Beautiful Child (13 page)

‘Well just look at you’ said Matt as he walked back into the bedroom from the bathroom. He was naked and his cock and balls swung slightly as he walked. ‘Sitting up in my bed with your post-coital cigarette and showing off your hairy chest to the world. You look like Sean Connery in all those early Bond films.’

‘Well does that make you Miss Moneypenny?’ asked Adrian in an attempted Connery voice that made Matt fall about laughing. ‘Why are you laughing?’

‘Because that was the worse Sean Connery imitation I’ve ever heard!’

Adrian grabbed Matt and brought him close. ‘I’ll bet Connery doesn’t kiss like I do, he said before sweeping Matt onto the bed and kissing him with the same extraordinary passion that had driven their love making. He then lifted the duvet and tapped the space inside with the palm of his hand. ‘Now get back into bed.’

‘Yes, Sir,’ said Matt as he crawled in and snuggled up to Adrian. If only it could stay like this. He didn’t want Adrian to go home. He wanted to hold onto this feeling and yet he knew that it would be wrenched away from him like a child who won’t give up his toy at bedtime. ‘You seem a lot more relaxed than when you first got here.’

‘Well I’ve had a thorough examination from the good doctor so I’m tons better now.’

‘Is it work that’s stressing you?’

‘Yes’ said Adrian. ‘We’ve got a big case on. I was lucky to get away to be honest.’

‘Murder?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Adrian. ‘You might’ve read about it in the papers? A woman called Rita Makin?’

‘Yes, I did’ said Matt as he recalled reading the report in the
Manchester Evening News
. ‘Somebody got into her house and cut her throat for apparently no reason?’

‘That’s the one’ said Adrian.

‘Horrific,‘ said Matt, ‘poor woman. Her poor family.’

‘You might not say that if you’d met them’ said Adrian. ‘Anyway, lets not talk about it anymore. I know what I meant to ask you. Are you going on holiday this year?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Matt who was somewhat surprised by the question.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to Italy in August. My friend Gabriella lives in Rome so I’ll stay with her and her family for a week or so and then we’ll all go down to the coast near Naples for another week. It’s beautiful down there. Have you ever been?’

‘No, can’t say I have,’ Adrian replied. He’d not been abroad that much. Since the kids had come along he’d not been able to afford it. It was alright for men like Matt who don’t have any dependents. Adrian wouldn’t swap his kids for the world but they did mean that his own life was on hold whilst he saw to theirs. That’s one of the reasons why he needed this time with Matt. It was something he didn’t have to share with anyone else in the family but himself.

‘Anyway, can you just picture you and me on some faraway beach then?’ asked Matt his voice rich with fantasy.

‘Well I can picture it, mate, but it’s not going to happen.’

Matt wished Adrian wasn’t quite as blunt as he sometimes could be. He took a deep breath and then asked ‘So why did you ask me?’

‘Well, the thing is, I told you my Dad died years ago?’

‘Yeah?’ Matt asked, noting that Adrian hadn’t apparently noticed the pause in their conversation. But then why would he? Adrian had everything he wanted at home and away.

‘Well my Mum has decided to give me and my brothers and sister part of what we were going to inherit when she died. She wants to give us something now so she can get the pleasure out of seeing what we do with it. My Dad has missed out on so much with his kids and his grandkids and I think my Mum just doesn’t want to miss out on as much. Anyway, it’s not a lot of money, Matt, not really. We’ll get about six grand each but it’ll be enough to spend some of it on a holiday for me and the family. I just wondered if you had ideas as to where we might go.’

Matt didn’t really want to answer that. He wanted to go on holiday with Adrian. He didn’t want to advise him of where he could go with someone else even if that was his wife and his children.   

‘I’ve always loved Italy’ said Matt. ‘I don’t think you can go wrong there. The food, the wine, the buildings, the culture, just the general way of the place.’

‘Too full of Italians.’

‘Watch it, you. My friends Gabriella and her husband Umberto and their family mean a lot to me.’

