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Gene thumped down the courthouse steps fit to make the concrete shudder to dust beneath his loafers. Bloody barristers had seen fit to drag out every witness until their every word was pulled as thin as a rubber johnny and he was hours overdue for a smoke.
He stopped halfway down the stairs, threw his shoulder into one of the towering pedestals and squinted up at the lion lounging high above as he rummaged his Marlboros from his coat pocket. ‘Lazy bugger,’ he muttered, not without a whiff of jealousy as he perched a fag between his lips and searched his other pockets for a lighter. Damned if he could figure out where it had got to, neither left nor right and he growled softly around his waiting cigarette as he shoved a hand into his trouser pocket…
‘May I offer you a light, Mr. Brown?’
A confusion of half-reactions slammed through him before instinct whipped his head away from the lion to the somewhat more dangerous feline hovering two steps above his own. Dark eyes sparked cool and playful beyond the flame flicking invitingly from a lady’s silver lighter poised between nimble fingers that he knew were capable of all manner of unladylike things.
‘You know that’s not my name,’ he mumbled, though he leaned in politely enough and let Mrs. Luckhurst light his cigarette all the same. ‘Reckon you saw me swear as much before God and Queen and all up there.’
‘True.’ Mrs. Luckhurst lit her own cigarette before tucking the lighter safely away in her handbag. ‘But I’m only acquainted with Mr. Brown. I’d hate for DCI Hunt to think me so terribly forward.’
‘Little late for that, love.’ Gene kept his shoulder pressed to the stability of the lion’s pedestal as he inhaled a steadying lungful of his Marlboro. It was hard to think the woman anything but, when that first rake of her eyes had made him feel as though he had been the one standing there practically starkers in the Twillings’ lounge and not her. He pursed his lips around his fag, privately irritated as he felt his normally direct gaze shift away from her bottomless dark eyes. ‘Enjoying the sideshow, are you?’
She shrugged, unfazed by Gene’s poorly concealed contempt. ‘It’s not as surprising as you suppose,’ she said. ‘There was always something a bit funny about our Carol. Too possessive by far.’
‘Takes more than that to snuff out a life,’ he muttered, even if he could see what Mrs. Luckhurst meant about Carol Twilling now. There had been a big hollow something behind her eyes, a shadow that he had hated to leave in Sam’s company for a second longer than absolutely necessary. He shuddered to think what she might have done with the lad if Annie’s shouts hadn’t brought their evening to such a premature end.
‘Though I have to admit,’ Mrs. Luckhurst continued, startling Gene out of his moody recollections of bare feet, an unbuttoned shirt and reddened lips, ‘I didn’t throw away a perfectly good day just to see Carol in the dock.’
Gene flicked a startled glance back up at Mrs. Luckhurst, thrown by the naked interest in her gaze. ‘Is that so?’ he attempted carefully. He took another drag off his cigarette, relieved to have his hand intercede between his face and her eyes.
‘Quite.’ She exhaled a lazy mouthful of smoke that piled itself thick and lush upon the heady nicotine already dizzying his head.
‘If you’re implying you came out to this farce of a trial to see me take the stand…’
‘Oh, I’m more than implying.’
Gene scowled, shook his head. ‘If you were fancying another eyeful of Mr. Brown, you’ll be very disappointed.’
‘Then why don’t you buy me a drink sometime?’ she asked. ‘Give me a chance to get to know Mr. Hunt a little bit better instead.’
And in the next exhale of smoke, he knew he was more screwed than a whole heapful of guests at even the most indiscrete of sex parties.
* * *
He let Mrs. Luckhurst choose the time and place, which was his next mistake. Nine o’clock was no proper time to be meeting a married woman, and decency was a tough front to maintain when Gene found himself slinking out of the Arms after only two hasty pints, unable to quite meet Sam’s questioning gaze as he did so.
‘Bit early, innit?’ he asked disbelievingly. A couple pints of his own and a whisky chaser had loosened the precision of Sam’s voice and slapped a flush of blood into his face. It filled his skin all the way down his neck and into the open neck of his shirt, Gene noticed as he fought to avoid Sam’s eye.
‘Missus has a roast on,’ he mumbled as he brushed past. Gene ignored the unconvinced frown he got in return, just as he ignored the heat he could feel wafting through Sam’s shirt as he strode too close on his way out the door. Days at the station were growing longer and Manchester was beginning to slowly simmer, just hot enough to wring the sweat from Sam’s skin by late afternoon and cast the ghost of an undeniable masculinity in his wake. He hadn’t failed to notice Sam’s displeasure at this turn of events, smirking as Sam wafted the collar of his shirt on stake-outs with that funny little turn of his nose as though he didn’t know how bloody attractive a bit of manly sweat could be to the ladies.
Something brushed his calf under the table and Gene jumped slightly in his seat before recognizing, as though from ages past, the playful slide of a woman’s foot against his leg.
‘No fair checking out during the first drink, Mr. Hunt.’
He rolled his shoulders back, squinted at Mrs. Luckhurst through the shoddy half-light in this crypt of a pub. The silence in here was suffocating, all murmuring laughter and ringing glassware that made Gene pitch his reply to a low grumble. ‘Who said I checked out on you?’
