Retreating from the bedroom, she picked up one of the notebooks on the bench, guiltily flicking quickly through its pages. It was full of pencil sketches, unrecognized faces, disembodied limbs. She replaced it on the bench and picked up a second, this one full of pen-and-ink drawings, more detailed, sophisticated work, a full graphic novel, by the looks of it, with Daniel himself the protagonist. On the first page, she noticed, he’d written a title—The Origins of Ares—and her vision was quickly blurred with tears. Warlike Ares, the most hated of all the gods, the one even his own parents couldn’t stand.
Oh, Daniel.
She turned the pages, her stomach flipping queasily once more as she recognized herself, drawn young and luscious, more beautiful and certainly more voluptuous than she had ever been in real life. Her skin burning with embarrassment, she closed the book, put it back on the bench, and then, almost without thinking, picked it up again. It was still in her hand when she climbed off the back of the boat, when for a second she locked eyes with a woman watching her intently from the back deck of the handsome red-and-green barge moored a few yards away.
* * *
Carla zipped her suitcase shut, carried it downstairs, and left it in the hallway. In the living room, she listened to her messages, one from Detective Barker, asking her to call at her earliest convenience, and another from Theo, inviting her for dinner. “Your favorite, lamb chops. Not sure if you’ve heard yet, but there’s good news, Cee. At last. Good news.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Theo stood at the sink in his kitchen, his left hand under the hot stream, watching the water run red to pink in the bowl. He had sliced a millimeter, perhaps two, from the very tip of his left forefinger and it was bleeding a surprising amount. The culprit, his recently sharpened Santoku knife, lay bloodied on the counter, next to it a pink-tinged garlic clove. The Santoku was hardly the right instrument for thinly slicing garlic, but his little chef’s knife was missing from the magnetic strip on the wall, lost, no doubt, somewhere in the chaos of the miscellaneous cutlery drawer, never to be found again.
Still, not to worry. There was good news. Good news, at last!
Despite the sudden and bitter cold, Theo had been out for a walk that morning and had, by coincidence, bumped into the young policeman, the one with the shaving rash, standing in the queue for coffee from the café on the towpath. Theo’s attempt to slip by unnoticed was unsuccessful; the young man collared him, his face the picture of apprehension.
“Mr. Myerson,” he said, sotto voce, “I was hoping I’d see you. There’s good news.”
“Oh?”
The young man nodded. “It’s not official yet, they haven’t put out a statement or anything, but I expect you’ll be hearing from them soon enough.” He took a deep breath, savoring his moment. “They’ve made an arrest.”
Theo gasped extravagantly. “Oh,” he said, his adrenaline spiking, “that is good news. Who, uh, can you tell me who they’ve arrested?”
“Laura Kilbride,” the police officer said. “The young woman you saw, the one . . . the one I mentioned before, the one I said”—he spoke from one side of his mouth—“had a history of violence?”
“And they’ve charged her?” Theo managed to ask.
“They will do. It’s only a matter of time. They found the knife,” he said.
“They . . . what? You mean the weapon?” Theo’s heart was pounding so hard in his chest, he thought he might pass out.
The young man grinned, ear to ear. “They’ve got her, Mr. Myerson, bang to rights.”
* * *
On the short walk home, Theo felt as though he’d scaled a mountain peak. His jellified legs could barely support him; he almost fell over twice trying to take evasive action from joggers. And yet at the same time he felt like dancing! It was over. They had her. It was over. And the thing that made his heart soar was that it was not just this particular mess that was over, not just this awful, brutal business with Daniel, but the whole thing. Daniel was gone and so was Angela. Carla would suffer, she would grieve, she would feel whatever it was she needed to feel, but after that, she could start to get better, without anyone to drag her back down. The Sutherland mess, all that poison they had injected into his family, into his marriage, it could start to drain away now.
Theo knew they would never go back to what they had been—he wasn’t stupid—but he could see a way forward. He could see them building some sort of life for themselves, some sort of peace, and they could do it together now, with nothing and no one left to divide them.