Twenty-Four
Miller fed Ginger her medicine from the plastic spoon, while Alex watched carefully, sitting next to him on the sofa.
She leaned in close to get a bird’s-eye view.
She muttered words of affection to the rat and of encouragement to Miller and, when Ginger suddenly squeaked in alarm, Alex sucked in a breath fast enough to make Miller jump and spill some of the antibiotic on his leg.
‘Do stop it, love,’ Miller said. ‘You’re making me nervous. You’re making both of us nervous.’
‘That should be my job … looking after her.’ Alex nodded at Ginger, then inched away. She sat back and folded her arms. ‘By rights.’
‘Yeah, well. Rights have got nothing to do with it, have they?’ Miller wiped the dribble of gloop from his leg, settled Ginger down again and tried to administer the last of the medicine. ‘Things being how they are.’
Alex said nothing for a while, seemingly content to brood, until the grumbling finally bubbled to the surface and began to leak from her.
‘It’s not like you sit around thinking that your life’s always going to be brilliant, is it?
You’d have to be a moron. You know that you’ll get ill at some point and all you can do is hope it’s nothing too serious.
You know there’ll be days, weeks, months you’d rather forget.
You know that bad stuff’s going to happen to you or to those around you, especially in our job, right? ’
‘It’s odds on,’ Miller said.
‘Be that as it may, I did not expect the sodding rats to outlive me.’
‘Trust me, it wasn’t on my dance card either.
’ Miller could only watch as Alex turned away from him, so he stood up and carried Ginger to her cage.
Walking back to sit down next to Alex again, it struck him that he’d not seen his wife in quite this mood for a very long time.
Not since that night at the Burnley and District Over Forties, when a distinctly average foxtrot danced by a sour-faced couple from Clitheroe had robbed her and Miller of a medal.
‘They obviously bunged one of the judges a backhander,’ she’d said afterwards. ‘My money’s on that weaselly one with the wandering hands. It’s the only effing explanation.’
Back when she was alive, Alex had been a fierce competitor, but that did sometimes mean she was not the most gracious of losers.
Since her death, Miller had spent time with ‘stroppy’ Alex, ‘flirty’ Alex and – every bit as often as he would have predicted – ‘piss-takey’ Alex.
But not quite this version of her, not until now.
He supposed that, considering her situation and, more particularly, the circumstances that had brought it about, she had every right to be like this.
If anything, it was a surprise that ‘sulky’ Alex had waited quite so long to put in an appearance.
Eventually, she seemed to remember that Miller was there. ‘So, you looking forward to your undercover op with Xiu?’
‘Not especially,’ Miller said.
‘You thought about what you’re going to wear?’
‘Oh, God.’ Miller groaned. ‘I don’t need to wear anything special, do I? I haven’t got anything.’
Alex moved a little closer and it was obvious that the sulkiness was already on its way out of the door.
The smile told him that ‘piss-takey’ Alex was firmly back in residence and looking to have some fun.
‘Well, considering it’s a heavy metal night, I hardly think you’ll be inconspicuous if you show up in one of your work suits, which are starting to look a bit tired, by the way. ’
‘You’re not helping,’ Miller said.
‘You’ve got jeans, right? Nearly everyone will be wearing jeans, so your bottom half isn’t really a problem.’ She looked him over, as if she hadn’t seen him before. ‘Obviously your hair’s going to be an issue, but there’s not much we can do about that.’
‘What do you think?’
Alex thought some more. ‘Do heavy metal fans wear hats?’
‘Not practical,’ Miller said. ‘They just fall off when the headbanging starts.’
‘OK, we’ll just have to make do with a bit of hair gel or something. What are you going to wear up top, though? Hang on … didn’t you use to have a leather jacket?’
‘You gave it to the charity shop, remember?’
‘I was trying to maintain your dignity,’ Alex said. ‘But now you mention it, a charity shop sounds like the ideal place to go. Pick up some tatty old denim jacket or something.’
‘I can nip in on my lunch hour,’ Miller said. ‘I’ve got to go to that one by the aquarium anyway. Finn put a copy of Abbey Road behind the counter for me.’
Alex just nodded. The mention of her daughter was enough to change her mood again and nudge everything off kilter.
The doorbell rang and Miller climbed, a little wearily, to his feet.
As he walked towards the front door, Alex began muttering behind him.
