An Accidental Shroud Read Online Free PDF Page B

into his wind-up speech and all-purpose smile.
    The credits began to roll and Christine went into the kitchen to make some tea. She'd long ago decided she didn't like Tom Callaghan.
    Arriving home that night after the show, Callaghan felt an immense weariness. He switched on the lamps and set the air-conditioning as high as it would go, threw his jacket across a chair back and took off his tie and his shoes. Then he poured two inches of Glenfiddich and made himself a ham sandwich. He could never eat before or immediately after the show, his stomach was too screwed up, but by now he was hungry. He could have eaten a good solid meal but his wife had recently walked out on him, and in any case, had never bothered to cook. He was nothing of a cook, himself.
    He sat on the sofa to eat his sandwich, allowing his gaze to rest for a while on the photograph on his desk, a thing he always did every time he came back home, as if by doing so he might will the subject of it to materialize. It was the only photograph in the room.
    The big picture window gave on to the river; the view was one of the best things about the flat, which was bare, almost monastic, as he preferred it, now that Joanna had taken with her all the fancy bits and pieces. What furnishings remained were plain but good, chosen by him. He had grown up with the second rate, but he knew a good thing when he saw it. He was careful over what he bought, canny with money. He had made – and was still making – plenty, but, as he well knew and heeded, there were fashions in celebrities, as in anything else. Nothing lasted.
    He sipped his whisky and slowly he began to relax. The show took more out of him every time. You had to be alert and on your toes the whole time, to think fast, though he was naturally a quick and agile thinker, as journalists have to be. In his game, you couldn't afford to miss a trick, you could allow yourself to forget nothing. That never bothered him, however. His memory was phenomenal. And there were some things no one ever forgot, or forgave. A ghost from the past laid a gentle hand on his shoulder, but it wasn't his runaway wife's. He felt a warning of the recurrent pain in his head, the one that had signalled trouble ever since he was a child, that he'd always been wise not to ignore. He shivered in the air-conditioning and thought it was a night to go to bed with a pill.
    Sleep didn't come easily, however. Tonight, as so often, he was haunted by memories from the past.
    His father, Rory Callaghan, had been an Irish Protestant dockworker of the Ian Paisley persuasion, who believed in hell fire and damnation, who had never forgiven himself his own lapse in marrying a foreigner, nor her either. Marietta had been a bright, volatile, clever woman, and though Italian, not religious, who could make his bigoted opinions look ridiculous, and frequently did as it became more and more apparent that their marriage was a disaster. Religion had not been the only source of their strife, however. There had been plenty more.
    Yet – for the sake of the child, Tom, it was said – they'd stuck together until Rory had died, mercifully for Marietta though not for Rory, of a stomach cancer. Marietta had come to England, found herself a series of jobs teaching Italian, the last of which had brought her to Lavenstock. And there Tom had stayed, too, working first on various local newspapers, going on to radio and graduating to television.
    His parents' marriage had been an explosive combination, and Tom's childhood hadn't been happy. The two strands of his inheritance still warred too much in him, irking him like the failure of his marriage, though he allowed none of it to inhibit him professionally. His public persona, and his private one, he had always kept as strictly apart as possible, for the very good reason that his private life contained a grief so huge it encompassed him entirely, one that could never be shared by anyone.
    He fell asleep, as he did