Sharon Carrie hushed him quiet and raised her hand towards Georgia, who steered her wheelchair towards them.
The little boy broke free and ran to his mum. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tight.
“I’ve had to park over the road,” Sharon Carrie said to her daughter. “You can’t move for police cars round here.”
Georgia laughed. “Hope you don’t get a ticket.”
Sharon Carrie smiled back and then, after a moment or two, looked more serious. “We’ve been reading some of the wreaths and things while we were waiting for you. From the other funerals. There’s one over there, from this week I think, with just one wreath, from the funeral director. Margaret Stenning. Is that the …?”
“Yes,” Georgia replied, “that’s her, the mother. Died of a broken heart, they say … although I don’t believe she had one personally. I think it was a council funeral, so Glyn Thomas said. No one attended.”
“No more than she deserved. What have they done with the brothers?”
Georgia shrugged. “Don’t know. Lou Cotton reckons they’ve been cremated already, all very secretive. So as not to attract the ghouls.”
“They deserved nothing. All those bodies. Monsters. Both of them.”
“The younger one wasn’t so …” Georgia’s words tailed off. “I don’t suppose it matters now.”
“The older one could have crippled you for life, shooting you like that.”
“Maybe.” Carrie thought for a while as she moved her wheelchair to go up the path and on to the road and back to the car. “But I’m not so sure … I was thinking about that during the service.”
“He was so close to me, he could have …” she dropped her voice so the little boy could not hear, “… blown my head off if he’d wanted to. But he didn’t.”
She continued, “If he hadn’t shot me, I could have been killed in the crossfire. Between the police and him. So …”
Sharon Carrie pulled a face as if to say, ‘so what are you saying?’.
“He shot me in the legs so I’d fall down out of the line of fire and he could be shot dead by the police.”
Sharon Carrie made an instinctive snorting noise. “That’s just … silly.”
“Is it?” Georgia asked. “I’m not so sure.”
They both stopped for a minute, each with their own thoughts.
Watching the little boy, now jiggling again, impatient to go.
And they turned to leave the crematorium.
“And that man was Michael Gayther, Roger Gayther’s son? The one who hugged you. He seemed very pleased to see you.”
“Mu-um …” Georgia answered in a long-suffering, please-don’t-start-matchmaking-again voice. “He’s just … you know … because I worked with Roger … on his last case.”
“Is he in the police? He’s another one that looks like a policeman. Like father, like son.”
“He does something undercover in the Met, but there’s talk he may be coming to Suffolk to set something up. I don’t know. He asked if we could meet up for lunch to talk about his dad and I said I’d love to … once I’m out of this chair.”
“Do I see romance in my crystal ball, Georgy?”
“No,” Georgia answered, “you do not. I’ve no time for that … I’ve got to recuperate, get on my feet again … then there’s my course work … loads of that … and Christmas … and New Year … and Noah’s birthday party to sort … busy, busy, busy, Mum. No time for romance. None at all.”
They looked at each other.
A long pause.
Georgia held her mother’s gaze.
Sharon nodded and smiled, taking her grandson’s hand. “Come on then, let’s get back to the car, get you unpacked and loaded up … I’ve promised Noah we can pick up a McDonalds on the way home.”
The older woman and the little boy went ahead, one walking slowly, the other hop-skippity-hopping along.
Georgia Carrie sighed, turning back towards the crematorium.
Saw Michael Gayther standing there looking at her. As if he had been like that for an age, just watching, and waiting to see her leave.
He broke into a sudden smile, raised his arm and waved at her.
She felt herself blush unexpectedly and waved back. Then chuckled to herself as she followed her mother and son out of the crematorium.
THE END
AUTHOR’S NOTES
So, I’m sitting in a Soho restaurant having lunch with my literary agent Clare and talking about writing – the stuff of dreams for so many would-be writers – and we’re having an enjoyable time.
And then Clare asks me, ‘What’s next?’ So far, I’ve written a couple of memoirs, Dear Michael, Love Dad and Out of the Madhouse, about my eldest son’s battles with mental health issues, and two dark literary thrillers, Sweet William and Mr Todd’s Reckoning.
I hesitate and say I want to write a thriller series featuring two detectives.
Clare laughs. Take a look at this. A million-selling detective novel is on the table in front of me.
We both had the same idea at the same time.
Thing is, there’s a big difference between what I’d been writing and what I now wanted to do. I’ve always just kind of done my own thing. Written what I liked and hoped other people would like it too.
I flick through the detective novel. It’s really good. I’d love to write something like this. Strong characters, gritty and exciting, a plot that rattles along to a great ending.
I’d never written anything like this before. I wasn’t sure I could do it. The characterisation, the twists and turns, the ratcheting up of tension over 300 pages or more.
I’ll have a go, though, I said.
I’ll start writing.
See where it takes me.
I knew from the beginning I wanted to make this a buddy-buddy book where I could run the partnership through a series. An older, world-weary man, something of a maverick, and a younger, keen and enthusiastic woman. He’s a step behind the times in his thoughts and language. She’s not.
I didn’t want to give him a bionic eye or a wooden leg or to have her as a shape-shifting alien with psychic powers – none of that
