Water Like a Stone Read Online Free PDF Page B

bothered to spend a quid or two extra on the twelve-year-old Aberlour. No point in splashing out more than was absolutely necessary, he would say. A diplomat to the bone, was Fogarty—no wonder he’d gone far in the force.
    Not that Fogarty was a bad copper, as much as it sometimes galled Babcock to admit it. He was just a better politician, and that was what up-to-date policing required. Fogarty played golf regularly with the right county officials; he lived in a detached bungalow in the toniest part of suburban Crewe; his unfortunately bucktoothed wife appeared often in the pages of Cheshire Life .The Fogartys’ life had, in fact, been Peggy Babcock’s ideal, and she’d told Ronnie often enough what a fool he was not to emulate it.
    Babcock had sneered at that, and look where it had got him. Alone in a sedate semidetached house on the Crewe Road outside Nantwich, a house he had hated from the day the estate agent had shown it to them. And Peggy, who had insisted they buy the place, had packed her bag and walked out, straight into the arms—and the flat—of the same estate agent.
    He gave a convulsive shiver as the cold began to seep through the thin fabric of his suit jacket. The central-heating boiler had been wonky the past few days, but he hadn’t mustered the time or energy to have a look at it, and tonight it seemed to have gone out altogether. Now there was no chance in hell of getting the heating man to come, which meant it was going to be a long, cold Christmas.
    Slipping back into his overcoat, Babcock tore the bow off the bottle of Aberlour, but stopped short of breaking the seal. The question was, did he put himself out of his misery now and suffer the hangover on Christmas morning, when he had to pay a courtesy call on his aged aunt, or did he put it off until he’d discharged his one social obligation and could sink as deep as he liked into alcohol-induced self-pity?
    There were a couple of beers in the fridge, if not much else—he could make himself a sandwich and drink them while he watched Christmas Eve rubbish on the telly. Either choice was pathetic.
    He’d volunteered for the holiday-call rota rather than face the evening on his own, but the citizenry of South Cheshire seemed remarkably well-behaved this Christmas Eve, more’s the pity, and he had finally given up a hope of action and left a stultifyingly quiet station.
    For a moment he toyed with the idea of calling Peggy to wish her a happy Christmas, but that meant he’d probably have to carry on a civil conversation with Bert, and he doubted his Christmas spirit would stretch quite that far.
    Beer and telly it was, then, and he’d better bring the duvet down from the bedroom for a little extra warmth. He’d hate for his officers to find him frozen on his sofa when he didn’t turn up for work after the holiday. Serve Peggy right, though, the cow, he thought with a snort, if she had to make social capital out of his embarrassing demise. On the other hand, “Killed in the line of duty” would provide her with conversational fodder for years, and he didn’t intend to give her the satisfaction.
    He had opened the fridge, groaning when he saw only a solitary can of Tennents and an open packet of ham that curled up at the edges, when the mobile phone clipped to his belt began to vibrate. Even before he glanced at the number he knew it was Area Control—no one else would be ringing him on Christmas Eve.
    “Thank you, God,” he said with a sigh, and raised his eyes heavenward in salute as he flipped open the phone.
     
    They sat huddled in Juliet’s van, with the motor running in hopes of coaxing a little warm air from the heating vents. The windows were already fogging from their breath, and outside, the snow still drifted down, cocooning them from the outside world.
    Kincaid found himself thinking of the time when he and Jules, as children, had managed to get themselves locked in their neighbor’s coal cellar for an afternoon. He’d