wondering just who the hell I was arguing with, then shrugged and went in through the kitchen door.
âAbout bloody time, too.â
Dad was standing at the back window in his multi-stained vest, swigging beer and smoking a cigarette and spraying shaving foam onto the kitchen window. I looked at him, said nothing, and put the shopping bags on the top of the fridge.
âChange?â he said, holding out his hand. I gave him whatever was left of the money. He sniffed at it, then put it in his pocket and went over to the shopping. âDid you get it all?â
âI think so.â
âYouâd better more than bloody well think so,â he said, dipping into one of the bags.
I didnât have a clue what he meant. Neither did he, I expect. He grunted through a shopping bag, poking this and poking that, cigarette ash dropping all over the place, then he stopped and looked up at me and said, âWhereâs the crackers?â
âIn the other bag,â I told him.
âOh, right.â He shrugged and turned to the window. âWhat do you think?â
Creamy-white shaving foam dripped all over the window, great globs of it sliding down the glass and piling up on the windowsill in little soapy mountains. At first I thought it was some kind of half-arsed attempt at cleaning, but that didnât make sense because Dad
never
did any cleaning ... and then I got it. It was supposed to be snow. Christmas decorations.
âVery nice, Dad,â I said. âGood idea.â
âYeah, well ...â he said, losing interest. âBest get that stuff put away before it rots.â
Did I hate him? He was a drunken slob and he treated me like dirt. What do
you
think? Of course I hated him. You would have hated him, too, if youâd ever met him. God knows why Mum ever married him. Probably for the same reason that Alex went out with Dean. Some kind of mental short circuit somewhere. Yeah, I hated him. I hated every inch of him. From his broken-veined, red-nosed face to his dirty, stinking feet. I hated his beery guts.
But I never meant to kill him.
Things donât just happen, they have reasons. And the reasons have reasons. And the reasons for the reasons have reasons. And then the things that happen make other things happen, so they become reasons themselves. Nothing moves forward in a straight line, nothing is straightforward. Which is why, in a funny kind of way, it was
The Complete Illustrated Sherlock Holmes
that killed my dad. If I hadnât got
The Complete Illustrated Sherlock Holmes
for my birthday then Dad would still be alive. Probably.
It was my tenth birthday, I think. Or maybe eleventh. Some time around then. I donât remember who gave it to me. It couldnât have been Mum, she was long since gone. And I know it wasnât Dad, because he always forgot my birthday. The only thing he ever gave me was dirty washing and a sore head. Anyway, it doesnât make any difference who gave it to me as long as someone did. Which they did.
The Complete Illustrated Sherlock Holmes
. It was a whopping great thick book containing all the Sherlock Holmes stories and illustrated with the original drawings showing Sherlock as this gaunt and scary figure with mad, sunken eyes and a cruel mouth. Iâd never read any mystery stories before and I probably wouldnât have bothered then if I hadnât been stuck in bed with a virus. I mean, it was a
really
thick book, nearly a thousand pages. Thatâs a lot of pages. It weighed a ton. But I got so bored just lying around in bed doing nothing, staring at the walls, listening to the sound of Dad clomping around in a drunken daze, cursing because he had to make his own dinner, I got so bored that I picked up this huge book one day and just started to read. And it was brilliant. I couldnât put it down. I loved it, every single story. A thousand pages? Nowhere near enough. I was hooked. Mystery after mystery after mystery. I