‘Will you do something for me? Even if it rains all weekend, tell him you’ve had a wonderful time, and tell him not to sell the caravan. It still does him good to get down here.’
Waters looked around. Against the lights behind the bar, he could make out DC, now engaged in conversation with more people, a couple and the woman behind the bar as she placed drinks on a tray ready for him to carry back to their table, even though no-one had been asked if they needed one. It seemed that many people here knew him and wanted to speak to him – Waters sensed that DC had not been here for some time and that people wanted to catch up with him. And he sensed too that Shirley Salmon was right – it must be good for him to be here instead of alone in the neat, tidy but empty home that Waters had visited on the day of Wayne Fletcher’s funeral.
As Smith returned to the table and handed out the drinks, the band began to play again. In the breaks between numbers, they talked amongst themselves around the table. For the first time, Waters heard Smith mention his late wife, just in reference to some past event here at the club; Malcolm and Shirley laughed and went to move the conversation on but Waters saw the glance between them. Clare, unaware of the possible significance of that moment, asked Smith about Sheila, and he answered easily and with a smile as if he had forgotten that she had gone – how she liked to walk on the beach after dark, how she always complained that a weekend was never long enough…
After an hour or so, the band took a longer break, a good twenty minutes. Clare leaned against him and Waters wondered how long he should wait before leaving the party and taking her back to the caravan. He didn’t want to seem rude but he couldn’t ignore the soft warmth pressed closer and closer to him. But before he found the resolve to go, the singer was back at the mike, and now he would have to wait another ten minutes or so.
‘Hello again, good to see so many here at Pinehills. No open mike tonight, so you’ll have to put up with us for a bit longer. But we can mix it up a bit so you don’t get too bored. Shirley?’
The singer shaded his eyes from the spots and looked out into the audience. In response, she put up a hand and waved to him.
‘Ah, there she is!’ followed by a few cheers. ‘Quite right – without Shirley we’d all be stuck in front of the TV tonight. Shirley, where is he?’
Waters was watching Smith, and saw him shrink slightly back into some sort of shadow. When Shirley half-stood and pointed down towards him, Smith shook his head and half-scowled at her but already there were cheers of encouragement from the surrounding tables and the man on the stage was saying into the mike, ‘Come on, get him up here everyone! Come on!’
As he stood, Smith said something apologetic to the young couple, said that he knew he should have gone home that afternoon after all, but Waters waved him on towards the stage – there was no alternative as the shouts from the audience had grown in volume and the bass player on stage had begun to strum a single note insistently.
Clare turned to him, looking worried.
‘I really don’t think he wanted to go, Chris.’
‘Neither would I!’
‘Is he going to sing?’
‘I don’t know!’ he shouted over the noise, which had become applause as Smith was seen approaching the stage, but he remembered the guitar at the house, the comment about the music room, the shelves full of books.
‘God, Chris, how embarrassing if he… I mean, it’s not fair. Just so you know, don’t you ever make me do anything like that, like this…’
He squeezed her hand but he felt it too, the apprehension. On the stage, the lead guitarist was handing over his instrument to Smith – he helped him with the strap as if the new musician was the hapless victim of a practical joke, and then he stepped off the stage and left him there alone. The others, the drummer, the bass player, the vocalist were turned towards Smith, watching and waiting, and the audience grew quiet in anticipation.
There was a pause. Smith looked down and took the plectrum once across the open strings. Then he re-tuned one string, looked up towards the rest of the band and said something. They turned out towards the audience then and the drummer began to tap the cymbal. The singer said into the microphone ‘Old Love’ and they began to play.
It was a slow, sad number, a hymn to regret and loss. As the singer went through the opening verse, Smith played just chords but as he completed the verse, the singer raised his right arm, pointing behind him towards the guitarist, and then it began – a low murmuring of notes at first, climbing as the fingers worked their way up along the frets, and as the notes climbed they were bent into new shapes, unexpected shapes, the shapes of sorrow made audible, almost visible on the dark air above the silent listeners. It went on and on, reforming itself, finding in the same few backing chords, the same simple framework of the bass and drums, the endless ecstasies of love and the agonies of loneliness.
Clare gazed at the stage, open mouthed and astonished. When Waters looked back again, he hardly recognized the man playing the guitar in the shadows at the back of the stage, eyes closed, a Buddha-like calm on the face. He stared on, looking for Smith but he could only see a legend. At the end, there was a space, an emptiness, before the applause began.
When they stood on the steps of the caravan under a starlit sky, Clare said to him, ‘What was it called, that first number?’
Waters turned to her. She was on the step above him, looking down into his face. He put his hands around her waist and slid them down until they rested on the flare of her hips.
‘Old Love.’
They could still hear the band across the caravan park, distant, muffled but the soaring guitar was still there on the night air, playing another number now. She put her fingers into his hair.
‘I really liked it. But guess what?’
‘What?’
‘I’m more interested in new love.’
She twisted out of his grasp and laughed as she unlocked the door and opened it. Waters turned and looked once more up at the darkness and then across the park to where Smith, or someone resembling him, was still playing. A light came on behind him and Clare called his name. When he went inside and closed the door, he couldn’t hear it any more.
BUT FOR THE GRACE
The next case for DC Smith, available now
“We are living in the departure lounge,” said Ralph Greenwood, “and flights leave with monotonous regularity.” So when another resident of the Rosemary House care home is found dead in her chair one Saturday evening in December, no-one is very surprised – not until the results of a routine post-mortem reveal something extraordinary. Sergeant DC Smith and his team have to tread carefully as they investigate what took place, and Smith himself has to confront some difficult memories.
Text copyright © 2013
Peter Grainger
All rights reserved
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Peter
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
An Accidental Death Page 21