Quintin Jardine - Stay of Execution

‘Fine. He’s a very sharp guy; chief constable material if he was one of ours. Why do you ask? Are you trying to pair us off?’

‘Don’t joke about that. He lost his wife in the Twin Towers. And anyway, I wouldn’t want to upset Stevie.’

‘You’ll upset me if you keep on like that,’ Maggie said quietly. She looked up at him; for all that they were on course for divorce, Mario was the only person in the world who knew everything there was to know about her. Sometimes that thought frightened her, but she knew also that, whatever happened to them in the future, he would always be the man she could trust beyond anyone else.

‘Sorry,’ he murmured. ‘For the record, I like the boy Steele; if he doesn’t get on with Mary, I’ll have him in a minute. Stevie and women, though, that’s another matter, and it’s got nothing to do with him and Paula, either.’

‘Are you giving me a warning, McGuire?’

‘I know better than to do that. But for all sorts of reasons you have to be careful, that’s all I’m saying. Don’t let anyone compromise you in the job, and don’t let anyone hurt you. Mind you, if anyone does, they’re in more trouble than they could imagine.’

‘If you’re planning on being my emotional security guard, why don’t you just move back in?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘No.’

‘Just as well.’ He paused. ‘I won’t be looking over your shoulder, love. But if you need me, I’m there. . That’s all I’m saying.’

She smiled, amused by his awkwardness. ‘Thanks. And however odd this may sound, the same goes for me too.’

The weather had been grey and wet all the way up the M90, but when they had turned at Perth, heading for Auchterarder, the skies had begun to lighten in the west, as if they were guiding them to their destination.

It had been dry when they had arrived, and mild enough for them to change into golf gear and play the best part of a round on the King’s Course. Bob had given Sarah her customary shot per hole, two at the par fives and longer par fours, and had regretted it by the seventh tee, when he stood three down, a deficit that he had been unable to make up by the time the light and the growing cold had forced them to call a halt after the fourteenth, the closest green to the hotel, apart from the eighteenth itself.

As they sat in the bar, having a drink before dinner, he was still muttering about his game. ‘All over the bloody place, I was,’ he grumbled into his gin and tonic, ‘and I putted like a gorilla as well. Honest to Christ, if you play a course like that, you should do it the honour of being in some reasonable form.’

Sarah was still basking in the afterglow of her rare success. ‘If you practised more you’d play better,’ she pointed out. ‘When was the last time you played Gullane?’

‘The October medal; shot a seventy-five. . net.’ He added the qualification.

‘What’s your handicap now?’

‘Seven point three.’

‘It’s not that long ago you were playing off four. You’re the detective, you work out why it’s gone up.’

‘You’re the pathologist,’ he countered. ‘You tell me how my pacemaker’s affected my swing shape.’

She laughed. ‘Of all the excuses I’ve heard for a bad round of golf, that has to be among the lamest. Your pacemaker doesn’t make you knock a four-foot putt six feet past the hole. Lack of concentration does that; plus lack of time on the course, of course.’

‘Is that your roundabout way of saying I’m not spending enough time at home?’ he asked.

‘You’re not at home when you’re on the golf course,’ she pointed out.

‘Answer the question.’

‘Maybe. The clubhouse is three hundred yards away from our house, and a round takes under four hours.’

‘If it takes over three and a half, it’s frowned upon.’

‘I was allowing you a couple of pints in the bar afterwards. Anyway, once that’s done you are home, and of course if I’m playing with you. .’

‘So if I take a morning off every week during the winter, as I could, and we hack round number two course, that would iron out the kinks in our marriage. Is that what you’re going to suggest?’

‘It wouldn’t do us any harm. I wouldn’t even mind losing once you got your game back.’

‘Okay, suppose I’ve booked a morning off and a tee time, and big McGuire or someone phones while we’re having breakfast and asks you to go and cut up a stiff, what are you going to do?’

‘Tell him I’ll do it in the afternoon.’

‘But Mario needs it done in the morning, because they’ve got someone locked up, and they need the PM report double quick or they’ll have to release him.’

Sarah gave a quick frown and sipped her sherry.

‘Need I say more?’ Bob asked. ‘Listen, love, this is not about leisure time, or about my fucking golf handicap. I can only do my job one way, and that’s flat out. You might have a different working environment, as a home-based consultant, but when your phone rings you’re exactly the same as me. If either of us gets a 999 call we don’t think, we act. And. . it’s. . always. . been. . that. . way.’ He prodded the arm of his chair with a finger, to emphasise every word. ‘It may have caused us a problem years ago, that time when you took Jazz back to the States, but we got over that and we lived happily with our respective lifestyles afterwards. What’s wrong with our marriage now is not our work, and it’s not my guilt over my brother. . which I now accept was misplaced. . it’s us, you and me.’

‘You can’t tell me how I feel about you,’ Sarah protested.

‘I think I can. This year, when we were in America, and I had my health thing and decided afterwards. . wrongly, as you saw it. . that I had to come back here to defend my job, you had a fling, an affair. It ended badly, and okay, I know we said we wouldn’t speak of it again, but I have to. We started the other night, and we have to finish.’ He looked into her eyes. ‘I need to be honest about this, Sarah: I can’t look at you in the same way I did before. I hoped I would, but I can’t. That doesn’t mean I don’t love you, because I do; it means that my perception of you has changed.’

‘If it has,’ she said grimly, ‘it’s an ego thing. Go on, deny that.’

‘I won’t even try to. The idea that the great Bob Skinner’s wife could ever be truly attracted by another man never entered my head. But you could, and you were, so that’s me put in my place. Sure, I could try to dismiss it by telling myself you were angry with me at the time so it was really my fault, but I’d be kidding myself. You fancied him and he fancied you, and you had each other. So now when I’m feeling black. . you know, the shade beyond blue, where we all go sometimes. . I find myself asking myself, how many more times?’

‘So why not ask me?’

‘Okay, since we’ve been married, how many lovers have you had?’

‘You know how many.’

‘Accepted. Now, suppose you met someone who got you as hot as the guy in Buffalo did, and it was mutual. .’

Dangerous ground. ‘Bob. . that’s not going to happen,’ she exclaimed. She felt her cheeks flush and feared for a second that he had noticed, but he was looking away from her, up towards the ceiling.

‘You can’t say that,’ he murmured. ‘It’s happened once this year already. Look, I’m not going to ask you whether you would or you wouldn’t, one, because I think I can guess the truth, and two, much more important, because I think what you’re saying is that I don’t affect you like that any more, I don’t get you that hot. Be honest with me, I don’t, do I?’

She sank back into her chair, as if she was trying to make herself smaller. ‘Honestly? No,’ she admitted finally. ‘But whose fault is that?’ she challenged him.