Quintin Jardine: Gallery Whispers

'How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?'

She looked at him across the dinner table, with a light, indulgent smile. 'Okay,' she said, quietly. "Let's have it.'

He beamed, in his small triumph. 'One.' He barked the word out, and in that instant his heavy eyebrows seemed to slam together in a frown. '… and that's not funny!'

Olive shook her head. 'You're not wrong there.'

Lauren, seated on his right, looked up at her father. 'I don't get that, Dad.'

He grinned. 'No, I suppose you're still a couple of years short of getting it.'

'Oh,' said the child. 'Do you have to be twelve before you can be a feminist?'

Neil gazed down at her, bland innocence written on her small round face, and realised yet again that if ever there was a mother's daughter it was Lauren Barbara Mcllhenney.

A small hand tugged at his shirt-sleeve. 'Daddy, Daddy!' Spencer shouted, eagerly. 'Did you hear the one about the Hearts supporter who went into a pub with an alligator?'

He laughed as he ruffled his son's thick fair hair. 'Aye, I did, Spence, often. The first time I heard it, it was a Celtic supporter that had the alligator. Don't you go telling that sort of joke outside, though.

You could get into real trouble if the wrong lad heard you.'

'And you could get into real trouble if the wrong woman heard you tell that other one,' Olive countered. 'Wherever did you pick it up anyway?'

'From Karen Neville.'

'Neville? Isn't she the new DS in Andy Martin's office?'

'That's the one. Not so new now, though. She's been there a right few weeks now.'

'Mum, can Spence and me leave the table? It's nearly time for the Holiday programme.'

She turned to her daughter and raised an eyebrow. It was enough.

'Sorry. May Spence and I leave the table?'

'That's better. Have both of you finished all your homework?'

Lauren and Spencer nodded in tandem.

'Very well; you may.'

Neil Mcllhenney gazed at his children as they ran from the small dining room and across the hall. 'A gentleman's family,' his father-inlaw, Joe Baxter, had pronounced after Spencer's birth. Son and daughter. One of each.

'I'll get the coffee,' he said, rising from his carver chair. 'You want milk in yours, or just black?'

'Have we any of that Bailey's left?' she asked him. 'If so, I'll take some of that in it.' He nodded.

Olive, in her turn, watched her husband as he left the room. Neil wasn't exactly fat, but over the thirteen years of their marriage, he had gained over two stone. Sure, he had a massive frame to carry it, but still, every time she thought of Chic, his father, and remembered the sudden awfulness of his death at the party for Spencer's christening, she felt a pang of fear for him. Chic had been fifty-four, a big, bulky man like his son. And he was only two years short of forty.

Without warning she felt another type of pang as the cough reflex kicked in.

Neil, in the kitchen, heard the paroxysm, then the quick puff of the inhaler as the fit settled down. This wasn't right; it wasn't bloody right. Anybody who knew them well would have realised that, simply by the fact that he was there making the coffee. Everyone in their circle knew that Olive couldn't stand his bloody coffee. Christ, she'd told them often enough. He either used too much or not enough, or ruined it by putting in too much milk, or made it straight from a boiling kettle and damn near scalded her. Now here she was letting him make the Kenco without a murmur. Indeed it was not bloody right.

'D'you not think you should go back to the doctor?' he asked, as he set a mug, its contents heavily laced with the last of the Irish cream liqueur, on the coaster which lay before her on the table.

She shot him the stare; the full, high-intensity spine-chiller that he knew so well, the laser look she could snap on in an instant. 'Olive's Silencer', her colleagues called it in the staff-room, in their awe at her ability to bring order to the rowdiest class without ever raising her voice.

'No I do not,' she retorted. 'I have asthma. The doctor's told me that, and she's given me my inhaler. She warned me that the cough would come and go.'

'It's the "go" part that I'm concerned about, love. Surely she could give you something that would settle it a bit quicker.'

'I'll be all right,' she snapped. 'Now pack it in. Change the subject.

What sort of a day did you have? What's the news on the Chief?'

Neil backed off, for that moment at least. 'He's coming on,' he said. 'The boss says that he has another appointment with the heart specialist in Spain next Tuesday. If that goes okay they'll let him come home, provided that they take at least three days for the journey and that Lady Proud does most of the driving.'

'When will he be back at work?'

'There's no news on that yet. I understand from the boss that one of the force examiners will have to pass him fit before he can come back. The moment can't come soon enough for Big Bob, I can tell you. He hates every day he spends in that office.'

Olive smiled. 'I'm sure he's just saying that, in case anyone thinks he's trying to undermine the Chief. He's probably loving it, really.'

Her husband shook his head. 'DCC Skinner is many things, but he ain't that subtle. He doesn't like being tied to a desk, and he never will. I'm his executive assistant. I know this.'

'What if the Chief doesn't come back?' she asked. 'What would he do then?'

'Ah, but the Chief will be back. It was only a mild heart attack.

They've put him on light medication and given him a diet.'

He paused, and she seized her chance. 'Speaking of diets, Neil Mcllhenney; you could do with losing some weight.'

Elbows on the table, shoulders hunched, head bowed, he looked across at her; his look this time, out from under his heavy, beetling eyebrows with a secret smile that went right into her soul, and told her, far more eloquently than the words which now they used to each other only occasionally, how much he loved her.

'Christ,' he rumbled in his slow, deep voice. 'She sits there with bloody Bailey's in her coffee, and tells me to lose weight!'

He watched her as she slept. She lay on her right side, and although he could not see her face, he knew that her hand would be on the pillow, the thumb gently brushing her lips in an unconscious gesture which he had always guessed was a relic of a childhood habit. Her dark hair, thick and wavy, tousled at the ends from their energetic lovemaking, clung to her neck and shoulders.

Her back was to him as he looked at her, admiring the curve of her hip in profile against the street light which shone outside their curtained window. He had lain like this often before, sometimes unable to keep from touching her, from running a finger-tip softly down her spine, knowing what it did to her and that within a few minutes she would be awake and they would be locked together again.

Yet on this night her turned back seemed to him to be a rejection, for all her commitment in their coupling only a few hours before. It had been satisfying for each of them, yet there had been none of the sense of spiritual union which they had known at the beginning of their partnership. That was one of the things which had set her apart from the other women who had lain in his bed, before he had found her and she had tamed him. Yet now it was, at best misplaced, or worse, he feared, lost.

'What's the matter?'

She did not stir as she spoke her question, but her voice was clear, and wide-awake.

'Nothing,' he answered, softly. 'I'm just thinking, that's all.'

'About what?'

'Och, just the job. You know.'

'But the job's been quiet for the last wee while.' She paused. 'Are you still having flashbacks to that man with the gun?'