I grimaced and shrugged. Not exactly tone deaf, but I’d never tried to play an instrument. She considered me with concern, a lost soul in the wilderness.
‘But you’ll be staying around?’ she asked.
‘Seems like I’ve got no choice. I’ll have to find out what happened, that day.’
‘If it takes long enough, I’ll have time to teach you the guitar.’
This was over the pudding, a sponge with hot jam on it. I said I hoped it wouldn’t take that long, and: ‘Anyway, I bet there’s no music written for clarinet and guitar.’
‘Then we’d have to write our own,’ she declared, and damn it, she wasn’t joking.
She was a woman who’d cheerfully take on anything, never daunted, accepting life as it came at her, in her case headlong.
With lunch over, I couldn’t find much excuse for hanging around any more, and she had her work to do. Awkwardly, I drifted back into her office, aware that I’d probably not enter that building again.
‘Well, I’ll be off.’ I thrust my hands into my slacks pockets. ‘Leave you to it. Maybe we’ll meet again.’
‘Oh, don’t rush off. There’s some stuff of yours you’d better take. I’ve been keeping it for you.’
She reached over and drew open the second drawer down of her desk, and came up with a large manilla envelope, fastened with a metal clip. She held it out to me.
‘Your personal stuff from the briefcase, and a few oddments from the drawers. Maybe they’ll help. You know, the memory.’
And in her eyes I saw she understood that this was the critical point. Not the money, not the visit to Pool Street Motors that day, not the disappearance of Clayton’s wife, but my memory. It was my mind we were talking about, and that was where I lived.
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Stone Cold Dead Page 28