Shaun Hutson: Death Day

'What's up?' asked Steve, taking the fag he was offered.

'My bloody watch has stopped,' Mackenzie told him.

Steve rolled up his sleeve, his forehead creasing. He tapped the face of his own timepiece.

'So has mine,' he exclaimed, extending his arm so that Mackenzie could see. The twin hands were immobile.

Stuck at 9:30.

Lambert parked the Capri in the small driveway beside the house and got out. The next door cat scampered across the front lawn as he walked up the path to the back door and he hissed at it. The startled animal spun round and fled off through a hole in the fence. Lambert smiled thinly to himself.

He found his back door key and let himself in. It was after nine-thirty so he knew that Debbie would be gone. She always left well before nine, sometimes before he even drove for the cemetery. The kitchen smelt of pine and new wood, and Lambert inhaled deeply. He crossed to the kitchen table and sat down, noting that two letters were propped up against the tea pot. He smiled again. Although the letters were addressed to Mr and Mrs T. Lambert, Debbie had left them for him to open. She always did. He considered the envelopes for a moment then dropped them back onto the table and crossed to the sink to fill the kettle. He stood for a moment, looking out of the back window, thinking how badly the grass needed cutting. The gardens on either side were in a worse state and that, at least, comforted him somewhat.

Their house was roomy, semi-detached, with three bedrooms, a dining room, kitchen and spacious living room. The third bedroom was to be used as a nursery when, and if, the need ever arose. Lambert looked down into the aluminum bottom of the sink and saw his own distorted image staring back at him. At the present time, there was no talk of children. Both he and Debbie had promising careers: he was one of the youngest Inspectors in the Midlands force and Debbie was chief librarian at the large Victorian looking building in the centre of Medworth. Lambert shook his head. An Inspector in charge of a force of less than twelve. That was police logic for you.

The shrill whistling of the kettle interrupted his thoughts. He made the tea, poured himself a cup and carried it into the living room where the daily paper was waiting on the arm of his chair. Debbie again. God how he loved that girl. He suddenly began to feel warmer, the incidents of the morning gradually subsiding. Diminishing but never fading.

He flicked through the paper, hardly seeing the words, then he folded it up and stuck it in the paper rack. Lambert gazed across at the bay window.

It was the inactivity more than anything which wore him down. The same routine every day, stuck in the house trying to find jobs that he'd already done two days before. The doctor had told him to rest for a month after the accident, but the time was dragging into an eternity. He glanced down at the phone on the table beside his chair and rubbed his chin contemplatively. Should he ring the station? Just to find out if they needed him for anything?

He grunted and turned away, warming his hands around the mug of steaming tea. He eyed the phone again but, instead, went and retrieved the letters from the kitchen. He tore the first of them open, knowing from the 'Private' stamp on the top left hand corner that it was a bill of some sort. Electricity. He muttered something to himself and re-folded it then tore open the second.

It was from his mother. He read it briefly, not really seeing the words on the blue tinted pages. Everything was all right, his father was fine. Hope he was feeling better. Etc., etc., etc. Tactfully no mention of Mike. He pushed the letter to one side and finished his tea. The same old crap every time. Debbie usually replied to them. Lambert picked up the letter once more and read the line which never failed to annoy him.

'Your father is fine.'

He threw it down. Father. Fucking stepfather. His own father had been dead for ten years. Lambert had watched him die, day by day. A little at a time. He remembered coming home from school every dinner time when he was twelve and finding his father sitting at the table, the bottle of whisky gripped in his palsied hand. Lambert hated him for his drinking, he hated him for what it had made him. But most of all, he hated his mother because she was the reason his father had begun drinking in the first place. Her and her fancy man. Mr Ted bloody Grover. 'Your father.' His new father, his fucking stepfather.

He tore the letter up savagely, hurling the pieces away from him in rage, his breath coming in short gasps.

Cirrhosis of the liver had caused his real father's death. Or precipitated it anyway. Lambert remembered finding him that day. His head thrown back, his eyes open. The yellow blobs of vomit still on his lips, the empty bottle gripped in his rigid fingers. Choked on his own puke.

Why was it, Lambert thought, that the painful memories always stayed more vivid than the pleasant ones? To him at any rate.

He reached for the phone and dialled Medworth police station. The phone rang a couple of times, then was picked up.

'Medworth Police Station,' the voice said.

Lambert smiled, recognizing the voice as sergeant Vic Hayes.

'Morning, Vic,' he said.

'How you keeping, sir?'

'Not bad. What's doing?'

There was a pause at the other end as Hayes tried to think of something he could tell his superior. His tone sounded almost apologetic, 'Nothing really. Mrs Short lost her purse in the Bingo hall, she thinks it was nicked. Two kids took a bike from outside old man Sudbury's shop and I've got bloody flu, that's all I can tell you.' The sentence was finished off with an almighty sneeze.

Lambert nodded, 'So there's nothing worth me coming in for?'

'No, sir. Anyway, aren't you supposed to be resting? I heard that the doctor gave you a month off.'

'How the hell do you know that?' asked Lambert, good naturedly.

'I bumped into your wife the other day,' Hayes explained. There was silence for a moment, then the sergeant said, 'By the way, sir, we were all very sorry about what happened.'

Lambert cut him short, 'Thanks.' He moved hurriedly on. 'Look, Vic, if anything does turn up, let me know, will you? Sitting at home here is driving me up the bloody wall.'

'Will do, sir.'

They said their goodbyes and Lambert hung up, plunged once more into the silence of the room. He clapped his hands together as if trying to shake himself free of the lethargy which gripped him. He got up, tired of the silence, and crossed to the record player. He selected the loudest recording that they had in their collection and dropped it onto the turntable.

Someone thundered out 'Long Live Rock & Roll' and Lambert went back into the kitchen to make himself some breakfast.

Already, the emotions were slipping to the back of his mind, waiting to be stirred perhaps the next day, but, for now, he began to feel brighter.

'Long Live Rock & Roll' blasted on.

Debbie Lambert looked at her watch and noted with delight that it was nearly one o'clock. She took off her glasses and massaged the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. There was a nagging ache behind her eyes and she closed them for a moment. The ledgers lay before her as if defying her to carry on work. This was the only part of her job she hated. Cataloguing. She was thankful it only happened once a year. Every book in the library, all 35,624 of them, had to be listed by author, publisher and serial number. She'd been working at it now for more than a week and hadn't even got half way. She resolved to take some of it home with her that night.

Mondays were usually quiet, but today there were agitated babblings from the direction of the children's section. A party of twenty kids from the local infants school had been brought in with the idea of introducing them to the delights of a library. Debbie could see two of the little darlings giggling uncontrollably as they pawed through a book on early erotic art. She barely suppressed a grin herself, especially when the kids looked up and saw her watching them. They both turned the colour of a pillar box and hurriedly replaced the book.