At least, thought Fleur, she wouldn’t have to face the pains and problems parents could inflict on their growing daughters.
Whether she would be spared the pains and problems life itself inflicted on most women was another matter.
She was feeling much better now. The past dwindled into its proper space, the cathedral descended from the sky and took its rightful place at ground level, still huge but now firmly anchored to the earth.
God’s house they called it. If there were a God, then it was presumably Him who did all that inflicting, she thought. Maybe I should go inside and have a quiet word, let Him know I’ve decided to change his plans a bit.
But He probably got the message when He saw Vince taking a seat.
What was going on in there? she wondered.
Like so much of life, there was nothing to do but wait.
08.25-08.55
For a few seconds Andy Dalziel had felt his mind going into free fall as he contemplated his temporal aberration.
Thoughts of Alzheimer’s, brain tumours, even, God help him, post-traumatic stress disorder, shrieked like bats around the tower of his understanding and the easiest solution seemed to be to jump off into the welcoming darkness.
Jesus! he told himself. It’s this place putting them daft thoughts into your mind. You’re a detective. Detect! Doesn’t matter what you find, so long as you’re strong enough not to run away from it.
First things first. This morning he’d woken up. He tried to reconstruct the waking process. It had seemed pretty normal, the mind surfacing from sleep’s dark depths, thrashing around on the surface for a few moments, grabbing at flotsam and jetsam from pre-sleep memory, identifying them as belonging to such and such a day…
That’s where it had started to go wrong.
Somehow he’d assembled these shards of memory not into the Saturday they belonged to, but into a Sunday that hadn’t yet happened!