Free Dying Flames by Robert Barnard

special?”
    â€œVery much so.”
    â€œThen I’d like it very much!”
    He liked her naïveté, but he also liked her quickness in picking up the implications of his words. When they had settled down and Christa had taken a Crunchie bar from her bag and contentedly worked her way through it, remarking that tea was some way away, she consciously ordered her thoughts, a process that was clearly visible in her young, impressionable face, then began.
    â€œRight. Well, I told you I wrote this young man a note telling him about Mum. I gave a fictitious name and said he could contact me through Darren Clarkson, that’s my boyfriend. He didn’t. He must have checked Mum’s name and address though, probably through the telephone directory. He contacted her direct, I think it must have been last Tuesday, early on, before she went to work, because when I got home in the evening after college, she was very not-with-it and disturbed. I dropped in at Halliburton’s—that’s the greengrocer’s—the next afternoon and they said she’d been acting odd all the day before. So I reckon he must have rung her, told her that he was the baby boy she’d given away twenty-five years ago, and talked over what had happened to him, what he’d done, in those years.”
    â€œThat sounds likely enough,” said Graham.
    â€œAnd Peggy—I often call her that—was naturally a bit shaken by that. They must have left it open if and when they’d meet, because it was a few days later before she began making hints that she’d like me out of the house on Monday evening. ‘Why, have you got a new man coming round?’ I asked. She wasn’t embarrassed or anything—she’s beyond that—but she just said, ‘Sort of,’ and went on insisting I find something to do on Monday evening. Finally I said I’d go along to my friend Josie’s, to put in some work on a college project I said we were doing.”
    Graham was silent. He still found it difficult to imagine the mental state of children whose mothers (or fathers, come to that) had a succession of partners. Flashing across his brain came an image of his mother at the sink washing up, or with a head scarf knotted around her hair, trotting off to the shops to get something nice for the family’s tea. He just nodded.
    â€œAnyway, Monday came, and after college I had some tea and then made a big show of getting books together for the project. I took all the impressive ones, and when Mum asked what the project was, I said it was ‘interdisciplinary.’ That floored her. Anyway, when she began to get nervy—it doesn’t take much these days—I waved her good-bye, left the house, and settled down in a garden four doors down, where the house is vacant and up for sale.”
    â€œSo as to catch a glimpse of him?”
    â€œYeah, and I didn’t have to wait long. You know Milton Terrace, don’t you?”
    â€œYes, I’ve been there.”
    â€œI know. Mrs. Poulson next door told me about this man asking after Mum, and I guessed it was you. Anyway, not many people come along it apart from the residents, and certainly not in the evening. So it didn’t take much detective skill to work out that the young man walking along looking at numbers was Terence John Telford.”
    â€œWhat was he like?”
    â€œNot like you. Not like Mum either, come to that.”
    â€œNo reason why he should be. I’d have said that people who looked like either of their parents were the exception rather than the rule.”
    â€œI’ve never really thought about it. Adam doesn’t look like either of his. I think I’m a bit like Mum, though only in looks. I’m not at all like her in character.”
    â€œYou prefer truth to fantasy?”
    She thought.
    â€œYes, I prefer the truth.”
    â€œYou still haven’t told me what this young man did look