‘Those lovely eyes of yours, of course,’ she replied, arching an eyebrow as she lifted her glass of wine to her lips. ‘You were miles away.’
‘Not at all, love.’ He cleared his throat, tossed a mouthful of scotch down there to help things out. ‘I agreed to a drink, and that’s exactly what you’re getting.’
Mrs. Luckhurst set her glass aside with a slight pout to her lips. ‘And nothing more?’
That foot, he noticed, hadn’t strayed too far and was now twitching hopefully at the hem of his trousers. Despite the anxious itch clawing down his spine, Gene kept his leg firmly in place, refusing to give so much as an inch of territory to this woman. ‘Won’t your husband object to that?’ he asked pointedly.
She shrugged, head tilting at an indifferent angle that threw a dark curl across her cheek. ‘No more than your wife would.’
Gene scowled into his drink. ‘I hope you’re not still confusing me with that Mr. Brown you were so fond of,’ he muttered. As much as he was grateful to the lass for helping out at such short notice, he cringed to think that anyone as canny as Mrs. Luckhurst would ever think he and Suki made a remotely convincing couple. Nought to do with her profession, mind – she was just really too young and good-hearted for a big bastard like him.
‘I thought we were moving past that, Mr. Hunt.’ She shook her head, gentle yet dismissive. ‘I only have to assume that a Mrs. Hunt who allows her husband out at this hour doesn’t much care what he gets up to while he’s gone.’
‘That’s if there’s a Mrs. Hunt to speak of at all.’
‘And is there?’
Another sip of his drink eased some of the tension gathering in his jaw. ‘Might’ve been, once.’
‘And now?’
The heavy bottom of his glass hit the table too loud for this pub’s posh hush, rattling her wineglass and shivering the flame of the tiny candle in its amber globe. Now was so hard to nail down as a single bit of that longer, messier march of time. There had been a girl – real, with the whiff of lavender about her hair and a rough edge to her fingernails – who became a woman when they wed. She had stayed the same so long as he’d stayed in uniform; he swore it wasn’t until after he’d shed it for CID that she started to disappear, and only by the most unpredictable degrees.
It had been the meals first, not so different from the usual gripes of the other blokes at work – suppers waiting for him some nights and nought to eat the next. But there were also the frocks that vanished from their wardrobe and the mornings he’d stir awake to find the pillow unmoved at his side, the sheets undisturbed even if he could’ve sworn she had been lying there with her latest Mills & Boon the night before.
Not that he had the slightest clue how to explain those things to anyone, least of all Mrs. Luckhurst. Thankfully, she seemed ready to take his silence as an answer in itself and move along as determined as ever.
‘Let me ask you this, then.’ She leaned in closer across the table, laid a hand on the tablecloth far too close to Gene’s scotch if not his own hand clenched in its reticent fist. ‘Is there a Mrs. Hunt at home?’
He hesitated, then stiffly shook his head. ‘Nope.’ A quick pop of an answer, like a boy’s toy gun, lighter than the cannonball buried deep in his belly.
All the same, there was too much empathy in her eyes even as her lips curled into a smirk. ‘Then why, Mr. Hunt, are we still here?’
It was a question for which he didn’t have a proper answer.
And if anyone asked how he had ended up here, stark bollocks naked in his bedroom, he would still have no sodding clue.
* * *
She perched at the foot of Gene’s bed, cloaked in one of his shirts with long legs tumbled across the rumpled duvet. Her dark hair was still all obnoxious perfection gracing her pale shoulders: another proof of his failure.
He didn’t much like to look right at her, but didn’t know where else to shift his gaze. Now wasn’t the time to stare too hard at the fainter rectangles of wallpaper on his bedroom walls where he could have sworn pictures used to hang, or the porcelain dish painted with bluebells that he never would have come by on his own.
Instead, he hitched the sheet closer about his hips, caught their shared ashtray as it nearly slid off his thigh. As an afterthought, he nudged it across the bed so she could flick away the dangling ash of her cigarette rather than let it drop onto the counterpane. His shirt fell open as she leaned forward, revealing the inner curve of her breast, unmarked and utterly unremarkable.
Gordon Brown hadn’t had problems like this. Even in that briefest span in the boudoir – to call any part of the Twillings’ home a bedroom would have been too pedestrian, too polite – Mr. Brown had been a flawless lover. His hands had found all the right places on all her lively curves, all traced out by a mouth that had no fear of delving past a smooth belly and inviting hipbone to taste her deeper still. At the time, with his identity smudged out and left behind in the Cortina, it was easy enough to take liberties, just as she had taken liberties fit to shake him to his very foundations.
Surveillance could go bugger itself – quite happily, no doubt – but Gene had always been a crack hand at undercover work. No matter how much fuss Sam liked to throw into the job, Gene knew the most simple personality was often the best for the job – it was far easier to go unnoticed if there was nothing remarkable about you to shake up expectations. On that job, he had been a man with a robust appetite for women and folks didn’t come simpler than that.
Shame this wasn’t undercover operation anymore.
