Pitch Black

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

AS THOSE PRESENT started to leave, I stayed frozen to the spot. My flesh crawled at the lingering glances from people not sure whether they should come over and speak to me or just go. I was in no mood to talk to anyone, so I was grateful when my closest friends once more formed a wall to protect me from the crowd. Thankfully, their actions deterred most people from coming over.

I say most, because there’s always one.

In this case, the “one” was my husband’s Aunt Miriam. Not my favourite person on a good day, and if I’d made a list of the people I least wanted to cross paths with today, her name would have been right at the top of it, written in bold and underlined. She powered in my direction like a super-tanker, mourners scattering out of her way as she dragged her long-suffering husband along behind her, set on a collision course with yours truly.

Nick’s grip tightened around my elbow, and he silently asked me with his eyes if I wanted him to get rid of her.

“I’ll deal with it,” I whispered. Despite the circumstances, this wasn’t his battle to fight.

She ground to a halt in front of me, her ample figure carelessly squashed into a Chanel suit, teetering on a pair of Louboutin heels that I was surprised hadn’t buckled under the strain. I doubted her unsteadiness was entirely due to the unsuitability of her footwear, however. Miriam was fond of a few glasses of wine with her lunch. Or sometimes instead of her lunch. And for glasses, read bottles.

I schooled my expression into a blank mask as I prepared to face a woman who made the Ugly Sisters look like Cinderella, and who had as much tact as a herd of buffalo. As usual, Miriam got in before me. She always had to have the first word and the last. And most of the ones in between.

“I thought I should let you know how sorry I was to hear about Charles’s death,” she said, her voice dripping with more insincerity than the pastor’s.

She was the only person who called my husband Charles. He’d despised the name, but she still insisted on using it even when he continually asked her not to.

“It was good of you to take the time to come, Miriam. I’m sure he would have appreciated it.”

Not exactly true, because my husband cared for Miriam about as much as I did. He’d have appreciated it more if she’d moved to the next state. Or better still, the next continent.

“I always said he’d come to a nasty end if he kept associating with those unsavoury characters. If he’d become an accountant like my William, I’m sure all of this could have been avoided. A man needs a well-respected job to get on in life. You don’t see any of William’s friends at the country club getting murdered,” Miriam said.

Even in a situation like this, she couldn’t resist giving me a lecture. Miriam classed any man who rode a motorbike, or had a tattoo, or didn’t have a nine-to-five office job as an “unsavoury character.”

Most of our closest acquaintances fitted into one of those categories, whereas Miriam’s son, William, was about as exciting as a jellyfish and with slightly less backbone. William’s wife wasn’t too enamoured with him either. Only last week, I’d seen her stumbling out of the Quality Inn on the outskirts of town accompanied by the pizza delivery guy from Giuseppe’s. She’d worn the satisfied smile of a freshly f****d woman as she busily untucked her skirt from her knickers. The Quality Inn was one of those classy establishments where the honeymoon suite came with a mirror on the ceiling, a vibrating bed, and free all-you-can-watch p**n.

Still, this was a funeral, and I didn’t want to cause a scene, so I kept that little story to myself.

“He made his own decisions in life, Miriam.”

“Don’t we all know it? Some of them were worse than others.”

She looked pointedly at me when she said that, leaving me in no doubt which decision of his she was referring to. Miriam thought I was a trophy wife and a gold-digger. I knew this because she told my husband exactly that about a week after our wedding.

No “congratulations.” No “I hope you have a lovely future together.” I think her exact words were, “You’ve done what? Is she a hooker? I hope you’ve got a good lawyer.” Like I said, Miriam held me in high regard.

As I forced myself to resist the call of the Beretta Bobcat I knew Nick had strapped to his ankle, she continued, “And as for that security company he started…” She shook her head and her double chin wobbled. “Charles could have been a man of leisure, travelled the world. But what did he decide to do? Install burglar alarms and advise little old ladies on what locks to put on their front doors. A waste if you ask me.”

I didn’t ask her. And as a matter of fact, he’d made a pretty decent living, as did I, and his life had been a damn sight more exciting than William’s.

“You’re entitled to your own opinion.”

