The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel by Steve Mosby Page A

without you .
    Both lies, I thought, remembering standing on the beach all those years ago, helplessly watching my girlfriend drown.
    Both lies when it had come to Lise.
    Sasha was home before me. I found her in the kitchen, chopping onions and garlic, with mince defrosting in the microwave. She’d changed into jeans and a thigh-length white T-shirt, one of my old ones. I walked up and hugged her from behind, pleased when she pressed back against me without hesitation. I kissed her neck and stepped away.
    ‘My turn to cook,’ I said.
    ‘I know. I just figured I’d make a start. Oh dear.’ She grabbed a sheet of kitchen roll and dabbed at her eyes, turning to face me. ‘Bloody onions. Anyway. You look surprisingly okay. You survived, then?’
    ‘Somehow, yeah.’
    ‘Was it because of my special coffee?’
    ‘I think it might well have been. How was your day?’
    ‘Ah, just the usual heroics.’ She shrugged, putting the kitchen roll in the bin. ‘What about you? Anything interesting to report?’
    ‘Not really. Pete decided to teach me a lesson by sending me on a wild goose chase. He said you wouldn’t punish me for getting drunk, so it fell to him.’
    ‘Ha! I always liked Pete.’
    ‘Yeah, yeah. I’ll just get changed, then I’ll take over in here.’
    ‘Right you are.’
    I hung up my suit upstairs, then threw on some jeans and a T-shirt of my own. A wild goose chase , I thought – except it was beginning to seem like it might be something else altogether, even if right now I wasn’t sure what. And yet my instinct had been to downplay the day’s events to Sasha, to not go into detail. I knew why, as well. I kept remembering the look on Paul Carlisle’s face: the horror that a life he’d left behind and moved on from might be rearing its ugly head in the present. And every time I pictured that, the knot in my chest tightened slightly.
    Downstairs, I fried up bolognese, and set the pasta boiling.
    ‘Your turn to pick five,’ Sasha called through.
    ‘Is it? Okay.’
    Once a week, we watched a movie together: turned off the lights and ate dinner on our laps, side by side on the settee. The routine was always the same. One of us would select five DVDs from the shelves, and the other had to choose one from them. We liked very different things. Sasha was a big science-fiction and horror geek, whereas I tended to go more for thrillers and dramas. Whenever it was my turn to pick, I always went for four films I wanted to watch, and one I knew she did. When it was her week to pull out five, the routine reversed itself. Neither of us had ever mentioned this arrangement out loud.
    Tonight I selected two horror films instead of one, hopingthe unspoken gesture might go some way to make up for my behaviour last night, if that was still needed. I left the pile on the settee while I drained the pasta, and then we ate dinner together watching a horror film called Pumpkinhead . Sasha enjoyed it anyway. The things we do for love.
    Afterwards, I took the bowls through and washed up, the water hot enough to leave the skin on my hands pink when I was finished.
    I was still thinking about the case.
    ‘I’m exhausted.’
    I turned to see Sasha leaning against the door frame, yawning.
    ‘Early night for me,’ she said. ‘You coming?’
    I dried my hands and hung up the towel. I knew I should go with her, but the folded sheet of paper Paul Carlisle had given me felt heavy in my pocket.
    ‘I just need to check something,’ I said. ‘I’ll be up in a few minutes.’
    ‘Just a few?’
    ‘Not even that many. Promise.’
    She smiled at me. ‘Good.’
    Back in the front room, I sat down in the dark on the settee and logged into the departmental database on my tablet, then synched the device with the plasma screen on the wall. A few moments later, the television showed a still image of the woman in the hospital. In the gloom, it looked as though she was somehow hanging in the air between the television and the