Val McDermid - The Grave Tattoo

Lost in Byron’s Childe Harold , the time raced away, and Tenille was surprised when the skinny, acned counter boy leaned on his brush opposite her table and said, ‘We’re closing.’ She grabbed her stuff and made for the door, checking her watch. Half past ten. And the rain had stopped, which meant she could dawdle home, hoodie pulled tight round her head against the wind.

It was quarter past eleven when Tenille inched her key into the lock and opened the front door without a sound. She slid into the darkened hall silent as a shadow, her senses sharpened by the prickle of fear. A cone of faint flickering light spilled into the hall from the half-open living-room door. She could hear the muted drawl of American accents from the TV. Her nose screwed up in a grimace, identifying the sweet of dope smoke and the sour of beer. She risked a quick peek round the door frame. Geno lay sprawled on the sofa, legs apart, one hand lying along the inside of his thigh, the other dangling towards the floor. His head lay back against the greasy mock velvet, his mouth open, a trickle of drool glistening at one corner. Pissed and passed out , she thought, relief and contempt mingling satisfactorily.

Tenille crept to her room and silently pulled her chest of drawers across the closed door. Without taking her clothes off, she slid under her lumpy duvet and eased herself to sleep with dark fantasies of a razor-sharp blade making a second red mouth in the invitingly exposed throat of Geno Marley.

‘I know you, sir,’ I said when I had overcome my surprise enough to speak. I told him that I had believed him either dead or else many hundreds of miles from these parts & that I had thought never to see him more. He said that he was as good as dead if any of His Majesty’s men should clap eyes upon him & that he hoped he could count himself safe in my mercy. I gave him assurance that the good offices of his brother had placed me in his family’s debt & that I would keep his confidences close in my own breast. He thanked me & shook. Me by the hand so that I could not fail to notice how yet he suffers the profound perspiration of the palms that so afflicted him as a boy & into his early manhood. Any-final doubts of mine were cast to the four winds at that pressing of the flesh.

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