MORNING SERIAL

“SLEEPING, yes.” He smiled sarcastically.

“We went out for the day. She gave me a tour of the island. No funny business.”

He wrote, again with an edge of sarcasm, into his pad. “No funny business.”

“Can I ask what happened?” I said.

“Difficult to say. It is potentially dangerous up around those coves. The body was pretty badly beaten up on the rocks.”

“You think she fell?” He nodded, as if to say that she had most likely come off the cliffs but how or why was anybody’s guess.

He took my details, and I gave him the name of the hotel I had stayed at in Protaras when I first arrived for Francis’s funeral. I did not want to give him Illie’s name, and I didn’t know the address. I had forgotten that I did not know the address.

I walked slowly back to the car parked on the upper main street. I had known Lou just a few days, and there was no confirmation the body was in fact her, but I felt oppressively sad on that short walk; it was heavier than the heat, and pushed me down as if I moved through polluted water. It was a sadness more profound than if she had just been a passing acquaintance, as I had tried to portray her to the policeman. A more profound sadness than even if I had simply warmed to her, wanted to get her into bed. I hadn’t realised that I had fallen for her a little bit. Enough to hit me hard.

I was yards from the car – it all happened quick – when clarity came to me like the jab of a blade through the heat. Lou had been killed and I knew why. They had thought it was her. They had muddled through their numbskull reasoning and come up with her name. Viktor had asked me about Lou, and I had lied to him. Illie had asked me about her and I had lied to him. They had seen through these lies and seen some insane picture. They were focussing on her as the source of the night-time attack. Who else knew the girls were at the house? I had let it slip. They had got it wrong. So wrong. Illie had killed Lou.

> The Golden Orphans by Gary Raymond is published by Parthian www.parthianbooks.com