Page 12 of Dead Fall

‘Oh, come on, Archie, don’t be like that.’

Taking a towel, he dried off his face before turning to her, his grey eyes serious. ‘I was worried sick about you.’

Cassie grimaced: she could kick herself. How could she have forgotten to call him?

‘I’m really sorry I forgot to text you till this morning. Like I say, I was wasted.’

‘I’m just starting to wonder if you really want me here,’ said Archie, pulling on his Barbour jacket.

‘Of course, I do,’ said Cassie, but she knew she didn’t sound very convincing.

‘I agreed to come live on this stupid .?.?. floating coffin’ – throwing a dark look at the ceiling an inch above his head. ‘When we could be living in a nice warm flat with a washing machine and a TV. And space. The last few weeks you’ve been out every other night, and when you are here you’re bad-tempered or monosyllabic half the time. I already feel like I’m here on sufferance – and now this?’

She bit her lip. Why didn’t she just tell him the truth? That someone had tried to get into the mortuary and she’d felt she had no alternative but to stay there overnight. To protect Bronte. But it would just sound mad, and she’d have to get into what had happened at school that day to make Bronte leave and how bad she still felt about it.

She sent Archie an imploring look. ‘Look if you’re worried that I’m seeing someone else, I swear—’

‘I’m worried you’re not seeing me,’ he said, zipping up his Barbour. ‘I’m not really part of your life. More of a tolerated lodger.’

And before she could find the words to disagree, he was off, the boat rocking as he jumped down onto the towpath.

Her relationships always came to this. She took a kind of bitter comfort from the thought.

*

Within a heartbeat of her grandmother opening her front door those beady eyes had noticed something was amiss. But then the person who raised you from the age of four to seventeen was going to have certain insights.

Her gran didn’t say anything, just kissed Cassie on each cheek, once, twice, three times in the Polish way, before ushering her inside. Cassie sniffed the air, detecting a steamy, savoury smell coming out of the kitchen.

‘Golabki?’ she asked.

‘Czesc.’ She nodded, steering her granddaughter into the living room. ‘Just cooked. Sit down, I’ll get you a plate.’

Ignoring Cassie’s faint protests, she came back with two of the cabbage dumplings called golabki – literally, ‘pigeons’ – because of their shape rather than their contents, ladled into a soup plate with some of their cooking broth, which shimmered with goodness.

Cassie realised that after a night passed trying to sleep on the bench in the mortuary changing room she was hungry.

Her gran watched her eat, smiling but silent. This one you had to give the space to speak, if and when she wanted.

The simple savoury goodness of the meal – together with the warm fug of the living room, the gas fire pop popping, the hum of Polish spices and the sweet scent of her gran’s face powder – catapulted Cassie back to her childhood. ‘Have you put something different in these?’ she asked, sensing some extra layer of umami beneath the wild mushrooms, buckwheat kasha, and obligatory fistful of garlic.

‘You can’t guess?’ Babcia clapped her hands together with glee. ‘It’s soy sauce – just a dash.’

Babcia experimenting with culinary fusion? Cassie was surprised to find herself scandalised but she had to admit it worked.

After she’d finished, and made coffee for them both, she came and sat opposite her grandmother. ‘It must have been tough for you, Babcia, bringing me up after Mum died and Dad went to prison.’

From the age of four Cassie had been brought up believing that she’d been orphaned when a car accident killed both her parents, and it was barely a year since she’d discovered what really happened. Her mother Katherine had been murdered, with her father Callum being convicted and sentenced to life for the crime – the car crash simply a fiction invented by Babcia to protect her granddaughter from the ugly truth. After his release from prison, Callum had turned up out of the blue to claim his innocence and Cassie had got drawn into investigating the case, finally helping to find the real murderer.

Now, he’d been officially cleared and was back in her life, and living locally, although he was currently on an extended visit to his home town of Belfast and beyond to see his family. Their family. Cassie hadn’t just acquired an unexpected father but a clutch of aunts, uncles, and cousins – a discovery she was still getting to grips with.

Cassie pictured Archie’s expression that morning: hurt and angry at her thoughtlessness. It was only recently that she had begun to understand the shadow that growing up without either parent had cast over her life – above all how difficult she found it making and sustaining relationships.

‘How old were you when I came to live here, Babcia?’ she asked. ‘In your late fifties?’ She had only recently started to appreciate how tough it must have been for her grandmother, taking on a hyperactive four-year-old so late in life.

Weronika nodded, glancing at the photo of Cassie on the mantelpiece alongside the one of her daughter who she called Katerina, and everyone else called Kath. ‘When you were little you weren’t too much trouble, but later, at fourteen, fifteen’ – she waved an expressive hand – ‘it was a little bit more difficult.’

‘I’m sorry, Babcia,’ said Cassie, awkwardly. She wasn’t much good at apologies either. ‘At that age you literally don’t even think about other people, what they might be going through. You spend every minute just trying to work yourself out.’ She could remember it still, the agonised self-questioning: Am I pretty? Am I smart? Do people like me?

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