Free A Line of Blood by Ben McPherson Page A

love. I wondered whether she had slept.
    Max came back in with the sugar. I put four spoonfuls into the cup and stirred.
    ‘Want me to open the blind?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘No what, Dad?’
    ‘No thanks, Max. And thank you for making coffee for me.’
    ‘That’s OK. Mum said you might want some.’
    ‘She out?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Say where she was going?’
    ‘No. Do you like the coffee?’
    ‘I love the fact that you made it for me.’
    Max left the room.
    I rang Millicent. She sounded lousy from lack of sleep.
    ‘You get my SMS, Alex?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Meet me at the Swedish?’
    ‘OK.’
    Max and I left the house at the same time and walked the first couple of blocks together. He hugged me when we parted, then set off towards school at a dog-trot.
    The Swedish didn’t make sense in an area like ours. It was all untreated oak and lightbulbs with complicated orange filaments that hovered in front of your eyes. But the coffee was good and they left you alone to drink it. Where else were people like us supposed to go in a place like Crappy?
    Millicent was sitting with her head in her hands, tiny against the vast communal table. I sat down beside her; it seemed at first as if she hadn’t seen me, as if she were somewhere very private; then she sat up, looked me in the eye, and began to speak.
    ‘I need you to understand that I have never and never would betray you, Alex.’
    She hadn’t slept. I could see the blood pulsing in her neck, smell the sourness on her breath.
    ‘So I probably need to start with the really bad stuff, and then I can explain – and I hope, I really hope you’re going to listen and to understand – how it isn’t what it looks like. Because I know it doesn’t look so good.’
    She reached into her bag and produced a small white envelope; she looked at it for a moment, then handed it to me.
    ‘So this is what the police wanted to discuss with me.’
    Inside was a single photograph. An elegant metal band, very thin at the bottom, slightly thicker on the top. Soft white gold. A line of three square-cut sapphires. My grandmother’s bracelet. My mother had given it to Millicent to welcome her to the family. It was so small that my mother could barely wear it, but was a perfect fit for Millicent’s left wrist. On the inside of the clasp I had had it engraved. MW.
    Millicent Weitzman.
My wife.
    ‘Alex, they found it in his bedroom.’ The tiny safety chain was broken.
    ‘His bedroom?’
    ‘This is the bit I can’t explain. The weird thing, not the bad thing. They found it between the wall and the headboard, on the floor.’
    ‘Between the wall and the headboard?’
    ‘That’s what they said.’
    ‘OK …’
    I could think of nothing else to do, so I drank coffee. It was tepid, must have been standing for some time.
    ‘Alex, I was never in his bedroom.’
    ‘But you were in his house? Is that what you’re telling me?’
    Millicent looked past me and over my shoulder. I followed her gaze and realised I must have spoken more sharply than I’d thought. A tall Swedish girl was staring at us from behind the coffee machine. She looked away, and Millicent and I looked back towards each other.
    ‘Christ, Millicent, what’s going on?’
    ‘Nothing, Alex. Please believe that.’
    ‘Right. Can’t be. Of course. He’s dead now.’
    ‘Sure. I probably deserve that, Alex.’
    She was going to cry. That small-child voice. The redness of her eyes.
    She swallowed hard. Pinched the bridge of her nose. Breathed out purposefully. Perhaps she wasn’t going to cry.
    ‘I lied to you. That’s the way you’re going to interpret it, and I guess it’s a reasonable interpretation. It
is
a lie of omission; I didn’t tell you.’
    ‘Didn’t tell me what?’
    ‘That I knew Bryce.’
    ‘I thought Bryce was his last name?’
    Millicent gave a tiny flinch.
    ‘You called him by his last name? Stylish.’
    ‘I didn’t betray you, Alex.’ She was looking at me very directly now. I held her gaze,