He smiled. ‘Supportive?’
‘I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding, and they’ll sort it out tomorrow.’
Aye, maybe...
‘And honest?’
‘I don’t normally approve of rough language, but: screw them.’ Another sip of wine. ‘You used to love working there and now you hate it. So quit. Tell them to fashion their job into a cylinder and insert it rectally – with force. And no lubrication.’
He winked. ‘I love it when you talk dirty.’
‘You could write that book you’ve been droning on about for years.’
‘I don’tdrone. I ponder and muse, cogitate and deliberate, contemplate and—’
‘Well, why not?Areyou happy?’
Working with children pretending to be journalists, churning out tweets and blogposts and ‘you won’t believe what these filmstars look like now!’, chasing deadlines, never writing about the things that really matter...
Was he happy?
‘No.’
Isobel nodded. ‘There you go, then.’ And as if that settled everything, she spun around – making her skirt flare, showing off a bit of leg – and headed inside again, leaving him out here in the gloom, alone.
‘Aye.’ He picked up his half-empty mug. ‘There I go.’
End of an era.
No more newspapers for Ace Reporter Colin Miller...
Or maybe the mug was half full?
Colin nodded, then took Schrödinger’s mug back into the kitchen.
No Isobel – moved on to another part of the house, leaving her empty wine glass behind.
Downlighters sparkled off their swanky high-end gadgets, and the kind of coffee machine you normally only saw in poshrestaurants. Lots of warm wood and terracotta walls, a marble worktop imported all the way from Tuscany. Photos of the family holidays, Rosie (12) getting her brown belt in karate, Alfie (10)’s first violin recital, and dropping Sean (19) off at university.
See, that was your metaphor, right there: one day your wee boy’s taking his first steps, the next he’s away studying medicine in Edinburgh. Things change.
Maybe it was timehechanged too.
Colin rinsed his mug and Isobel’s glass, stuck them in the dishwasher, then grabbed his car keys from the drawer.
Aye: hecouldjust hand in his notice tomorrow, but where was the fun in that? Going by Agapova’s record, she’d probably be ‘working from home’ again, anyway. And if you’re gonnae tell someone to roll their job sideways and stick it up their arse, you want to do it to their face.
Colin stuck his head out into the hall. ‘I’m just heading out for a bit. Go stick a bottle of fizz on ice – when I get back, we’re celebrating!’
Colin turned his BMW M2 Coupé – red as the roses, with active M differential, rear-wheel drive, and TwinPower turbo inline six-cylinder engine – onto the driveway outside Natasha Agapova’s house.
A true-crime podcast rumbled out of the car’s Harman Kardon fourteen-speaker sound system, keeping him company on the journey out here.
‘...and when we opened the second trench, there were the missing village children: twenty-two dead little bodies, all lined up in a row, with their heads pointing towards the chancel, their feet bound in silver chains, and iron stakes driven straight through their sternums.’
‘Wow. Not their hearts? Cos you’d think it would be their hearts.’
‘Well, you see that’s thefascinatingthing about the Church of Our Lady and Saint Peter—’
