Holloway Falls Read Online Free Page A

time he seemed to accept that she was telling the truth.
    Each of them seemed dislocated from the facts. She wondered why he was here. Doing his job, she supposed, even though it no longer seemed to interest him.
    Holloway glanced at his notes. Hanging men etched in margins. Clockwise spirals. A stick figure with a zigzag mouth lay in a hospital bed.
    ‘But he knew he had problems? He was still in treatment?’
    ‘You know that. You’ve probably met his doctor.’ (He did, and he had.) ‘He saw a psychologist for about a year, give or take. God knows it was a struggle to make him go in the first place. He didn’t think it would do any good.’
    ‘And?’
    She shrugged, once.
    ‘They were talking about temporal lobe epilepsy,’ she said. ‘But by then they were at a loss, pretty much. It’s quite rare, and Andrew wasn’t even a classic case.’ She sighed. ‘It’s just neurology,’ she said, with a tired emphasis. ‘A functional thing. Bad wiring.’
    She tapped the side of her head twice. Cuck-oo.
    He smiled, tapped his front teeth with the end of a biro.
    ‘I heard once,’ he said, ‘from a doctor—my wife’s friend was a doctor—that if they sever certain nerves, and join them to certain other nerves, you taste vinegar as a loud noise in your ears. Synaesthesia. LSD can do it to you. Well, the good stuff can.’
    She laughed, obligingly. She said: ‘How long have you been married?’
    He tugged at an earlobe. ‘Well now. Nineteen years? Twenty? Twenty in July.’
    ‘You get less for murder.’
    ‘Ha. Yes.’
    ‘I can’t believe he’s gone. Not really.’
    Now the creature that had possessed her husband’s body was no longer around, she found herself rediscovering Andrew, reassembling a sense of his nearness. Having him dead was like having him back.
    It was better.
    She encountered an occasional guilt at her want of anger at him, that she didn’t feel worse. This feeling would sneak up behind her at odd times, wrap its arms around her breasts, nuzzle its face into her shoulders and rock her gently side to side. She would weep into her fist until it passed. Eventually, it always did.
    Holloway pocketed his notes.
    ‘That’s enough for now,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch. Meanwhile, there’s nothing you can do. Take a holiday. Don’t wait by the telephone. Take the kids to …’ (not the seaside) ‘—Alton Towers. Thorpe Park.’
    She laughed because he seemed well meaning. Then she closed her eyes, lifted her chin, nodded.
    Holloway was bored by the meagreness of his thoughts. He stood, straightened his jacket a little.
    ‘I can’t say I know Andrew,’ he said. ‘I never met him. But I don’t think he meant all this. He wouldn’t hurt you like this. Not if he was in control.’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘Well. One would hope not.’
    She looked up at him from beneath her brow.
    He smiled, snaggle-toothed on one side. He had long canines, one of which was chipped by a wedding ring worn round a finger curled into a fist thrown with malice smack into his mouth, ten years before. Longer. The jagged end sometimes caught his lower lip and he looked wasted and undomesticated. This with a delicate, boyish jaw and his freckled skin, still troubled by shaving.
    He was scented with something she recognized: Wrights Coal Tar Soap. When she was about to leave for Bristol University, her father had described its smell as the last pious thing in England. He still made the same joke every Christmas.
    Holloway shut the door behind him and stood for a long second in the front garden, squinting. He patted his pockets, checking the whereabouts of wallet and keys.
    He wondered what Rachel Taylor thought of his visit. What use in looking again at photographs of a dead man?
    Drowned men did not return from the sea.
    He patted his breast pocket, removed his sunglasses, slipped them on. Checked his watch. He thought about the £38,000. He had a sense of something loosening in his chest. It was almost relief.