The Perfect Widow. A.M. Castle

but when we asked her if she wanted someone with her? If she wanted us to ring her mum, for example.’

      Burke gave her a look. She could just about interpret it as exasperation in the gathering dusk. ‘I can’t think of anything worse than having my mum around in a situation like that.’

      ‘But what about your kids? Wouldn’t it be good to have their gran there?’

      ‘You’re making a lot of assumptions. Not every family works like yours. Mine aren’t crazy about their nan, she’s pretty strict. Maybe Mrs Bridges, or whatever, is the same? Maybe they just don’t get on?’

      ‘OK, so not her mum – but why not another friend? Is she seriously going to sit there all night on her own with those kids? After what we’ve just told her?’

      ‘Why not? Maybe she wants to get her head around it first. Maybe she doesn’t actually have any friends. Basically, Becca, that’s not a crime.’

      ‘I’m not saying it is, but—’

      ‘You’ve got to stop expecting everyone to be the same as you. When you’ve been doing the knock for as long as I have, you’ll realise people take it all ways. Forget the textbook, forget what you think you’d do.’

      A cold drizzle started to fall. The windscreen wipers were soon beating a soothing tempo, as English as a nursery rhyme.

      ‘Truth is, you won’t know till you’re there. Where she’s sitting now. Just pray you never are,’ Burke said, turning the key at last, putting the car into gear with his usual heavy deliberation and signalling to pull out.

      Perhaps he was right. He had years of experience, in the end. All she had was instinct, and they were always being told to make that secondary to the rule book.

      ‘Amen to that.’ Becca shrugged, accepting defeat. For now.

       Chapter 3

       Now

       Louise

      All I want to do today, the day of the funeral, is make sure Giles and Em get through it, that we all do, as best we can. It’s not going to be easy. There was the delay, due to the … circumstances. You’d think that would make things less painful. It should be less raw. But it’s like pulling the plaster off bit by bit. They’ve had time to get used to the pitch of their grief, we’ve pared down our lives to fit around it. Now we have to open ourselves up again, parade in front of strangers.

      Still, if we can keep putting one foot in front of the other, get to the end of this long and dreadful day, then it’s one major ordeal over. I’m not saying we can then move seamlessly on with our lives. I know now that recovery will be slow. But still, it will be one less thing hanging over us.

      Em is in a dark-purple dress, one that Patrick liked. Better than black, for a girl of her age. We’ve scrambled together a dark suit for Giles. Boys can look wrong, dressed up in men’s clothes. Vulnerable necks, shiny jackets. But Giles looks good. Pale as his shirt, of course, and so sad, so brave. But smart, well turned out. Just like his dad.

      I’d taken one of Patrick’s suits to the undertakers. His best. They’d asked me if I wanted to see him then. I refused, of course.

      Unwisely, I mentioned it to the kids and then, of course, they felt obliged to see him. So I had to do it after all. Back to the funeral parlour, the careful obsequiousness of the staff, the décor that was so inoffensive it managed somehow to be revolting. We waited with another red-eyed family, offering each other stunted little smiles. Then we were led into the ghastly viewing room. Real flowers, at least. A pale pink carpet, suspiciously clean. I loathed it all. I looked at anything except the dazzling high shine of the coffin we’d picked, and the snowy white satin around his head. We were a tight little clump again. I could feel their fear and dread, the horror the living have of the dead, but I could feel their determination too. They are the best part of me, that’s for sure.

      I shuffled them forward, tried to make things easier, all the while averting my own eyes as much as I could. I couldn’t avoid a glimpse. And the worst thing was that he somehow looked so untouched, after all that he – we – had been through. That dressmaker’s dummy was not my husband. But he was still my children’s father.

       Chapter 4

       Now

       Becca

      Becca Holt stumped into the station building and dropped the results of her shopping trip on her desk. It was cluttered already with clumps of empty Costa cups and plastic bags as shrivelled as autumn leaves. Tutting audibly so her colleagues wouldn’t think it was all her rubbish, she shoved the lot into the nearest bin, hesitating only briefly over whether it should go into ‘recycling’ or ‘general waste’. Even throwing stuff away was complicated nowadays.

      Once the decks were cleared to her satisfaction, she snuffled in the pristine white paper bag she’d brought in. Just inhaling the doughnuts calmed her, the reassuring, wholesome smell of vanilla undercut with the hidden raspberry jam. She breathed in a bit too hard and had to splutter, finding a sudden unwilling sympathy for the coke addicts they were constantly moving on from under the arches down near the station.

      She darted a quick glance around. At most of the desks, her fellow PCs were sprawled flat or had their noses pressed up against screens. Opposite, Burke was knocking a biro against his teeth in a rhythm that was doing his dental work no favours and would soon be messing with her head. She’d bought the doughnuts to share. She knew she should be tearing open the bag, leaving it on the side of her desk, making a general announcement of her largesse. Getting them all to love her. But bugger that. She wanted them all to herself.

      She carefully edged a doughnut up a tad in the bag, ducked her head down, bit and sighed. It was good. So good it was bad. A bead of jam oozed down the side of her mouth and she licked and rubbed ferociously. Didn’t want to look like Dracula, did she? Or be caught snacking, either. She could do without being teased. As she’d discovered, the banter here wasn’t imaginative. Give them a stick, and they’d be beating you with it until you collected your pension.

      She chewed carefully and swallowed, the movement making her waistband dig in that little bit more. She felt a prickle of shame. It suddenly made her think of that woman’s thighs. Her first and only knock, and as such seared on her memory. But she didn’t think she’d have forgotten it anyway, even if she’d called on as many of the recently bereaved as the Co-op Funeral Service.

      Louise Bridges. That had been her name.

      There’d been something about her, for sure. She couldn’t say it had been eating away at her. She was the one who had been eating away, and not at that case, but at mounds of stuff she shouldn’t even be looking at. She knew that. But this was a tough job, physical. She could walk it off. In theory. Unfortunately, her beat didn’t cover Land’s End to John O’Groats. As often as not, she was welded to the seat of her patrol car, and even that was stationary in traffic.

      The truth was, it was the kind of work that you wanted to compensate yourself for doing. Demanding, sometimes demeaning. Requiring a lot of patience. Being polite, however absurd the calls on her time. Stepping in to defuse rows between grown men that would have shamed toddlers. Picking drunks up out of the gutter, and still treating them with respect, even when they hurled all over her clodhopping shoes. She needed a treat after a long day – and sometimes in the middle of a long day. And occasionally, like now, right at the beginning of what was, after all, bound to be a long day.

      Unbidden, that woman’s legs unfurled in her mind again. How did you even get legs like that? Genetics, that’s how. Her own tree trunks would always be just that, even if she ate nothing but tofu and quinoa from this day forth. She knew that to be the truth. Yet there were steps she could take, to make sure the rest of