Free The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes Page B

it felt much later. I offered Miranda a lift home. She was on her feet before I’d finished speaking.
    I offered Jackie Tyrrell some money for the dinner, but she forced it back into my hand and pulled me down until we were eye to eye. Her face was fixed in a comedy leer; her breath was a yeasty cloud of alcohol; I thought she was going to kiss me, and didn’t see what I could do if she did, but when I looked her in the eye, she fixed me with an unexpectedly clear gaze.
    "Call me. We need to talk," she said quietly, urgently, and then pushed me from her and yelled with laughter as if she’d propositioned me. I waved good-bye to Proby from a distance, not wanting to risk giving him my hand again for fear I’d never get it back.
    "See you racing!" he bellowed twice as we were leaving.
    When we got out into the night, the rain was falling softly. I opened my coat and turned to Miranda Hart to see if she needed it. She snaked her arms inside it and around my neck and pulled my mouth down onto hers and kissed me; she smelled of oranges and salt; when I opened my eyes, all I could see was the shimmer of the streetlights in the rain. I thought for a second they were stars.
    "What happened to your gum?" I said.
    Her tongue snaked quickly out of her mouth with a little wad of chewing gum on its tip, then vanished again, to be replaced by a smile.
    "Come home with me," she said. "And I’ll show you how I did it."
    She reached up to my mouth and wiped it with her hand. It came away red with her lipstick, and she waved it in front of me and grinned.
    As we walked down Merrion Street to my car, amid weaving groups of happy and belligerent and bedraggled drunks, shiny and sodden in the damp night, I straightened the bills Jackie Tyrrell had crushed into my hand and put them in my wallet. Among them, I found her business card. On one side was printed:
The Jackie Tyrrell Riding Academy for Girls, Tibradden Road,
along with her phone numbers. On the back, in red ink, she had printed:
     
PATRICK AND LEO
RODE TOGETHER
     
     
     

SIX
     
     
       I saw Miranda Hart to her door and touched her arm and made to leave. She grabbed my hand and pulled me close and kissed me again.
    "I can’t stay," I said.
    "I don’t want you to stay all night," she said. "Just long enough."
    She held on to me with one hand while she worked the key in the lock. It occurred to me that if I was going to stop sleeping with clients, or with women implicated on some level in the cases I worked, now would be the time to start. But I didn’t. What’s more, I didn’t want to. Miranda Hart dragged me into the darkened living room and pushed me onto the couch and fell on top of me; she was wild and ardent at first; then, after a while, there were tears in her eyes, and she said,
    "Maybe this is not such a good idea," and I said,
    "Now she tells me," struggling to get the words out, and then,
    "Do you want to stop?" and she said,
    "Fuck no, do you?" and I said,
    "No I don’t," and she said,
    "Come on then. Come on, come on."
    It wasn’t how I thought it would be, at once gentler and more passionate; afterward, she cried a little. When she asked me what I wanted to drink, I said, "Gin," and she said, "Good idea." I’d be late for Dave Donnelly, but I couldn’t leave, not just yet. What’s more, I didn’t want to. We sat in the living room, both on the sofa, half dressed, the light from the kitchen bleeding into the dark, reflecting off the glass doors at the other end that gave onto a small garden. I could see her chewing, and shook my head in wonder. Where did she keep it? It was a gift that passed all understanding.
    "Sorry about that," she said.
    "Sorry about what?" I said.
    "You know. The make-up-your-fucking-mind, the tears, the all-round crapness. Being messy. Behaving like a girl. I thought I could just…"
    I took her hand and held it.
    "We all think we can just…and sometimes we can, and sometimes it doesn’t work out that way."
    "Just the day, you