Road Kill

experimental heaviness and bounced up and down a few times, like she was thinking of staying and was just trying out the mattress.

For a moment I didn’t reply. All I could think of was how hard she’d fought for the right to come along. Then I backtracked and realised Tess herself had never made that much of a fuss about it. With Gleet banging the drum on her behalf, she hadn’t had to.

I also remembered how she’d told me, with apparent sincerity, that Clare had been unfaithful to Jacob with his own son. Not relevant as such, but pretty good as an indication of her inability to separate fact from fiction.

“Why’s that, Tess?” I said, dropping my eyes to her knee again. I’d just about got all the grit out of it but she was going to have to stay out of short skirts for a while.

She snorted hard enough to make the bed sway and waved a hand towards herself.

“Well, look at the state of me,” was all she said.

“So, what are you doing here?” I asked, keeping my voice casual. I caught one of her hands, turned it palm upwards and started wiping dirt from the scuffed skin.

“Tickles,” she said, giggling, trying to pull it away.

“Sorry, but I really need to clean this up,” I said, not letting go, the way you’d hold onto the ear of a fractious child.

I was using a stronger solution of disinfectant than was strictly kind and it should have been stinging like hell but the alcohol was proving an effective painkiller. For the moment. Her hand had started to swell a little, too. “You’re going to have to take your rings off, Tess.”

She shook her head several times more than was necessary, then had to grab on to the bed while the room caught up with her. “Oh no,” she said, “they never come off, this lot.”

She held both hands up, backs towards me, to show off the rake of silver bands, adorned with glittering glass. “Made ‘em all myself. Cool, huh?” She wiggled her fingers and frowned, as though she couldn’t work out why she was having trouble flexing them.

“Your fingers have already started to come up like sausages,” I said bluntly. “If you leave it until tomorrow you’ll have to get them cut off.”

She pulled a shocked face and shivered with the giggles again.

I sighed. “I meant the rings, Tess, not your fingers.”

“Sorry,” she said, grinning inanely and making an effort to pull herself together that was only partially successful.

But she did begin tugging at her fingers, dropping the jewellery into a pile on her lap, a purpose for which her mini skirt was not best suited. One ring slipped between her thighs onto the carpet and, when she leaned over to retrieve it, two or three others dropped, too.

Tess swore. I reached for one of the saucers from the tea-making kit, scooping the fallen rings into it and handing it to her, otherwise we were going to be here all night. She managed to peel the rest off with studied concentration and added them to the collection.

“So, if you didn’t want to come to Ireland,” I said, picking up the thread again along with the cotton wool, “why was Gleet giving Daz such a hard time about them not letting you in on it?”

“Just ‘cos I wanted in didn’t mean I wanted in, in,” she mumbled, sniggering again. Then she sobered, turning almost maudlin. “Aw, but Gleet’s been lovely to us – me an’ Ashley – a proper mate.”

“Really?” I said, getting irritated with her now and trying not to show it. “So what’s he doing with Slick’s bike, then?”

For a moment Tess sat and stared at me, open mouthed, and I could see the alarm flitting about behind her eyes. God knows, there was plenty of room for manoeuvre in there.

There may have been surprise but it was not, I realised suddenly, because of anything Gleet might have done. It was because I knew about it.

“What you talking about?” she demanded, much too late.

“Come on, Tess. Slick’s bike went missing after the accident and I know full well that Gleet’s got it,” I said, only stretching the truth a little. “Now why is that, hmm? What doesn’t he want the police to find?”

“Nothing!” she said, her voice starting to rise. “They aren’t going to find nothing.” And, as it sank in that a denial was as good as a confirmation, she added sulkily: “There isn’t nothing for them to find.”

And taken purely from a grammatical point of view, she was probably telling the truth. I squirted Savlon onto her hands and sat back on my heels, letting her rub the cream into them. She did so distractedly, in a nervous wringing gesture.

“If it wasn’t Gleet,” I asked quietly, “who did knock Slick off his bike?”

She looked up at me, bleary, pink around the nose like she was about to cry. “Who says they were after my Slick?”

“Don’t keep trying to walk me down that path, Tess,” I said softly, a warning. “There was nothing going on between Jamie and Clare, and you know it.”

She flushed. “He told me he was bringing her to see him,” she muttered.

“Who did?”

“Jamie. He told me Slick was bringing Clare to see him last Sunday. Didn’t want his old man to find out about it. Dirty little sod.”

Realisation dawned. Not knowing about the money Jamie was borrowing from Clare, Tess had put her own perverted spin on the facts. Well, that figured.