Mrs. Luckhurst shifted her weight along the mattress, tugging the excessive drape of his shirt closer around her as she moved. Seeing her in his shirt put Gene in mind of the way she had carried his coat up the stairs after the keys had been drawn, claiming it as part and parcel of the prize she had won. At first, Gene had thought she might have had ideas of spreading herself out across the camelhair like some centerfold tart while he shagged her rotten, and more fool him for thinking her so passive and predictable as that. He never did find out what she had wanted from his coat, but damned if he hadn’t been driven to distraction by the manly whiff of aftershave he had scented off her neck where the coat had rubbed against her skin.
Wolf in man’s clothing. That’s what she was.
‘So,’ she breathed, interrupting the silence that had stretched too long between them. ‘Who’s Sam?’
‘Don’t.’ He glared a warning at her, heart pounding painfully hard. ‘Don’t you start.’
She hummed around her cigarette, ignoring his growl with a drop of her eyelashes. ‘There was this time,’ she said lightly, ‘at Roger’s and Carol’s. Mrs. Bellamy was meant to have gone with my David, only she got cold feet. Begged off with a headache or some such.’
Gene frowned at her dismissive shrug, the unimpressed roll of her eyes. ‘Not for everyone, is it?’
‘True.’ Mrs. Luckhurst glanced back at him, eyebrows arched. ‘Your Mr. Blair wasn’t too keen, was he?’
His calf twitched beneath the loose sheet.
‘As I was saying,’ she continued, her smile sharpening by the second, ‘my David was going spare. Only seemed polite to invite him along for the night, him being my husband and all. Just as well I’d drawn Roger that night, he’s always been an open-minded sort.’
Gene squinted at her through the smoke of his own cigarette but held his tongue. There was no point giving voice to the confusion fluttering deep in his belly.
‘They were a bit clumsy at first, both trying to focus all their attention on the only woman in the room…’ She grinned for a moment, lost in memory. ‘But once I made them understand there was nothing wrong with what they had to offer each other…’
She leaned forward, his shirt falling loose again as she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. Far from tugging it closed again, she let it slip indifferently from her shoulders as she slid off the bed and rose to her feet, naked and unselfconscious. Mouth dry as ashes, his own cigarette hanging useless from his fingers, he watched her bend in search of her knickers. The bedside lamp caught the ample flesh of her hips, revealing buttermilk skin unblemished by fingerprints of any kind. No matter the deep ache in his groin, she showed no sign of his half-hearted hold on her hips while she had ridden him, so slow yet intense enough to wrest that damning syllable from his body at the worst possible moment.
‘Where you off to?’ he grunted. Mrs. Luckhurst had found her knickers – bright blue this time – and was shimmying them up her thighs.
‘Back home to my David.’ She twisted about at the waist, scanning the litter of her evening’s clothes and his week’s wardrobe on the floor until she found a brassiere of the same intense blue. ‘I don’t fancy sleeping alone tonight.’
He frowned, struck briefly speechless as she deftly flung herself back into her bra and stepped into the puddle of her frock. ‘Never said you had to,’ he offered finally, probably too late judging by the tiny smile Mrs. Luckhurst cast over her shoulder.
‘You didn’t have to.’ She nudged the barely-there sleeves of her floaty thing of a dress into place on her shoulders and took a delicate step backward, closer to the bed. ‘Be a dear, zip me up.’
A creeping sort of resentment was simmering in his gut, but Gene perched his cigarette in the ashtray with a sigh and nudged himself along the mattress until he was within reach. She was arching back helpfully enough that he didn’t have to stand to tug her zipper up the curve of her spine to where it stopped between her shoulder blades, just shy of her dark curls. His fingers hesitated a moment, sensing a sort of mute eroticism in the moment but that shiver of interest was no stronger than the act of taking her zipper down in the first place so he let it pass with a shrug and reached back for his cigarette.
‘You shouldn’t be sleeping alone either, you know.’
Gene thumped back against the pillows, unimpressed. ‘Then why don’t you do something about it?’ he challenged sullenly.
‘If only I could.’ She swayed about to face him again, head bent downward at an angle that was near impossible to read in the shadows cast by the bedside lamp. ‘He might, though. If you’re man enough to ask.’
He opened his mouth quickly enough but found so many responses fighting it out on his tongue that it was far too easy for the mouthy mare to dive in and plant a too-slow parting snog on his lips.
‘And if you’re not,’ she murmured, warmed wine breath chasing down the heartbeat caught in his throat, ‘have another scotch, then call him already.’
She drew back with the swiftest nip of teeth to his lower lip, leaving Gene staring stunned after her retreating back. Common sense told him his only hope of letting her go whilst holding on to his few tattered shreds of dignity was to keep his fool mouth shut and let out nought but enough cigarette smoke to obscure every inch of his bedroom.
So damned if he knew what made him shout her short at the door. ‘And what if he says no?’
This time, when she turned to face him, the light caught every contour of her face and the slow appreciative drag of eyes over his every sprawled limb. ‘As if he could,’ she murmured. ‘Good night, Mr. Hunt.’
He let her go with a less than gracious grunt – not a farewell fit for a lady, he knew, but no matter if her kind had nought to do with his future anyhow.