Free Pain of Death by Adam Creed

no point going back to Bridget until he knows more about Sean, until he has spoken to Sean. In the meantime, he has come to see Kerry’s children.
    The foster parents, John and Sheila Archibald, are more than enough to scare the bejesus out of any child, standing in the porch of their interwar semi on the outskirt sprawl that is the Finchley Road. All they need is a pitchfork and a pig out back to be straight from Hopper’s Midwest.
    ‘You don’t look like a policeman,’ says Mr Archibald, squinting at Staffe’s warrant card, his beige-coloured tongue poking out between his fat, wet, ox-blood lips.
    ‘The sooner they’re in, the sooner they’re gone,’ says Sheila. ‘And you won’t be dragging our name in no mud. Those poor children, they can’t choose their parents. Nobody can.’
    ‘We can choose the children,’ says John Archibald, a proud grin spreading. ‘But not their parents.’ He stands aside, waves Staffe and Josie into his home, as if it were the primest waterfront.
    Staffe knows the Archibalds’ situation. According to Carly Kellerman of Social Services, they are serial fosterers. Their track record is untarnished and they take all ages. They are in it for the money, according to Carly, and, apparently, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for their itinerant and ever-changing subjects. They are pros.
    ‘This is Miles,’ says Sheila Archibald, passing the palm of her hand across his suede head. Miles looks up, glum. He wears short trousers and a polo shirt. His cheeks shine and his eyes don’t. Staffe thinks he looks like an evacuee.
    ‘Hello, sir,’ says Miles, avoiding Staffe’s eye. Not an ounce of sincerity.
    Miles’s little sister, Maya, clutches onto Mrs Archibald’s perma-creased slacks. Sheila swirls the child’s ponytail in her fingers, absently. But she catches Staffe’s eye and says, ‘We brush it every night, don’t we, Maya?’
    Josie sits on her haunches, eye level with the children. ‘It’s lovely here, isn’t it? Aren’t you lucky?’
    Miles shrugs and Maya scuttles round the back of her temporary mum, buries her face between Sheila’s knees.
    Staffe takes a pound coin from his pocket and crouches alongside Josie, winking at Miles. He extends one arm, places the pound coin on his downturned hand and with the other, flicks it up his shirt cuff. It is disappeared. ‘Where’s it gone?’ he asks Miles.
    Miles shakes his head, shows a gummy smile.
    ‘Maya, do you know where it is?’
    Maya peers out from behind Sheila’s legs.
    Staffe reaches across, letting the coin slip into the palm of his hand, putting it behind Maya’s ear and withdrawing his hand, holding the coin between his thumb and finger. ‘In Maya’s ear, all the time.’
    ‘Again!’ shouts Miles.
    ‘’Gain!’ shouts Maya.
    Staffe repeats the trick, pulling the pound from down Miles’s nose, then out of Josie’s mouth and finally from behind the ear of an unimpressed Sheila Archibald. ‘Now, you show Josie your toys while I have a word with Mum and Dad.’
    ‘They call us Sheila and John. And it doesn’t do to get them excited,’ says Sheila.
    Staffe watches the children go with Josie and says, ‘Does mum come round ever?’
    John Archibald shakes his head. ‘Good thing, too.’
    ‘But the children must ask about her, if they know you’re not their parents.’
    ‘This isn’t Little House on the Prairie . We can’t get attached.’
    ‘You mean the children can’t.’
    ‘She came round once,’ says Sheila.
    ‘Just the once,’ says John, a hint of disapproval in the look he shoots at his wife. ‘She was in a state.’
    ‘Drunk?’
    ‘Worse. She ended up crying and the children heard. We didn’t let them see her, of course.’
    ‘Would you say she loved them?’
    ‘I don’t know what you mean by that,’ says Sheila. ‘She had another one on the way. That’s all I know. Women like her, they should be …’
    ‘Sheila.’ John Archibald goes to his wife, puts an arm around