‘Okay, but not Italy.’

‘Well how about France? For all the same reasons as Italy.’

‘Too full of the bloody French,’ said Adrian. ‘Look, I don’t want to go to any country that doesn’t speak English.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Okay, so I’m a lazy Brit who won’t try.’

‘You’re not prepared to make any effort to speak someone else’s language?’   

‘No, sorry. I’m very English when it comes to things like that. It’s up to them to speak English not the other way round.’

‘Christ!’ Matt exclaimed, ‘I didn’t realise what a little Englander you were.’

‘Yeah, well that’s me.’

‘That’s a pity because it would be great for your kids and learning another language opens up a whole new culture to you.’

‘I’m quite happy with my English culture thank you very much.’

‘You were quite happy with straight sex until I came along.’

Adrian laughed. ‘Oh touché!’

‘You see’ said Matt. ‘You can speak another language.’

‘Well what’s touché?’

‘It’s French you idiot.’

‘I never knew that.’

‘Oh  puh–lease!’

‘No seriously, I didn’t.’

‘Mange tout, Rodney, mange tout.’

‘So do you speak French?’

‘Yes’

‘And do you speak Italian too?’

‘Yes’ said Matt. ‘But it’s the language of love so that’s why I never speak it to you.’

‘Oh ha, ha, my sides!’ laughed Adrian. ‘Anyway, I think it’s going to be Florida.’

Matt pulled a face. ‘Florida? You’d have to pay me to go there.’

‘At least they speak English.’

‘Of a sort. I’m sometimes able to understand people who don’t speak English more than I can understand Americans. I certainly feel more in tune with other Europeans than I do with America.’

‘Well I’m of the opposite view,’ said Adrian. ‘Sorry. Europe means nothing to me. America is the real deal.’

‘Oh I hate their absurd puritan values,’ said Matt. ‘They wanted to impeach Clinton because he’d had an affair. It had nothing to do with anybody else but those directly involved.’

‘So you’re saying that if our Prime Minister was found out to have been having an affair with one of his staff, it wouldn’t bother you?’

‘Not a bit.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it would be his business to sort out with his wife and his lover,’ said Matt. ‘Just like it was Mitterand’s business in France when it was discovered he had a daughter with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Nobody else bothered. The French public just shrugged their Gallic shoulders. They took the more mature view.’

‘But what about the morality that goes with being in that office?’

‘I think it’s a bit rich of you, Mr. Married Man, to be climbing onto the moral high ground when you’re lying here in bed with me.’

‘But this is different.’

‘Why is it?’

‘Because I’m not the Prime Minister.’

‘But there’s the duplicity, don’t you see? In Britain and America we’ve got to grow up about these things. We’re forever banging on about how we want our politicians to be more human and then when they do show they’re human we condemn them for it.’

‘Well, yeah, I can see what you’re saying,’ said Adrian who then lowered himself down and kissed Matt. ‘You think a lot deeper than I do.’

‘That isn’t difficult.’

‘Don’t push it, mastermind.’

Matt cradled Adrian’s face in his hands. The stubble on his face made it feel like sandpaper to Matt’s smooth hands and it got him hard.

‘Remember when you wouldn’t kiss me on the lips?’ said Matt. 

‘Yeah’ said Adrian. ‘What a twat I was.’

‘You’d fuck me from here to next week but you wouldn’t kiss me on the lips because you said that would really make you gay.’

Adrian laughed at his own stupidity. ‘I know’ he said and then kissed Matt again. He did have the softest lips. ‘I can’t get enough of it now.’

‘Is that why you’ve never asked me to fuck you?’

‘I don’t understand?’

‘Well that really would be making you perhaps more gay than you want to be’ said Matt. ‘The penetration and all that. You know what I mean, Adrian.’

‘Yeah I do and I suppose that’s true, yeah. But I’ve never really thought about it, Matt, until you mentioned it. I get what I need from being inside you.’

