Page 36 of Smoke & Ashes
I ordered myself a pint and found a table by the door. It probably wasn’t the most professional decision in the world to be drinking on the job, but then it also wasn’t the most professional decision in the world to be sleeping in your office or with whoever would have you. Or, for that matter, to be spending most of your working day dealing with vision-quests and murderous vampires. But we played the hands we were dealt.
My level of drunkenness was still within acceptable levels when Edward Brown appeared a couple of hours later. In the circumstances I felt I’d shown admirable restraint.
He sat somewhat resentfully opposite me. Leaving aside my general distaste at his actions and my, y’know, homosexuality, he wasn’t a completely unattractive man. His hair was slightly receding, but he managed to pull it off with a sort of Prince William vibe, and despite clearly knowing he was in some sort of trouble, he carried himself with the unconscious confidence that you needed to do well as a professional seller of very expensive things.
“So,” he said. It took a certain amount of courage to speak first in a situation like this. You had to give him credit for that. Minimal credit, admittedly. “You’re here for my wife.”
“Yup.”
“I never meant it to end up like this.”
“They never do.”
He looked down at the table. This wasn’t going to be a happy conversation for either of us.
“Go grab a drink,” I told him. “I’ll still be here when you get back.”
He went and grabbed a drink, again making the wise choice not to try and do a runner. “I don’t know where to begin,” he said when he returned.
“Okay, let’s start with the basics. First of all, just to make sure we’re on the same page here, when you saymy wifeyou mean Galatea, not some other woman you’ve got stashed in a semi-detached in Slough?”
He nodded.
“And is your marriage legal?”
That one rattled him. But he probably knew I’d spoken to her. He shook his head.
“Because you got her fake papers, or because you never intended to marry her to begin with?”
“The first one. Legally she didn’t seem to exist, so I had a friend fix it. In the eyes of the law, our marriage might have been a fraud. In my eyes it wasn’t.”
I didn’t know if that made it better or worse. “And is there another woman?”
He didn’t respond to that one, which was basically confirmation on its own.
“How long?”
“A year?”
“And how long were you married?”
“Two years. Two and a half. Engaged for a while before that—the papers took time to sort out.”
This was getting to be a variant on the oldest story in the world. Well, I suppose technically the oldest story in the world was the one that went “then a big rock came out of the sky and all the dinosaurs were gone” but this was still on the list. “Okay,” I said. “Let me run a scenario by you, and you can steer me right if I miss anything or say anything you think is off base.”
He gave me an expectant look.
“You meet this girl, she’s beautiful and mysterious and did I mention beautiful. Also she’s, like, extremely accommodating sexually. How am I doing so far?”
“I’d rather you didn’t speculate about my sex life.”
“That wasn’t a no. Point is she makes you feel things you’ve never felt before—she’s basically your dream woman. The kind of woman you thought only existed on television. Pretty soon you decide you’re in love or what passes for it, and to your amazement she feels the same. It’s like your birthday and Christmas all at once.”
Silence. I’d probably been a bit unfair, but unfair wasn’t the same as inaccurate.
“A few months later you ask her to marry you and she says yes. You start to realise that some of the things that made this girl so fresh and exciting might actually be problems, maybe even dangerous problems. She doesn’t seem to have parents or a family or really any past at all. You probably come up with some theories, maybe she was a mail order bride who got lost in the post, maybe she’s in witness protection and they couldn’t be bothered with a cover story, maybe she’s an angel sent from heaven to suck your dick and do your laundry.”
“That’s rather harsh.”
