Chapter 43
EDWIN
I sat on the edge of my bed and tugged open the bottom drawer of the chest. At the back under a pair of pyjamas was a photo album.
I slid it out and set it on the cover next to me.
I knew the contents as intimately as if they were tattooed on my skin, but sometimes I needed to reassure myself they still existed other than in my memories.
I peeled back the tissue paper covering the first page and couldn’t help smiling.
I’d been an angelic-looking child. No more than four, maybe five in the picture, seated on a stool by my mother’s knee, I stared out like a little doll from whatever studio background she’d been able to afford, my blond curls tamed into a semblance of neatness and my white sailor suit starched to within an inch of its life.
Mum looked serious, but the grasp she had on my shoulder I recalled as firm but loving.
This couldn’t have been cheap; heaven knows what she’d gone without in order to afford it.
Smiling as I smoothed the tissue down, I leafed carefully through the album. There were a couple of older ones of Mum, as a child herself, then a family group with her older sister, my Aunt Irena, whose name I’d have surely forgotten had it not been neatly inscribed on the back of the card.
Dalziel had taken control when he’d turned me and, after my initial adjustment, had left me in the care of Baxter while he waltzed right up to my front door, politely informing the neighbours I’d had a ‘brush with Himself Upstairs’ and would now be staying with friends from across town in order to recuperate.
He promptly boxed up anything of sentimental value and arranged for the parcels to be sent to await me at his own London residence.
He divided up and gave away any of Mum’s meagre possessions I’d agreed to that could benefit any of our neighbours, earning himself some respect after the suspicion with which he’d been viewed on arrival.
Two days later, he left the empty flat after having placed a letter for the landlord and the solitary key on the mantlepiece, and I’d never gone back.
Several years later, the entire block of flats was condemned and demolished.
As well as my medals, the photos were something I always kept with me.
Baxter had made increasingly good copies for me over the years and kept them safe, digital and paper versions, for reasons I couldn’t explain, because who the heck apart from me even knew who these people were?
The originals were all I had left of people who’d once loved me.
I paused when I got to the images of Bertie.
His mother, possibly sensing my utter despair at his funeral, had sent me a sweet letter, the ink smudged where I presumed she’d cried over it, enclosing a snap of him she thought I might like as a keepsake.
I wondered now as I traced the worn edges of the sepia, if she would have been disgusted by our love, or perhaps she might have grown to accept and even encourage it. I’d never know.
Suddenly, I didn’t want to see the pictures of us in uniform, or the others.
Unless someone asked me directly about him, I would keep my memories of Bertie locked away now, because although I knew what we’d had was real, he’d been gone for a century.
It was time to let his memory rest. Also, I had found someone new.
Two someones. Fuck, my chest ached. Trace couldn’t have known, but the fact he’d said that burned a hole in my guts like acid. I wasn’t even angry with him, not really — he’d more than earned his parole — but damn, it hurt. I couldn’t stay and risk saying something I’d regret.
I put the album away. Dialled Dalziel.
“Edwin. What’s up?” The muffled thump of a heavy baseline suggested my sire was not at home.
“You’re busy, it’s okay.”
A door creaked and the thump lessened. “Speak, boy.”
I sprawled backwards on the bed and let the weight of his enthralled words seep into my bones. “It’s Trace,” I finally sighed.