Free Holloway Falls by Neil Cross

had contracted following the breakdown of his marriage. His office was located on a Bradford backstreet, above a launderette whose own sign seemed faded by one wash too many. They met in a workman’s café next door, huddled in fixed plastic chairs over a Formica table.
    Bliss was a neat, rotund and discretely salacious man with a sparrow’s quizzical, orbicular head. He was perhaps five feet four inches in his stockinged feet. He was charming, deferential, effeminate. Clipped, militaristic diction.
    Holloway poured sugar into strong tea. For a long time he stirred it, using a brown-stained teaspoon.
    He explained what he wanted.
    Bliss was to follow Kate and report back to him every week, advising him of where she had been and who she had seen.
    By which he meant who she had slept with.
    Two weeks later they met again. Bliss stood in Holloway’s doorway. He wore Farrah slacks and a police-style sweater over a checked shirt. He handed Holloway a video cassette.
    Holloway’s stomach went cold and his bowels loosened.
    He asked Bliss inside.
    He sat and put his head in his hands. He said: ‘Oh God.’
    Tenderly, Bliss put the tape in the VCR and turned on the television. His shallow breathing accelerated until it synchronized with the muttered profanities of Kate’s approaching orgasm. She ground her pubis against the boy in a slow sickle motion, moaned as if in pain. The boy muttered something. Slapped her thigh. The tinny impact registered shockingly clearly. Kate hung her head and brushed the wet fringe from her eyes.
    In the grey half-light, the boy’s exposed cock shone like Vaseline. Kate lay on her back. Muttered something humourless when the boy slid inside her. His response was too low for the microphone to register. He buried his face in the crook of her neck. He arched his spine and the cheeks of his ass tightened like a fist. Kate’s eyes rolled white, like a predating shark.
    Holloway asked who the boy was. It took him three attempts to get the words out.
    Bliss smiled with fraternal sadness.
    ‘He’s a student. David Bishop. University of Leeds. First year, engineering.’
    Bliss said he must go. He excused himself to go to the lavatory. Then, in the hallway, Holloway counted cash into his smooth palm, fragrant with soap.
    Bliss left him a business card. He shook Holloway’s hand, wished him luck for the future, and left.
    Holloway closed the door. He wiped the palm of his hand on the wall, screwed up the business card in his fist, and dropped it into the kitchen bin.
    Later, he found beads of semen on the toilet seat.
    Some months later, Holloway had occasion to go looking for Derek Bliss. He found that he lived alone in a pretty, stone-built cottage on the edge of Harrogate. Holloway arrived at his bedroom window under cover of darkness. Up the sleeve of his jacket was concealed a tyre-iron.
    Shortly after he broke in, it became apparent that Derek Bliss was gone.
    The wardrobes were full. There was milk in the fridge, dating to the previous week. Last Monday’s Telegraph . Junk mail had massed like a snow drift on the coarse mat beneath the letterbox.
    Perhaps Bliss had intuited that Holloway would not tolerate having him around, knowing what he knew. Perhaps not. For whatever reason, he’d gone and he never came back.
    A full winter passed before somebody, a neighbour, grew curious about some unattended snow damage to the cottage and called the police.
    Through the cold, dark months, Holloway’s necessarily tentative efforts to locate Bliss had failed. It was summer before he learned via some offhand copper’s comment, that Bliss had died shortly before Christmas. He had been several weeks into an extended Australian vacation.
    Holloway never learned the full story. Soon, he relocated to Bristol. Since then, he’d thought about Bliss at most infrequently. Sometimes, not often, he truly believed him to be dead. Other times, he imagined him, leering and reddened and glazed like a suckling pig,