She moved up behind him and tucked her arm in his. At first, he made no response, then, after a moment, he slid his arm around her waist.
‘Is this it, do you think?’ he said finally. ‘Are we finished?’
‘Christ, Liam, I’ve been a complete bitch,’ she said.
‘True enough,’ he agreed. ‘On the other hand, I’ve been a total arsehole.’
She laughed. The first time she’d laughed that weekend. ‘I won’t challenge that incisive piece of self- evaluation.’
‘What’s making us like this? Maybe we really do need to give it up now.’
She turned to look him in the face. ‘You keep saying that,’ she said. ‘I’m beginning to think you might mean it.’
‘Don’t know what I mean. Don’t know what to think any more.’ He waved his stick vaguely in the air. ‘Not easy to get your mind around this. Makes it difficult to think about anything.’
She couldn’t argue with that. It was the worst thing about his illness – the absence of any clear prognosis. Years more of this, or something much worse. And that raised another question. About whether she was strong enough to cope with whatever the illness might throw at them. Whether, if it came to it, she was strong enough to be Liam’s carer.
‘You need to talk to the doctor again,’ she said, knowing that she was just trotting out the same meaningless mantra.
He turned and looked at her, then shook his head. ‘It’s not been a great day so far, but it won’t be improved if we get into that old argument again. You know there’s nothing she can say to me. I’ll go back when I need to, but I’m not clutching at straws.’
Again, she couldn’t argue. There were those who, faced with Liam’s condition, would pursue every possible solution. Second opinions, alternative remedies, any available form of quackery. There were those, too, who went into denial, pretended it wasn’t really happening to them.
Liam’s approach was different. Like most things in his life, he’d taken the diagnosis in his stride, simply accepting its reality. She remembered what he’d been like that first evening after his appointment with the neurologist. Shaken, and quieter than usual, but with the air of someone who’d perhaps received a larger-than- expected credit card bill or whose car had been damaged in some minor shunt. Not someone who’d just been given a potentially life-changing piece of news.
She’d felt guilty that day, too, because she’d allowed him to attend the appointment on his own. Her only excuse was that, typically, Liam had given her no real inkling of what was going on. He’d told her the full story only that evening. Hadn’t wanted to worry her unnecessarily, until he was sure. She suspected that, with feelings caught between shock, anger and guilt, she’d reacted less calmly than Liam himself had.
It wasn’t that Liam had been untroubled. In the weeks afterwards, he’d devoted himself to learning whatever he could about this baffling illness – borrowing books from the library, scouring the internet, sending off for leaflets from the MS Society. Mostly, he said, this mass of material just confirmed how little anyone knew – about the cause, the potential treatments, the likely prognosis. He’d confirmed to his own satisfaction that the limited medication he’d been prescribed was appropriate, and that, at least within the boundaries of conventional medicine, there was little else available. Liam had no time for alternative treatments. So that, as far as he was concerned, was largely that.
He was, or seemed to be, unfazed by the threat posed by the illness, but equally he harboured no false hopes. Maybe his condition would stabilize or even improve. Maybe it would continue to decline. Either way, other than the steps he was already taking, there wasn’t much he could do about it.
‘OK,’ she said now, moving herself closer beside him. ‘Your choice.’
‘My choice,’ he agreed. ‘You reckon we can still make this work?’
‘Probably,’ she said. ‘So long as we don’t expect it to be easy.’
‘It could be easier.’
‘If I gave up my job, you mean?’ The sea looked dark and threatening under the thunderous sky. The narrow beach was deserted, an occasional seagull shrieking in to gather some discarded remnant.
‘It’s not all or nothing. You could do something less demanding.’
‘Like what? Waitressing? Teaching? Prostitution?’ She was already pulling away from him.
‘No, for Christ’s sake, Marie, I’m not saying give up the job. I’m just saying you don’t have to be doing what you’re doing now. You’ve said yourself how demanding it is, that officers can burn out—’
‘You mean I can’t cope?’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, stop this and listen. I’m not saying anything like that.’
She had turned away and was staring fixedly out to sea, but she knew that, if only for once, he was right.
‘What are you saying, then?’
‘I’m not trying to stop you doing anything. If this is what you want to do, fine by me. It’s not ideal but we can make it work. But you know you can’t do this forever. Even if you want to carry on, they’ll want to bring you back in from the field eventually.’
‘Before I go native?’
‘If you like. Christ, Marie, you’re the one who’s told me all this. I don’t know how it works. You do.’
She did. However good she might be at this job – and at times she didn’t know if she was any good at all – at some point, for whatever reason, they’d bring her back in. Quite probably that was what they were already planning. And quite possibly, if she took Morgan Jones seriously, it was what she needed.
‘Shit, Liam, I don’t know.’
‘Neither do I, and it’s not something we need to decide now. I’m just saying that things won’t be like this forever.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying we run with it for a bit.’ He laughed. ‘Let’s just try to be a bit less uptight, OK? Enjoy the time we do get together.’
She said nothing for a moment, her eyes fixed on the barely discernible horizon.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘This was never going to be easy. We have to work with it for a while . . .’
She wasn’t sure what happened next. She was turning back towards Liam and he was moving closer to her when his legs slipped from under him. He toppled sideways, his face ashen, his mouth shaped to utter some words he never spoke. His wooden stick clattered under the metal railing, falling silently down to the sands below. And then Liam was falling, too, his head striking one of the iron posts, his body sliding awkwardly into the rails as he lost his footing.
She reached out instinctively and grabbed his thick woollen coat. His weight was too much for her and he dropped forwards, his head striking the post again.
She could see blood on his scalp, mingling with his wet hair, dripping down his forehead.
Her mind was already running through the possibilities, her eyes scanning the deserted promenade. She crouched over him, sheltering his head from the rain, fumbling for her mobile phone.
Christ, she thought, what had they done now?
Chapter 12
‘Anything’s possible. But it’s nothing to do with me.’
‘You’d have been informed, though, guv, surely.’
Welsby shrugged. ‘In theory, but these days . . .’ He jerked a thumb in the direction of some unspecified authority. ‘Any one of those bastards might have authorized it. Wouldn’t necessarily keep me in the picture. Might
