Best Supporting Role Read Online Free PDF Page A

in?” Sergeant Brooks looked uneasy—as if she would have paid good money not to be here.
    They both took off their caps. Constable Wilson, who despite his impressive height looked about seventeen, wiped his feet several times on the mat.
    “Have you got handcuffs?” Dan piped up, addressing himself to Constable Wilson.
    “As it happens, I have,” he said, offering my son a smile.
    “Really? Can I see?”
    “Tell you what,” Sergeant Brooks said. “Why don’t you and your sister go into the living room with the constable, and he’ll show you his handcuffs. He might even let you try them on.”
    “Cool. Have you got a truncheon as well?”
    “Yep.”
    “Have you ever hit baddies with it?”
    “Er . . . once or twice.”
    Ella announced that handcuffs and truncheons were boring. She was going up to her room to play with her princess doll’s house. The sergeant crouched down so that she was level with her. “You know what, sweetheart?” she said, giving the top of Ella’s arm a gentle rub, “I think it might be best if you go with the constable while I talk to your mum.”
    There was a solemnness about this woman that scared me.
    Ella nodded. She wasn’t about to argue with a police officer.
    I led the sergeant into the kitchen. I was about to offer her a seat, but instead she asked me to sit down.
    I felt my heart pounding. “What’s happened? It’s Mike, isn’t it?”
    Sergeant Brooks said that according to witness reports it was all over in seconds. A man had leaped from a thirty-foot-high ledge in what the police believed was a suicide attempt. Mike, who had been walking back to the office after apparently visiting a local betting shop—they knew this because he had a betting slip and several hundred pounds in cash on him—was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The jumper landed directly on top of him. Mike died instantly. The jumper survived.
    The room started to spin and turn green. Sergeant Brooks got me to put my head between my knees. Then she asked if there was anybody she shouldcall.



Chapter 2
    “L ooks like the rain’s stopping,” Mum said, buttering another half of a bagel and passing it to me to top with chopped herring and a cocktail olive. “We should get a decent turnout.” In Mum’s world, the size of a funeral correlated directly with the weather conditions. “You know, I’m starting to wonder if maybe I should have ordered more bagels.”
    I said we had enough bagels to feed half of Africa.
    Just then Dad appeared, fiddling with his cuff links. “I just had your uncle Barnet on the phone. He says he needs a lift to the cemetery and could our limo go via his care home and pick him up.”
    Mum stopped buttering. “What? He actually expects the chief mourners to chauffeur him to the funeral? Bloody cheek. What did you tell him?”
    “I told him to get a taxi.”
    “What did he say?”
    “That he’d ring round and get some quotes, but we shouldn’t rely on him being there.”
    “Like I care . . . but he’ll be there—see if he isn’t. When have you ever known that man to turn his back on free food?”
    •   •   •
    I t was more than three weeks before Mike’s body was released. First there was a postmortem. This was followed by an inquest, where the coroner recorded a verdict of death by misadventure. Some misadventure, but I couldn’t help thinking that the suicide guy surviving was the kind of ironic punch line that Mike would have appreciated.
    The death-by-misadventure verdict meant that no charges were brought against the suicide jumper. Psychiatric reports concluded that he was suffering from severe schizophrenia and, the last thing I heard, he’d been placed in a secure psychiatric hospital.
    If I hadn’t had Mum and Dad, I’m not sure how I would have coped. They came tearing over the moment they got Sergeant Brooks’ call. In the days that followed, as I veered between disbelief, numbness and raw, howling emotion, they