She had that smug little smile of a person convinced they were always right down to a tee. Oh, how I longed to remove it.

“By the way, when is the will being read?” she asked.

Ahhh. The real reason for her sudden interest became clear. She wanted money, yet she had the nerve to call me a gold-digger. Now probably wasn’t the best time to break it to her that there wouldn’t be a formal reading of the will, because I was the only person included in it, and I already knew what it said.

“Nothing’s been arranged yet,” I said truthfully.

I wasn’t about to give her the bad news at the funeral and have her raising hell. The reporters camped outside would have had a field day with that. If we were somewhere else, I’d have told her that her numbers hadn’t come up just to see the look on her face. If I was really lucky, she’d get so pissed she’d give herself a stroke.

“Well, be sure to let me know when it’s organised. It’s never good to delay these things, you know.”

I didn’t have to answer because Miriam turned on her heel and left, trailed by her poor hubby. He was a good deal younger than her and had started out as the pool boy before he made the biggest mistake of his life. Another man blinded by money. There wasn’t a lot else to love about her, and unsurprisingly, he seemed to have spent the last decade regretting their union. The poor guy’s only hope left in life was that she’d cark it first so he could finally get some peace. She’d never divorce him because he’d get half of her cash—not that there was much left seeing as she’d drunk most of it.

Somewhere in the years since their marriage, the dumb schmuck had lost his hair and gone soft around the middle. Now, he looked more like the Pillsbury Doughboy and less like the arm candy that Miriam originally chose. From the way she always snapped at him, the feeling of disharmony was mutual. They spent most of their time sitting around the country club, bickering. It truly was a match made in heaven.

I watched Miriam’s super-sized backside disappear towards the parking lot, where she ploughed through the waiting mob of reporters like they were skittles. Strike one for Miriam.

“Ready to go?” Nick asked.

I looked up at him. Over the past few days, he’d developed worry lines around his eyes, and the dark circles underneath showed the toll recent events had taken. And it wasn’t just him. I saw the same effect on all the team. After what happened at the Green Mountain Hotel, life would never be the same for any of us.

I took a deep breath and did a mental check. My hair looked okay, my eyes were dry, and I was calm enough that I wouldn’t lose it at a photographer. In truth, I wasn’t ready to leave my husband for the final time, but I knew I couldn’t stay.

“Better get it over with,” I replied.

My guys immediately formed up again, and we headed back towards the cars. Between the umbrella above and the bodies around me, there wasn’t much for the press to see. I kept my head down, careful not to make eye contact with any of them, but that didn’t stop them yelling more questions as we pushed past. They were worse this time.

“Is it true you’re being investigated over your husband’s death?”

Like I was going to answer that.

“Was your husband an enforcer for the Russian mob?”

Seriously?

“Did your husband die over an arms deal gone wrong?”

That guy must have been on a break from the Hollywood slot.

“Were you having an affair with another man?”

None of your f*****g business.

“Was your marriage in trouble?”

Fuck.

“Did you hire someone to kill your husband?”

Off.

Curses hovered on the tip of my tongue, but I refused to let them fly. Some of the reporters had digital recorders, and they’d have just loved to get my tirade on tape. They were fishing, hoping someone would take a bite so they could splash their trash across the front page. They obviously hadn’t managed to dig up anything good on my husband’s life or death, or on me either, and I refused to get riled or let them see me upset. But that someone could think those things hurt more than I cared to admit.

We made it over to my car, and I bleeped the locks. Nick pulled open the driver’s door and looked down at me.

“Still sure you want to go by yourself? I can drive if you like,” he said.

“Let you drive my car? Nice try, but you’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Thought that would be a long shot. I can just ride with you if you want company?”

“I need a few minutes on my own. I’ll meet you back at the house later.”

In reality, I felt as if I was going to break down, and I didn’t want Nick or anyone else around to witness it. I’d never been good at expressing my feelings. I guess most people learned that sort of thing from their parents, but I’d never had that education. The overriding emotion my mother showed me as a child was indifference, interspersed with the occasional angry outburst.

The last time I cried was etched vividly in my mind. At eight years old, I’d just had a run-in with my mother’s latest boyfriend, a skinny man everyone just called Dog. I always found that odd because he smelled perpetually of fish and looked like a rat. That evening, he’d just taken his belt to me for the heinous crime of eating the last tin of baked beans.

