key, no erase button. The damage that had been done couldn’t be healed with just a few facile words.
Brooke didn’t even reply. He aborted the call, strangely relieved but dreading when he’d have to try again.
The pain in his body reminded him of the other damage that needed healing, too. Standing up, he painfully unpeeled his jeans far enough down to inspect the large red weal across his left thigh where the Beretta magazine had absorbed the force of the bullet strike earlier that day. Its oblong shape was almost perfectly imprinted on his skin. He touched it and winced. In a day or two it would blossom into a spectacular bruise and a rainbow of colours.
His right side was pretty tender, too, where he’d taken that particularly solid blow from the man now encased several feet deep in concrete. I’m getting too old for this bollocks, he thought as he peeled off his T-shirt to examine his ribs. Another florid, multicolour bruise was on its way there, too, but at least nothing was cracked internally that he could feel.
The bedroom door suddenly opened and he turned to see Roberta standing there.
She was wrapped in a towel that covered her from chest to mid-thigh and her hair was wet. ‘Sorry,’ she blurted. ‘I was looking for a hairbrush. Forgot to pack mine.’
‘I don’t have one,’ Ben said. It was impossible not to notice the gleam of her well-toned flesh, or the way her hair lay across her bare shoulder.
Her eyes flicked downwards for an instant. ‘You’ve got scars that weren’t there before,’ she said.
‘I suppose I do,’ he said, glancing down. His torso read like a map of his exploits over twenty years.
‘Jesus. I thought you said you were lucky with bullets.’
‘That one wasn’t a bullet,’ he said. ‘It was a knife. Those ones are bullets.’
‘Oh.’
‘The drugstore on the corner will have a hairbrush we can buy,’ he said.
‘I guess,’ she replied. ‘Anyway, shower’s free if you want it.’ After an awkward silence, she slipped away and shut the door.
Ben spent three minutes under the shower, letting the hot water blast away his thoughts as best they could. He emerged from the bathroom in fresh clothes and, feeling suddenly ravenous, headed into the safehouse’s tiny kitchen to prepare some dinner. The worktops were lined with dust, and when he opened the fridge door he discovered that a bottle of milk had solidified into something way beyond cheese. He closed it quickly, opened a cupboard and grabbed two of the stacked tins inside, a pack of ground Lavazza coffee and a bottle of cheap red table wine that he’d forgotten he’d had left over from the old days, and was relieved to find. He hunted a can opener and corkscrew out of a drawer.
‘I see you’re still working your way through the same old store of canned cassoulet,’ Roberta observed as she wandered through into the kitchen, slumped on one of the two plain chairs by the small table and watched him empty the contents of the tins into a saucepan over the gas stove. Her hair was towelled dry and frizzy.
‘Lasts as long as tinned corned beef and tastes a lot better,’ he said, stirring the saucepan.
‘Oh sure, lumpy beans and overcooked sausage stewed in goose lard would be anyone’s idea of a treat, come the apocalypse. But as long as I can wash it down with some of that wine, I don’t give a rat’s ass.’
He uncorked the bottle, poured out two brimming glasses and handed her one of them. She gulped half of it down and gasped. ‘Goddamn, I needed that.’
Once the cassoulet was steaming hot, Ben ladled it unceremoniously onto a couple of plates and they sat down to eat it with more wine. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, forking up some beans, ‘there’s survival food, then there’s gourmet survival food.’
‘Coming from an American,’ he muttered. ‘Get it down you. We’re going to be busy later.’ He ate in silence for a while, then looked up, aware that she was watching him. ‘What?’
‘I hate to say it, but this kind of environment suits you a whole lot better than the vicarage did,’ she said.
‘That’s probably just as well, isn’t it?’ he replied tersely.
‘Sorry. It was just an observation. Maybe it didn’t come out quite right.’
‘So tell me,’ he said, keen to change the subject, ‘How’s life been for you? Apart from getting entangled in God knows what kind of trouble neither of us needed?’
‘Life?’
‘It’s been a long time,’ Ben said. ‘We haven’t been in touch. You must have had some kind of life.’
‘Are you asking about guys?’
He shrugged. ‘Not specifically.’
‘Sure, I had a life. I put my old one behind me, I worked hard at my job, I did some travelling around Canada and the northern states. Then there was Dan. You remember him, I guess? Dan Wright? You saw him, when you came over that one time.’
‘He was your colleague at the university in Ottawa,’ Ben said. ‘You and he were giving a lecture on “effects of weak electromagnetic fields on cell respiration”. I didn’t know what the hell that meant then, either.’
She raised an eyebrow, forkful of food poised in mid-air. ‘My, what a remarkable memory you have, Ben Hope. So you must also recall with perfect clarity what you told me afterwards?’
‘I told you I thought a bloke like that could be good for you,’ Ben said. ‘He seemed like a decent sort. Steady. Dependable. The opposite of me. And I could tell he liked you.’
‘Yeah,’ she said sourly. ‘A few weeks after I last saw you, Dan asked me on a date. I said no. I hadn’t …’ Roberta almost spoke the words that were on the tip of her tongue, ‘hadn’t got over what happened between you and me’, but she managed to cover it up. ‘I hadn’t any interest in relationships at that point. But months passed, he kept asking, and eventually I said yes and we started dating. It lasted about a year. We talked about moving in together.’ She gave a little snort and knocked back the last of her wine. ‘Well, you and I both made the same mistake, Ben. The great, decent, dependable Dr Wright turned out to be Dr Wrong. Dead wrong. One evening I went back to the lab to pick up some notes, and I found the sonofabitch giving an extra-curricular one-to-one Biology class to Xandra Mills, one of his more alluring final-year students. Right there on the desk.’
‘Oh,’ Ben said. ‘What did they do, fire him?’
‘You’re kidding. That would have drawn far too much scandal for the university. He got a speedy transfer to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Or else I don’t know how I could have gone on working with the jerk.’
Ben poured the last of the bottle into their empty glasses. ‘I’m sorry to hear about all that.’
‘Are you?’ she asked, cocking her head to one
