Page 37 of Dead Fall

They paused to smile up at Tabby bearing course number four: Wiltshire roast vegetables – one purple heritage carrot, a strip of celeriac and a scrawny wedge of parsnip – Archie’s portion garnished with bone marrow butter.

‘What about kids?’ he asked, pretending to study his food.

Cassie realised this was the first time the subject had come up in their eight or nine months together – at least in a way she hadn’t been able to sidestep. It wasn’t that she’d definitively ruled out the idea, but she had never felt even a trace of the urge to procreate that many – most? – women seemed to experience. Add in the inescapable fact that it was women who made the lion’s share of the sacrifices, and she wasn’t sure she ever would.

‘I don’t know, Archie. I like my job, and my freedom, I guess.’ A pause. ‘I’m guessing you do, though? Want kids?’

He met her gaze, his dark grey eyes looking serious. ‘Oh yes, a brace of them at least.’

They both went to speak but were interrupted, not by their server, but a blonde woman almost six foot tall and not much more than a foot wide at her broadest point, with a face like a startled fawn.

‘Arch?’ she asked. ‘It is you!’ Before turning to Cassie and saying, ‘I am so sorry to interrupt, but I was at school with Arch here.’

She smiled, showing her perfect teeth. ‘It’s Lætitia – with a diphthong.’ Her look doubting that Cassie would have a clue what that meant. ‘But everyone calls me Letty.’

‘Di’ from the Latin for two; ‘phthongos’ meaning sound or voice, thought Cassie to herself.

Letty and ‘Arch’ saddled up for a ride down Hooray memory lane: the night Letty got ‘totally squiffy’ on scrumpy .?.?. a mutual chum who’d just got a job at a Japanese bank .?.?. someone’s upcoming weekend house party .?.?. yada yada. The exchange probably only lasted two or three minutes but Cassie was grateful when Tabby-cat arrived with the next course, as it saved her from having to extract her own eyes with a spoon.

After Letty had gone, trailing a cloud of vetiver, Cassie raised an eyebrow. ‘Old squeeze?’

Archie’s cheeks went pomegranate red: he blushed easily, like most ginger-haired people. ‘A brief dalliance, years ago. No torches carried on either side – she just got engaged actually.’ He dispatched half of his lozenge of sous-vide turbot, served on fermented kohlrabi, in one modest bite before taking a gulp of wine. ‘I might go to the house party she mentioned. Harry’s got a proper country pile with beautiful grounds. Hey, why don’t you come with?!’

Her face must have betrayed her blank horror at the prospect of hanging out with Letty and her chums because Archie’s face fell. Like, literally fell, as though the strings that gave him his default-cheerful expression had been cut.

They got through the rest of the meal on work chat, and when Tabby-cat asked if they’d like a digestif they both went for large brandies which they took up to the room.

There they lay side by side on the bed, fully clothed and not touching: the half metre of pristine white linen between them might as well have been the Himalayas.

‘When Tabby said dessert was “banana three ways” I nearly made a bad joke,’ said Cassie, trying to lighten the mood.

It didn’t dispel Archie’s brooding silence. Her stomach felt like it had been filled with quick-setting cement. ‘Well, this is fun,’ she said, about to pick a fight, her default method when an ending was inevitable to get it over with.

‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ He spoke with what was clearly great effort.

But.

‘But I sometimes feel as though my life is on hold.’

Cassie felt a sudden heat behind the eyes; her childish impulse to engineer a row gone.

He levelled his gaze at her. ‘Could you meet me halfway? Not now, but in a few years, say, we could get somewhere outside London but still easily commutable? Like, I don’t know, Surrey?’

Surrey? He might as well have said Mogadishu.

‘I’m not trying to get you to give up your job,’ he went on. ‘I know you love it. But there are mortuaries everywhere.’

‘What about the .?.?. kids thing though?’ she asked, twisting her glass on the bedcover. ‘I just don’t see myself .?.?.’

‘You’re only twenty-seven!’ he said. ‘You might change your mind, a few years down the line?’

No chance. The realisation made her stomach plunge.

Meeting his hopeful, hopeless gaze she said, ‘And if I get to thirty-five and still feel the same? What then?’

Chapter Twenty-Three

The cab/train/Tube schlep back from deepest Wiltshire the following day took Cassie nearly three hours and felt like twice that. When she finally climbed aboard Dreamcatcher Macavity cantered down from the deck where he’d been sunning himself to greet her. Following her below deck he jumped up onto the banquette, arching his back.

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