Quintin Jardine - Deadly Business

He nodded. ‘Sounds good,’ he agreed. ‘So why are you freezing me out?’

‘I’m not,’ I protested. ‘I just assumed …’

He kissed me. ‘Assume nothing about me, lover,’ he whispered, ‘other than the best.’

‘In that case,’ I sighed, with a smile, ‘let’s just try it on for a while and see if it fits.’

That night, when, finally, I fell asleep, I had the strangest dream.

We were still full of light, Liam and I, when Conrad parked in the garage beneath the house. The two of us climbed the single stair that led to the hall and stepped out.

Audrey was there, and still she looked anxious, even more than she had a few hours before, if that was possible. ‘It’s okay,’ I reassured her. ‘Deed done, everything fixed.’

‘No,’ she whispered. Her eyes flickered to her right. I looked over her shoulder and saw a figure, a tall male figure, the garden lights lending him an aura as he stood in the doorway that led to the deck around the pool, silhouetted against the night sky.

I moved towards him, frowning. He couldn’t be the police, surely.

Then he stepped into the light; and his aura seemed to come with him.

He wasn’t the police.

He was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, and a check shirt with no sleeves, so that you could see every one of the hard muscles on his arms. In a pose-down with this guy, Liam was a loser.

We moved closer to each other. His skin was tanned, but not like that of a northern European on holiday; instead, like that of a man who lived and worked under a harder sun.

He didn’t look like Keanu Reeves any more, that was for sure. His hair was mostly grey, military-style, in what they call a buzz cut, as neatly trimmed as the beard that defined his features. His nose was a little broader than I remembered Keanu’s having been, his cheekbones a little higher, his eyebrows a shade further apart.

Then he spoke, in an accent that might well have been Scottish in origin but which had become imbued with other influences, mostly west coast American.

‘Okay,’ he growled, ‘where is the bastard who’s trying to cheat my kids?’

And that’s when I fainted in my dream, and in the same moment sprang into full wakefulness, my eyes searching the room in vain then filling with tears as I realised that however good, and true and loyal the sleeping man beside me might prove to be, he would always take second place to a ghost, one that would never let me alone.