Free No Cure For Love by Peter Robinson Page B

plummy Brit accent.
    ‘Well, pardon me for mentioning it.’
    Sarah laughed. Same old Paula, prickly as a cactus, quick to take offence when none was intended.
    Finally, they arrived at the car park and found the red Nissan.
    ‘Unless you’ve learned to drive since you were last here, love,’ Paula said, ‘I’d try the other side.’
    Sarah blushed. ‘Sorry.’ She’d gone automatically to the driver’s side. She got in the correct side and fastened her seat belt. ‘How was the drive over?’ she asked.
    Paula lit a cigarette and breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Not bad. Roadworks near Barton bridge and an accident just past Huddersfield, but other than that . . .’ She negotiated her way out of the car park, refusing Sarah’s offer of money to pay the man in the booth, and headed for the motorway. ‘It’s a bloody maze round here,’ she muttered.
    The car felt cramped and tinny to Sarah after Stuart’s gigantic hunk of Detroit steel. She wriggled around in the seat to get comfortable, but still the roof was too near to her head and the windshield too close to her face. Cars made her more nervous than planes, which was one reason why she had never learned to drive. The smoke made her cough.
    ‘All right?’ Paula cast her a sideways glance.
    ‘Yes, fine.’
    ‘I’ll open the window if you want.’
    ‘No, it’s all right.’
    ‘Really. I don’t mind. It’s no trouble.’
    ‘Well, maybe just an inch or so.’
    Paula opened the window a crack and pretended to shiver. The draught blew the smoke right into Sarah’s face.
    ‘Shit!’ Paula missed a turning and went around the roundabout again. Sarah thought of the little roundabout in Venice, one of the few she had seen in the United States. She felt a momentary pang of homesickness for her beach house. It was the only place where she had felt truly at home in years, perhaps because it was where she had started putting her life back together after Gary.
    But thinking of the house also brought to mind a fleeting image of the severed arm and the heart in the sand. Then she remembered the letter she had slipped in her luggage, unopened. She had found it when she dropped by the house with Stuart to pack – at the last minute, as usual – before going to the airport.
    She looked out of the window and saw a local diesel train rattling along beside a canal. Two boys stood on the stone banks leaning over the water with fishing nets. She doubted they had much hope of catching anything there in December, mild as it was. A yellow sign showing a man digging with a shovel appeared by the side of the road, then another. Soon the motorway was reduced to two lanes and they were crawling along between a silver Peugeot and a juggernaut from Barcelona. But there were no men digging with shovels.
    Only when they had left the Manchester conurbation behind did Paula seem to relax at all. She still sat hunched forward in her seat, though, gripping the steering-wheel so hard her knuckles were white and squinting at the road and the cars ahead as if they were some sort of malevolent entities bent on her destruction. She doesn’t like driving, Sarah realized. It must run in the family. Her father and mother, she remembered, had never owned or driven a car in their lives.
    Soon the Pennines loomed ahead, furry green hillsides made eerie by mist swirling on their lower slopes.
    There was still plenty of traffic on the motorway as it passed through the grimy urban sprawl round Rochdale and Oldham, but the cars thinned out as it climbed a long, slow hill and cut a swath through the Pennines.
    All around, sheep grazed and becks and streams trickled through deep clefts in the dark green hillsides, flashing in the winter sun. They passed lonely barns, hamlets, small stone bridges, a reservoir. At one point the motorway got so high up that Sarah’s ears went funny like they did on the plane. She yawned.
    Paula glanced sideways again. ‘Tired? You’re quite a hit over here, you know.