Free The Sun Will Still Shine Tomorrow by Ken Scott Page A

colleagues. He pulled a few personal items from his locker and climbed the stairs from the station into the gloom of the Newcastle day. He was in a daze, this couldn’t be happening.
    Alexis. Alexis again. Why did she always come back to him in the bleak periods of his life? She would be halfway through her contract now. At first he’d tried to call her but every time he’d rung her mobile he’d been cut off. Eventually, after a few days, it didn’t even ring out, an obvious sign that she’d replaced the phone.
    He’d tried to see her anywhere and everywhere. He’d been to her office, away on a training course, they’d said but refused to tell him where. And her mother’s house in Chiswick. Four times, he’d been, and four times her parents had stood on the step and refused him entry. Her mother stood with tears in her eyes, swore blind she hadn’t moved back to the family home and yet… something… something didn’t ring true. Joanna Brody was hiding something. And why had she looked so sad when Ashley turned away?
    “Take care, Ash,” she had shouted after him as he reluctantly made his way down the red gravel driveway to the road. Each step felt like he was placing a million miles between himself and Alexis.
    He had lost her.
    As he reached the bottom of the drive he just knew he had lost her.
    His mobile phone rang. The name Holy John flashed up on the display.
    “Ash? Where the hell are you?”Ashley pressed end and turned right towards the central motorway and cursed the draconian licensing laws of England. He walked and walked. He walked the familiar streets of Jesmond, through Armstrong Park and down into Heaton and Byker. He stood at the top of Walker Road and watched the huge cranes of Swan Hunter shipyard. The day he left school, a quarter of his classmates made the short trip across town and began their working lives there. It was a job for life, the careers officer had said, and his father had tried oh so hard to make Ash stay at home.
    “A good job at the shipyards. London’s streets aren’t paved with gold,” he’d said.”Stay where you belong, son.”
    The sight of the cranes had depressed him then just as much as they did now. He pulled up the collar of his coat, cast an eye up to the ever-darkening sky and picked up the pace.
    At eleven o’clock, he watched as the tiny double doors of the Queens Arms in Shieldfield opened. He took a quick look around him then headed for the opening. He wanted to think that the Queens hadn’t changed, but it had. In his early twenties he’d return home to Newcastle at every opportunity and, more often than not, the hours were spent in this small welcoming hostelry, a stone’s throw from Newcastle city centre.
    At one thirty-seven, a familiar face sat down at his table.
    “I’ve heard the bad news, Ash,” John Markham said with a voice that reeked sympathy. “Roddam came down before lunchtime and briefed the team.”
    Ashley nodded a hello in his direction and shrugged his shoulders as if to say who cares.
    But he did care.
    “I put out a call to the uniforms; a few of them had spotted you over Heaton, then walking along Byker Bridge. I figured you’d need a drink or two, heard this place was an old haunt of yours.”
    Ashley smiled. The beer had began to kick in; so too had the Talisker single malt. He gave a prayer of thanks to Bacchus. He felt at ease with the world, as if nothing really mattered. He hadn’t thought about what tomorrow might bring or the day after.
    “Rod dam’s a good guy, Ash; reckons he’ll have you back within a week or two. He’s backing you all the way.” John Markham laughed.”He had a quiet word with me, reckons you were a bit out of order up there. Won’t take it any further though.”
    John Markham sat with Ashley for another two hours and made no attempt to persuade him to leave. Each time he asked for another drink, Markham obeyed his command.
    Ashley’s speech was now slurred and on what was to be his