Cuthbert's Way (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #17)(56)

“Makes you feel grateful, doesn’t it?” Phillips said. “We’re so lucky not to have those worries. I s’pose I’m guilty of forgettin’ how hard it must be for other folk, at times.”

“You’re always a thoughtful person,” his wife assured him. “It’s impossible to be perfect.”

“You make it look easy.”

MacKenzie stopped dead and turned to him, reaching out a hand to straighten his preposterous tie—which consisted of a pattern of tiny reindeer faces, each with a red, sequinned nose.

“That was very smooth,” she said. “You can be a charming devil, when you want to be.”

“It’s often been said.”

She curved a hand around the tie and tugged him a bit closer, right there in the car park.

“I won’t tolerate flirting in the office place,” she said, with mock severity. “Luckily, we’re not in the office, right now.”

She yanked him forward to administer a thorough kiss.

“That’s for being wonderful,” she said. “Come on, sergeant. We haven’t got all day.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

*

There was a certain smell associated with hospitals.

A combination of bleach-based cleaning products, canteen food and something more subtle, like meat gone bad. Both MacKenzie and Phillips had spent some considerable time in and out of hospitals, and the smell never improved.

They made their way to the reception desk, where they were directed towards the Neurology department.

“I thought we could have a word with Danny’s specialist, on the off-chance he heard or saw anything unusual during his meetings with Danny and Justine,” MacKenzie said, as they made their way through the hospital corridors.

Phillips nodded, and deliberately slowed the pace so that MacKenzie’s leg would not be put under too much pressure. Three years earlier, she’d suffered terrible injuries, leaving her with deep scar tissue that could often be painful, especially if she over-exerted the muscles in her leg, as she often did. Incapacity did not come naturally to a woman like Denise, who could do almost anything she put her mind to.

There had been times when he’d seen her cry tears of pure frustration, and times during the first few months after the attack when she’d been so depressed, he’d worried she’d never come back to him—and, he supposed, she hadn’t. It was not the same Denise he awakened to each morning; just as he was not the same Frank as the one he’d been aged twenty, before he’d known anything about love and loss. Life changed you, for better or for worse, and it was a question of rolling with the punches, where you could. He’d fallen in love with a strong, independent woman, and he still loved that woman, for she was even stronger than before.

She was a survivor.

Then, there had been his first wife, Laura, who’d succumbed to cancer back in 2010. She’d been his first love and, God’s truth, he’d never looked at anyone else while she’d been alive. He was a loyal man, not driven by the kind of ego that led some to seek their thrills where they could. No, he’d been happy and satisfied with what he had at home, and it had come as a terrible shock when they’d learned the news of her illness. He’d tried to help her fight the disease and, for two years, they’d held off the inevitable, fighting the insidious illness eating away at her from the inside. He’d taken time off work to nurse her; bathing Laura’s poor, wasted body, wiping her clean, making sure she had her pain medication, drying her tears and listening to her occasional anger about the futility of it all. He’d wheeled her along corridors much like the one he was walking now, smelling the same bloody smell, until all he’d been able to do was hold her, rocking her against his chest until she slept and never woke up again.

“—Frank?”

He shook himself and reached across to take MacKenzie’s hand.

“I was just rememberin’,” he said quietly. “All this talk of miracles has got me thinkin’, I s’pose. Maybe Ryan was right—who’s to say what any of us would any of us do, if we were desperate enough? If someone had come along during those final few months when Laura was dyin’, and they’d told me there was any chance of a miracle…I’d like to think I’d have seen through them and that I’d have told them to bugger off and darken somebody else’s door, but who’s to say? Plenty of people turn to religion in their darkest moments, and believin’ in miracles isn’t far off.”

MacKenzie nodded. “I can only imagine what you went through,” she said, softly. “I saw pieces of it, when you’d come into the office looking so sad. I didn’t know it at the time, but I think I started falling for you all the way back then, when I had no business to. I couldn’t help admiring the way you looked after Laura, right to the very end. I thought to myself, to be loved like that would be a grand thing.”

Phillips brought her hand to his lips.

“I’d do the same again, in a heartbeat,” he said, deeply. “No matter what the future holds for either of us, I’ll be here beside you for as long as I can, my love.”

MacKenzie felt the warmth of his words seep through her body, and felt as rich as a queen.

“I can’t agree with what Justine Winter did,” she said, keeping her voice low. “There’s no justification for killing Tebbutt, or being a party to what was done to Edward Faber; it was inhuman. But, when I consider the demands on her mind, the stress of her situation and all the emotions that must have been swirling, I can find a bit of pity in my heart. Perhaps it’s pity for the life she might have had, if she’d had a bit more support at home, or for the little girl who lost her mother, her father and couldn’t save her brother. She must have been so lonely that she lost sight of herself.”