‘Was Imelda fat?’
Twelve hours or so earlier, Sandra’s use of the past tense would scarcely have registered, but in the present circumstances, it was especially poignant. He’d been in denial for over a year that Imelda might actually be dead, and it had taken several more months to get used to the fact that he’d never see her again. Then all of a sudden she pops up large as life on a bloody computer screen. It was bad enough that she’d deliberately subjected him to all that grieving and misery for no reason, but to discover that she’d only married him in the first place for the sake of “convenience”… What a bitch.
‘Well?’
Once again, Trevor had no idea what Sandra was asking. ‘Well what?’
‘Oh never mind,’ she said, spreading a liberal amount of butter onto her toast. ‘You’re not really with me at the moment, are you?’
‘And that’s surprising, is it? I mean, I’ve just been told by my missing-presumed-dead wife that all the time I knew her, she was an MI5 field agent, and to cap it all, she tells me she was ordered to get herself wed to any old sucker so her cover would be more convincing.’
‘Yes, I think she could have left out the bit about “the more ordinary the better”.’
Trevor didn’t respond. Imelda’s remark had certainly wounded him deeply, but when he’d thought about it later, he’d realised that the depth of the wound was directly proportional to the truth of her statement. He couldn’t deny it. He was as ordinary as they came.
‘Still,’ said Sandra through a mouthful of toast, ‘I suppose you’ve got to be grateful to her in one way.’
‘Oh?’
‘She got you off a murder charge, didn’t she?’
‘Yes, but if she hadn’t decided to disappear off the face of the planet because – what was it? – some enemy agent was on to her, none of that stuff would ever have happened.’ Enemy agent? Good grief, the whole situation was totally bizarre. ‘And anyway, it was only by pure fluke that I spotted her on the computer.’
‘Gotta thank Milly for that one, I guess.’
‘And what if I hadn’t? You think if it had gone all the way and I’d been convicted she’d have stepped in and saved the day?’
‘Yes, I do actually.’
‘Huh.’ Trevor slumped back in his chair and folded his arms.
‘Your sister thought so too.’
‘Oh she did, did she? What is this? Some kind of female conspiracy?’
Trevor was aware of Sandra’s mouth moving, but he heard nothing of what she was saying. His mind had already drifted back to the events at Janice’s house the night before. It had been close to midnight when they’d got there because Logan had insisted on getting confirmation that Imelda really was who she said she was, and he’d dragged them to the nearest police station and kept them hanging around for almost three hours until he was satisfied. “Satisfied” was perhaps not the most accurate description though. The guy was fuming and had issued all kinds of threats, including charging Trevor’s mother with wasting police time if she hadn’t been ‘completely off her bloody trolley’.
Not surprisingly, Janice had demanded a detailed explanation of exactly what her brother had been up to that had brought the police to her door in full view of all the neighbours. She had fed them soup and sandwiches, and when Trevor had finished explaining and wolfing down the food, she’d rung their mother, who had flatly denied all knowledge of any murder accusation and added that Trevor needed his head seeing to.
As it was so late, Trevor had hoped his sister would put them up for the night, but there was no way his ‘hooligan bloody mongrel’ would ever cross her threshold again. He had no intention of making Milly sleep in the car, so he and Sandra had found a couple of rooms in a nearby guesthouse which allowed pets.
‘So long as it’s well behaved,’ the guesthouse owner had said, casting a doubtful eye in Milly’s direction.
Trevor had lied – convincingly for once – and they’d been shown to their adjacent rooms.
‘’Night then, Trev,’ Sandra had said when the proprietor had headed off back down the hallway. ‘Sleep well.’
‘Yeah, it’s been a long couple of days,’ he’d muttered, suddenly aware that Sandra had taken hold of the doorknob to her room several seconds earlier but had so far shown no sign of actually turning it. Afraid that the slight reddening of his cheeks was about to develop into an incandescent beacon of embarrassment, he had mumbled a final goodnight and almost hurled himself and Milly into his own room before she could notice.