This Thing of Darkness Read Online Free Page A

dealing with moments like these used to achieve consistently successful results. Those methods, however, would constitute a criminal act if carried out in a public place and we’re trying to move on from all that anyway. So he sighs, and stands, and says, ‘Let’s make a move.’
    I nod.
    We go. I’ve eaten almost nothing.
    One of our first dates was a day out at the seaside, and we’ve decided to reprise that, except that the weather then was all sunshine and white parasols. The weather now carries straight from the North Atlantic. Salt, grey, edged with spite.
    We head for Gower, take one of the cliff paths. Grey rock, grey waves. When there’s a break in the cloud cover, the volume of light feels overwhelming.
    Mary Langton, one of my favourite corpses, had her ashes scattered over this bay. Brendan Rattigan, one of my least favourite, has his bones rattling somewhere in the tides beneath us.
    ‘How drunk would you have to be to fall off?’ I ask.
    ‘What, here? Very drunk.’
    ‘At night. Dark, but moderate visibility.’
    ‘This is one of your cases?’
    It is, I admit it. The accidental death.
    Buzz is hurt, I think, that I can’t let our first day since the break-up stand on its own, but I’m not entirely sorry about that. He always had this picture of me as someone capable of changing into the sort of woman he ought to marry. It’s helpful for him to remember the cranky obsessive I actually am. It might make it easier to let me go.
    ‘Who? What? Where?’ he asks.
    I give him the facts. We walk on five hundred yards to where the security guard fell.
    The cliff stands at the eastern edge of a small, rocky bay. There are climbers – orange jackets, ropes, helmets – starting to work their way up the crags opposite. Standing where we are, we can see nothing of the cliff beneath our feet. There’s just a short, tussocky slope, the soil bleaching into limestone. Then nothing. No middle distance. Just a long leap to a far horizon and the sound of waves breaking over rock.
    A metal spike, corroded but still sound, stands a few yards below the path, just before the slope starts to tilt irreversibly into void. The path mostly doesn’t come this close to the edge.
    ‘Was it wet?’
    ‘Yes, but not very. And he knew this path. He did night shifts at some telecoms construction site further on down the coast.’ I point. ‘He used to walk out sometimes, if his wife needed the car.’
    ‘Any motive?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Alcohol?’
    ‘Two pints, drunk an hour or two before death.’
    Buzz shrugs. ‘Anyone can slip, I suppose. And once you start to fall . . .’
    His sentence drops away, like the ground. We sit down, looking at the horizon, the waves that carry an edge of white at their crests.
    I don’t know what Buzz is thinking. I’m thinking of the man who died and that feeling I half understood in the café: that metal gleam, that weight of pain.
    A couple of climbers walk past us on the path. Stuff jingling from their harnesses.
    The first climber says, ‘OK? Nice day.’
    Buzz says whatever men say to each other.
    I say, ‘Is there rock climbing here? Underneath us?’
    The climbers say yes, and start to argue about names.
    ‘The cliffs have names?’
    They show me a guidebook. Not only the cliffs, but each individual route up the cliff. The crag underneath us now has four routes – Critterling, Little Arrete, Idris Gawr, Crack and Slab. The climbers tell me the routes range from ‘pretty simple’ to ‘well, if you fancy a challenge’.
    Then they laugh.
    Then they leave.
    ‘Your boy was a climber, was he?’
    For a moment, the tense confuses me. I don’t know why Buzz is using the past tense, when the dead man’s presence is so strong all around us. It feels like ignoring someone who’s sitting right next to you.
    So I sit there blinking, trying to feel the fence that separates dead from living, until I find the answer to Buzz’s question. ‘No, no. I don’t think so anyway.’
    ‘Does