The Devil's Due: A Cooper and McCall Scottish Crime Thriller by Ramsay Sinclair (good inspirational books .TXT) 📗

with my speech. “Uh, tissue?” I held out a packet of Kleenex at the ready, which she accepted gratefully.

She’d been through a small war with her glasses. Tear stains covered the entire lens, a real nightmare to see out of. No matter how hard she wiped them with the hem of her shirt, they just got damp again with fresh tears.

“Uh, I could—?” I offered my services gently, gesturing to a phone lens cleaner I pulled from my pocket.

“No, thanks. They’ll be fine,” she declined, shaking her head.

I felt a bit of an idiot now. I didn’t know how to do all this nice malarkey.

“Right.” I stuffed the lens cleaner back into my pocket. “Uhm,” I began, but she continued crying. I decided to start anyway. “DI Cooper,” the usual flash of my badge occurred.

Her nose had become bright red from a mixture of cold and a tear stains. Both eyes puffed underneath as a direct result. She didn’t reply straight away and analysed her answer carefully. A prime example of thinking before you speak. “You’re not very tactful for a detective, are you?”

My hand gawkily scratched my neck in a comforting motion. “I, uh, I thought my tact was fine, considering. Aren’t they?”

“Not really.” She let out a faint chuckle which was better than more tears, I supposed. “I know you want a statement. I’ll give one. Anything for Jimmy.” Her words were soft-spoken with a slight middle-class accent.

“And you are?” I asked, and she stared back cluelessly. “To Jimmy?”

“Oh. I’m his teacher. English teacher,” she clarified.

I wished I could fall off the face of the earth so I could end this awkward interaction. My head told me to rationalise and press on with my questions. My heart, however, forced me to do exactly what McCall would have done.

I stepped closer to the garden wall and hoofed myself up to sit beside her, grunting with effort. For a short wall, it wasn’t the easiest to sit down on. My shoes scuffed on the brickwork.

“Thank you,” the blonde woman said sincerely. “For helping Jimmy. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you. All of you.”

“I’m trying to help you too,” I spoke quietly to the lady, roughly in her early thirties. “Shock is a real thing. Not many people think it could happen to them, but it can happen to anyone.”

“I think walking in on a dead woman allows me to be in shock, doesn’t it?” the woman snapped snarkily. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this sensitive mush.

“Well, uh, yes. Of course. I wasn’t suggesting otherwise—” I stopped still, not wanting to put my foot in it again. I tapped the brick wall for a distraction, to come up with a tune. Anything to take me away from this conversation.

“I’m usually a lot more fun than this, I promise,” she apologised, a tear dropping down her cheek. “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Act so... unbothered. You’re not crying, or even upset. Yet you didn’t cry or even show any sign of remorse. How?” she asked, brown eyes full of sorrow and confusion.

“A detective, crying?” I scoffed. “I’d be the laughingstock of the town. Even more so than before. It's my job to remain under control, to stay calm. Plus,” I struggled to word this next sentence in a kinder form, “I didn’t know these people. There’s no emotional connection. That makes my work slightly… easier to manage.”

“But what if it was your family?”

“What do you mean?”

“Would their death upset you? Or have you seen too many… dead people to be in shock, like me?” The bobbed woman pried curiously.

It was a question nobody had ever asked me before. Honestly, I didn’t know how to answer. She hauled her glasses higher onto the bridge of her nose.

“Uhm, I don’t know.” She recoiled in surprise from my honest answer. “What I mean is…” I paused, thinking about what family meant to us. “We don’t see each other all that much. If it was my sister, then yes. I’d be… angry. But I don’t think I would cry.” The woman looked visibly shocked but by me now, rather than Laura’s death. “I’ve seen too many awful things. I haven’t cried in ten years.”

She made me second guess whether I was right or wrong, and I loathed it. My jacket collar rubbed unpleasantly against my jawline.

“Then you don’t understand grief,” the woman silently clumped my tissue into a ball, knuckles slowly turning white.

“Perhaps I don’t,” I finally admitted. At long last, that blotchy face met mine, displaying a disappointed smile. Her wrapped-up body tinted a light shade of blue.

“Clearly, we were brought up very differently,” she recognised. Laura was playing prominently on her mind, I could tell by the way she daydreamed every so often. I knew exactly how she envisioned Laura in the bathtub, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

“I’ll say,” my bigmouth opened by accident.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She frowned, creasing her delicate features into those which conveyed irritation. Uh oh. It’s that thing women do, where they take something harmless and twist it into a bigger meaning than it actually was.

“Nothing.” My attempts to cover up my meaning were futile, and she was already on the warpath. “Well, it’s your accent,” I gave up resisting and went with our natural flow of conversation.

“My accent?”

“You’re posh.” Insult one. “I’m guessing you have well-off parents who could afford things,” and there went insult two, “whereas mine couldn’t. I had to work and save up a bit of money to move here, to make a life for myself.”

“They might have been able to afford things, but I too wanted a life of my own.” She barely had enough energy left to get angry at my words. Instead, she used a calm and educational voice. It made me sit up and listen, having a quality that had a way of sucking people in. “Just because people come from different backgrounds, doesn’t mean we don’t all desire for similar things.”

Our heated discussion swivelled