‘Oh, and just so as you know, I was bang on about that pair from Clitheroe. Dodgy as hell. A few weeks later, they got disqualified from a Veterans’ Latin and Show Dance festival in Accrington, after she got caught giving one of the judges a quick “hand shandy” out by the bins … ’
Miller opened the door.
‘Hey, Miller,’ Finn said.
‘Hey, Finn,’ Miller said. ‘I was just talking about you.’ He saw Finn lean to peer around him, keen to see who else was in the house. ‘No … I meant, thinking about you. Sorry, I’m a bit tired. You coming in or what?’ He turned and walked back into the living room. ‘You hungry?’
‘No, I’m good,’ Finn said. ‘I could murder a cup of tea, though.’ She began mooching around the living room. -‘Actually a bit of toast would be fantastic, ta.’
Miller turned, already on his way to the kitchen. ‘A bit of cheese on toast?’
‘Even better.’
Miller flicked on the kettle and turned on the grill. He was grinning as he took butter and cheese from the fridge, having decided that he wouldn’t let Finn eat on her own, even though he’d had his own dinner a couple of hours earlier.
Her turning up at the house like this was no longer the major deal it used to be.
It certainly wasn’t a shock any more. These days she dropped in once every few weeks or so, happy enough to grab a hot shower and a bit of dinner, talk about nothing in particular.
Sometimes she even arrived with her friend Natalie, the sister of a lad whose murder Miller had investigated only a few months before.
It was all very different from the way it had been, even a year ago.
Any moment she’d been forced to spend under Miller’s roof – her mum’s roof – had seemed like torture for her back then, and you didn’t need to be a detective to figure out why.
How could a child ever feel comfortable in the home her mother had kicked her out of?
Miller had never judged Alex for what she’d done.
How could he? He knew exactly why she had told Finn to leave; that in the end she had been left with no other choice.
She’d watched Finn’s father lose everything to drugs.
She’d seen his life and consequently theirs descend into violence and chaos and she could not afford to let that happen again once Finn had begun following in her father’s footsteps.
Miller never judged her, because Alex spent every waking moment judging herself. Dealing with a guilt that was eating her up until the day she was killed.
Miller knew that Finn felt guilty too. Irrational as it was, she chose to believe, at her lowest, that her mother might still be alive had she herself not gone off the rails.
Miller could point out all he liked that her mother’s death had had rather more to do with a man and a gun, but in those moments Finn – every bit as stubborn as Alex had been – was not to be persuaded.
There were other times when she would blame anyone but herself for her addiction, Alex included; times she would lash out at Miller because he was the closest person to her and lashing out was the closest thing to love she felt herself capable of.
Miller had learned, or hoped he had, to see through the fog of shame and guilt to the real young woman behind it.
A young woman who was no more than anxious on good days, but terrified on most of the others.
Who struggled to hold her life together a lot of the time and who – though she would probably deny it – still wanted to be that daughter who made her mother proud.
Miller carried the two plates and two mugs of tea into the living room on a silver-plated tray which he and Alex had won for a particularly bang-on quickstep at a contest in Morecambe. ‘Brown sauce on the cheese on toast,’ he said.
‘Obviously, because we’re not savages.’ Finn was sitting on the floor with her back against the sofa. She reached for the plate, took a big bite and a slurp of tea, then turned to look at the rats. ‘Ginger’s looking better.’
Miller dropped into the small armchair opposite her and leaned down for his own plate. ‘I’m a good nurse,’ he said.
‘I bet you are.’
‘With rodents, anyway. Not sure I’d be any good looking after people.’
‘Yeah … you are,’ Finn said. She held up the slice of cheese on toast she was eating.
‘What d’you think this is?’ She asked if she could take Ginger out of her cage for a while and Miller said that was fine.
He asked her to pass Fred across to him, ‘because I think he’s starting to feel left out,’ and they sat and ate together, saying little and occasionally feeding titbits to the grateful rats on their laps.
When Miller got up to take the dirty plates and mugs into the kitchen, Finn put the rats back into their cage, then followed him. She leaned against a worktop and chewed at her nails.
‘You’re looking well,’ Miller said. ‘I meant to say.’
Finn barked out a laugh.
‘No, really, I swear.’ She was still pale and stick-thin, with hacked-at hair that would give the makers of shampoo ads the heebie-jeebies, but Miller had seen her look worse.
‘I’ve been to a few meetings,’ she said.
‘Have you?’
‘Now look, I really don’t want you to get all worked up and over-excited about it—’
‘I won’t.’
‘I just wanted to tell you.’