to be okay. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe him so much.
The problem was, we both knew it was bullshit. That wasn’t a promise Cole could make. And the worst had already happened. Gabe was dead. Me getting convicted of his murder… well, that would be just the cherry on a cake of shit.
I sat, silent, looking up at him, at his furrowed brows, his dark blond hair, his troubled blue eyes, turned deep navy in the candlelit dark. He put his hand to my cheek.
And then he leaned down and kissed me.
For a moment I thought—I don’t know. I thought perhaps it was just his compassion for me, a gentle brotherly kiss meant for my cheek or forehead that happened to land on my mouth. But then his lips parted, his hands came up to cradle my face, and I realized he was kissing me. Properly kissing, his mouth open against mine, his tongue against my lips. And for a second, a strange, wine-muddled, longing-filled second, I let him. No, more than that, if I’m being completely honest—I did more than just let Cole kiss me; I kissed him back.
But then something inside me lurched, a sense of the deep, absolute wrongness of this, however much I wanted to feel someone’s arms around me and their body pressing against mine. Yes, I wanted someone—their lips, their heat, the softness of their bare skin—but I didn’t want just anybody, I wanted Gabe.
“No.” I said the word indistinctly at first, my mouth muffled by Cole’s. And then more forcefully, pushing at him with my hands flat against his hard chest. “No! Cole, I don’t want this!”
Cole staggered back as though I’d slapped him, though in truth my shove hadn’t been that hard.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as if bewildered, though I wasn’t sure if his bewilderment was at my actions or his own. “God, I’m so sorry—the wine—I just—”
“It’s fine,” I said tightly, though I wasn’t sure if it really was. “We were both—look, I get it. We’re drunk, we’re both grieving—” My throat tightened. And the thing was, I could see how it might be true, for him as well as me. How that longing, that desperate longing for Gabe might turn into reaching for the person who had been closest to him. But Cole was with Noemie, and I—what even was I? His best friend’s widow?
“I’m sorry,” he said again. He reached out, but I took a step back, involuntarily, and his face crumpled as though he was hurt. “I’m so sorry. I’ll sleep in the car.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “You’ll freeze.”
“I’ll put the heater on.”
“You can’t leave the heater on all night, the battery will run down. Come on, Cole. We’re both adults, we”—you, I thought, though I didn’t say it, but then it was true that at first, at least, I had kissed him back—“just made a mistake. We don’t have to let it ruin our friendship. I’ve got a sleeping bag—I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“No,” Cole said at that, his voice emphatic. “No. If anyone’s sleeping on the floor, it’s me. I’m sorry—I was—I don’t know what I was thinking, Jack. I was just confused. And I—”
He stopped.
“Yes?” I asked. I felt—I don’t know. Confused, but also sorry for him. But he shook his head.
“Never mind.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket, looked at it, and then sighed. “Look, it’s nearly midnight. Let’s get some sleep. And I’m going on the floor, okay? I don’t want to hear anything more about it.”
For a minute I thought about arguing—but then I gave in and nodded. Cole would be going home tomorrow, to a proper bed and a mattress. He could take one night on the floor.
“Okay.”
For the next few minutes there was silence, while Cole unrolled my sleeping bag across the floor, and I pulled out the couch. I hadn’t tried to unfold it the night before; I’d simply slept across the cushions, and now I struggled with the mechanism. It came with a bang, sliding out unexpectedly and hitting me in the ribs. The blow wasn’t hard, but it fell exactly over the place where I’d sliced myself on top of the wall, and a hot wave of pain shot through me, making me cry out and drop the sofa bed, holding my hands over the dressing.
“Jack?” Cole said, straightening with a puzzled expression from where he was unzipping the sleeping bag. “What—are you okay?”
I couldn’t speak. I could only stand there, my hand pressed to my side, making a movement that wasn’t quite a nod or a shake and trying not to whimper with the pain.
“Jack, what the fuck?” Cole came across, alarmed now.
I could feel something hot trickling down my side from beneath the dressing. Shit.
“I’m… okay,” I managed. The pain was receding, back to the low throbbing ache I was starting to get accustomed to. “I’m okay. I cut myself… climbing a wall. The couch just… it just caught me on the tender bit.”
“Jack, no. You’ve gone gray. This isn’t—let me see.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t taking my top off in front of Cole, not after what had nearly happened between us, but he must have read my thoughts, for his expression grew set and a little impatient.
“For God’s sake, Jack, I’m not going to jump your bones, if that’s what you’re worried about. Yes, I was stupid for a moment, I’m not denying that. But you don’t nearly faint from just getting scraped in the side by a couch; that’s not normal. Show me what happened.”
I closed my eyes. Then, reluctantly, I pulled up my T-shirt.
The first thing I saw was that the dressing—two days old now—was dark with old blood. More blood, fresh and red, was trickling out from beneath one corner. Cole gave me a look as if to say, Can I? And when I nodded, he began to peel back the wet corner of the dressing. I shut my eyes, feeling the pain intensify as the sticky edges pulled on the wound, but I could still hear Cole’s shocked intake of breath as the dressing came clear.
“Oh Jesus, Jack… This… this doesn’t look good.”
I opened my eyes.
“What do you mean?”
I peered down at my side, trying to see past the bunch of rolled T-shirt Cole was holding in his free hand. In the other was the blackened, crusted dressing.
What I saw made acid nausea rise at the back of my throat.
The wound hadn’t healed. It was still the same small, malignant puncture, just below my rib. But now the sides were puffy and swollen with the white, unhealthy look of flesh that’s soaked too long in the bath. And the liquid that oozed gently out of the hole was a mix of blood and something more unsettling, a kind of sticky white fluid that didn’t smell great.
“You need to get this treated.”
“I can’t go to hospital. They’ll want ID and NHS numbers. Look, let’s just try and—” I swallowed. “I don’t know. Clean it up. I’ve got some more dressings in my rucksack, maybe I can get something from the pharmacy tomorrow.”