They kissed again and Matt felt his erection twitch against Adrian’s. ‘Do you have time?’

‘Yes,’ said Adrian as he reached for another condom and picked it open with his teeth. ‘But this one will have to be a quickie though. It’s KFC bargain bucket night at our house and Penny normally goes for it about seven.’

‘Oh you sure know how to make a boy feel valued.’

They’d just finished making love when Adrian’s mobile rang. He reached out and picked it up. He said it was Penny calling and asked Matt to keep quiet whilst he answered it. Matt did as he was told just like he always did but it annoyed him. Listening to Adrian say ‘darling’ this and ‘darling’ that just really pissed him off. 

‘She’s a wonderful woman, my wife,’ said Adrian after he’d finished the call from Penny, ‘I’m so bloody lucky I can’t tell you.’

‘I’m very pleased to hear it.’

Adrian looked up at hearing the tone in Matt’s voice. ‘What’s all that about?’

‘Do you have to say that every time you’re here?’

‘I don’t’ Adrian protested.

‘You fucking do,’ said Matt. ‘You may use a slightly different form of words but it amounts to the same thing. I know I’m only your bit on the side, Adrian, but you don’t have to rub my nose in it.’

‘I didn’t think you had a problem.’

‘I don’t,’ Matt insisted, ‘but I do have a problem with you not showing me any sensitivity at all. You could’ve gone into another room and taken that call instead of asking me to keep quiet in my own fucking bedroom.’

Adrian paused as he looked at Matt. Then he said ‘I’d better get dressed and get going.’

‘Yes’ said Matt, flatly. ‘You wouldn’t want your KFC to get cold.’ 

*

Sara brought Michelle Clarke in to take her fingerprints and a DNA sample. Mrs. Clarke protested but Sara said that it was no worse than what they’d asked of her husband who was still in custody. She’d learned from her experiences with Lady Eleanor Harding last year that the more you bring suspects into the station the more they seemed willing to tell the truth. It would seem elementary for a police officer to be able to deduce these things but Sara had always operated on the principle that she wasn’t always right. It was her job to tease the answers out of everyone she needed to tell the truth and if that meant interviewing them in their own homes then that was better. But if it meant bringing them down to the station and putting on the whole official big shit thing then that was good too.

‘Right, Mrs. Clarke,’ said Sara as she walked into the interview room where Michelle Clarke was sitting. ‘Let’s talk for a few minutes.’

‘Detective Inspector, I have three sons who will want feeding when they get home from school in a couple of hours time.’

‘Well I won’t keep you longer than necessary, Mrs. Clarke.’

‘I don’t even know why I’m here,’ said Michelle, defiantly. ‘You should be out there finding my mother’s killer.’

‘That’s what we are doing, Mrs. Clarke,’ said Sara.

‘So you say,’ Michelle replied. She bowed her head. If only she could turn the clock back and tell her mother that whatever had happened between her and Warren, they could talk about it. They could work things out. It was tearing away at her inside.

‘Yes, Mrs. Clarke,’ said Sara. ‘I say.’

‘Well at least can you give me an idea as to how long you’re going to keep me here?’

‘That depends on your answers to a few questions,’ said Sara, ‘and I must say, I’m surprised you haven’t asked after your husband’s welfare, Mrs. Clarke?’

‘Are you going to charge him?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Sara. ‘we’re still working on it.’ 

‘I wish you luck.’

‘Mrs. Clarke, you surely don’t mean that?’

‘My husband was sleeping with my mother, I don’t owe him anything.’

‘But you wouldn’t want him falsely accused?’

Michelle shrugged her shoulders. ‘Don’t expect me to care about the duplicitous bastard.’

‘I think that’s understandable in the circumstances’ said Sara. ‘but I need to find your mother’s killer. And I can’t rule anyone out.’

‘Anyone?’

‘Including you, Mrs. Clarke.’

Michelle sat back in her chair. ‘I was nowhere near my mother’s house that night.’