“Those were mine, you little b***h. You don’t take what’s mine.”

“I-I-I didn’t know.”

I’d felt sick with hunger, and there wasn’t any other food in the house, but he lifted up my top and thrashed me, anyway. One, two, three, four, five lashes. My back burned, and I started to cry.

That only made him angrier.

“Shut up. Shut up! You’re always snivelling. If I hear you do that again, I’ll take more than my belt to you.”

With every word that passed his lips, I shrank back further into the corner. I knew he meant what he said.

So, I never cried after that.

Emotions like hope and happiness were foreign concepts to me. At school, I’d always been the outcast. A memory of seven-year-old me flitted through my mind, rushing out the door at the end of another day in hell. Or rather, St. Joseph’s First School. I’d almost made it to freedom when a foot across the threshold sent me sprawling. A dainty foot encased in a pink patent pump with little bows. I followed the leg upwards and found Katie Mitchell sneering at me. As her little gang of cronies looked on, she’d raised her heel and ground it down on my Mickey Mouse pencil sharpener. I’d coveted that thing in the newsagent’s for weeks before I finally plucked up the courage to steal it.

Katie’s pretty shoes were no match for my ugly second-hand lace-ups, and when I kicked her in the shin, the teacher came running at her wail. I got sent to the headmaster’s office. Again.

Even now, I could still feel the condescending looks of those kids, and their cruel taunts would forever play in my head. I never got invited for play dates or to birthday parties, and even if I had been, I could never have reciprocated. My mother resented being lumbered with one child without having to care for somebody else’s for the day as well. Not that she did much caring. I’d been fending for myself for as long as I could remember while also looking after my mother as best I could. She’d never kept a job for long, and money was always tight. A good weekend for me meant finding enough food to have a meal on both days and managing to stay out of range of whichever waste of space boyfriend she’d installed in her bed that month.

The one emotion I became overly familiar with as a child was fear. Fear is a choice. An important lesson and one I learned too young. First, I worked out how to hide it, and then how to conquer it. Succumbing to fear never helped my situation, but acting scared encouraged people to take advantage of me. Standing up to the school bullies meant they left me alone, even if it did get me labelled as a problem child.

At home, the most sensible option was to avoid my mother’s boyfriends. The best of them ignored me back. Others took their anger out on me, shouting for every perceived wrong before they raised their fists, but they weren’t the worst. No, those were the men who had a special spot reserved in hell, the ones who started out nice, too nice, but then touched me in ways that even at that age I knew were wrong. I’d spent a lot of time hiding under my bed, and when I outgrew that, the wardrobe became my refuge. By the time I got too big for the wardrobe, I was old enough to keep out of the house altogether.

As an eight-year-old girl, I’d perfected the art of the blank face and still body. A faultless mask. It served me well as a child, and it continued to do so as an adult. Nick, one of the few people who knew anything about my upbringing, took a good look at me and understood I’d shut down.

He wrapped me up in a hug and leaned over, dropping a soft kiss on the top of my head.

“Okay, baby, I’ll see you soon.”

Please, just leave me alone. If I hid myself away like the scared child I once was, nobody could touch me. Not the hordes who thought they were helping and not the cops, either.

We’d given them a chance to do their thing in the fortnight since my husband died, but they hadn’t made a whole lot of progress. In fact, they hadn’t come up with a single line of enquiry other than to question me, and I knew I didn’t kill him, so I was already one step ahead of them there.

I also had access to my husband’s files, which the cops didn’t, and with his line of work, there might be a link in those to whoever murdered him. My investigators were better than the police anyway, of that I was sure. If the killer was going to be found, it would be by us, not them.

Nick closed the car door, and I started the engine. As I pulled forward, my foot on the throttle giving a warning growl, an explosion of flashbulbs lit up the grey sky. Thanks to my illegally tinted windows, the reporters weren’t going to get much, but I still wanted to jam their cameras into their mouths and force them to chew on the jagged remains. Death by telephoto lens.

Teeth clenched, I showered the rabble with gravel as I pulled out of the parking lot then floored it towards the highway that would take me home.