Come Clean (1989) Read Online Free Page A

slowly around, taking in a couple of vandalized, decaying cars and a newish-looking
Montego that might be Ralph’s. They all seemed empty. Ian said: ‘Who’d hang about in a place like –?’
    ‘Hush,’ Sarah told him. She was listening for the appalling din of the injured man dredging into himself for breath, but heard nothing except occasional traffic and the gentle rush
and rustle of a few sheets of newspaper whisked by the wind across the yard surface. The beam reached the loaded rubble container and she kept it there, resisting the slight pressure on her wrist
from Ian to move it on. ‘Let’s go closer, Ian.’ She began to walk.
    ‘Debris. Ralph’s having some outhouses cleared, that’s all. They weren’t safe.’
    ‘I’d like to look.’ She felt as she had felt earlier, afraid, crazily pushy, weak in the legs, wanting to give it all a miss, and determined to keep going and to find out what
was wrong. Schizo? Maybe. But sometimes she understood why she had married the police.
    They stood alongside the builder’s skip, leaning on the side, like languid passengers at the rail of a liner, and she shone the flashlight in. The acrid, depressing smell of rubble and
rotten wood hit her and she gazed at old beams, clusters of bricks held together by ancient mortar, slates, splintered rafters. A couple of wooden doors lay on top, overlapping each other and
making it hard to see very far in. She reached out with her free hand and tried to shift one of the doors to the side, but it would not budge.
    ‘What? Have you seen something?’ Ian asked.
    ‘Can we move it together?’
    ‘Sarah, what for? We’re going to get filthy.’
    She put the flashlight out and placed it on the ground, to make two hands available. ‘Come on,’ she said and took hold of one of the doors.
    ‘This is mad.’ He gripped it with her, though, and they shoved. The door slid a little towards the far edge of the skip and the other one moved with it.
    ‘A bit more,’ she said. They had to lean over further to push again. The doors moved, though much less this time because the top one came up against the skip’s far side.
‘Right.’ She stood back and bent down to pick up the flashlight, then switched it on again and hung over the edge, letting the beam reach now into the heart of the container. Her own
breathing felt tight. Ian gazed with her.
    ‘So?’ he said.
    Still leaning over, she moved the whole length of the skip, the light still searching. She switched off and turned to face him. ‘All right. Nothing. Nothing but your genuine rubbish. There
might have been.’
    ‘Like?’
    ‘You know what like.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Honestly, Sarah, I –’
    Ralph called from the fire-door exit. ‘What the hell are you two doing? Looking for treasure? Come on back in before you hurt yourselves.’
    ‘Yes, we’re coming,’ Ian said.
    ‘No, let’s go to your place now, Ian. I’ve had enough here.’ She took his arm.
    ‘Why not?’
    In his bed a little later they tried to put aside the events at the Monty and she said: ‘This is no fly-by-night, empty affair. Don’t think I don’t know
exactly what I love in you, Ian Aston.’
    ‘God, what’s that mean, all the don’ts?’
    ‘And not just your hands, although your hands seem to know everything there is to know about – Oh, your hands can put everything right, can’t they? Like now. Yes, yes, just
like now.’ She knew she was grinning with pleasure like an idiot at what he was doing to her. One day she must start working on efforts to ration her responsiveness with him: it was such a
give-away. ‘Your hands are good, and all the rest of it, but it’s not everything.’ Her own hands reached out silkily under the clothes to him.
    ‘Yours know something, too.’ He groaned happily in his quiet, apologetic way.
    ‘You made me gentle and loving, Ian.’
    ‘Only ten minutes ago you were being so tough, shoving chunks of building about.’
    ‘That’s