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personal to him, too. His best friend was gay, his girlfriend bisexual. It had come close.

He was afraid.

His moment of introspection didn’t last. As ever, someone else’s needs intervened. This time the message that pinged up on the phone was from Ashleigh. Break-in at Claud’s office. With a sigh, he picked up the phone and called her back.

Chapter 16

‘I hear my mum’s been on your back.’

Doddsy sighed. Tammy’s opposition to his relationship with Tyrone had played uncomfortably on his soul since Jude had told him about it, but that was nothing to how he’d felt since the conversation that morning, and the realisation that Phil had been indisputably on the scene of the second murder and within a couple of miles of the first. The threatening message had only made it worse. When there was a right moment he’d tell Tyrone about it, because a threat to one was a threat to the other. ‘Not directly.’

‘Jude, then. She told me she’d had it out with him. I knew he’d have told you.’

They were coming back into Pooley Bridge along the lakeshore walk. The sun had given up under the onslaught of the rolling spring clouds and a chill breeze had sprung up to whip tiny waves ever faster across the surface of Ullswater and force the Union Jack at the end of the steamer pier to stand out as if to attention. ‘Are they giving you trouble at home?’

He was a few steps behind Tyrone as the path narrowed to the gate and he watched the younger man anxiously. Tyrone habitually walked like a policeman on the beat, tall and slightly ponderously with thumbs tucked into his belt, but today he was off-duty and light hearted, swinging his hips through the twist in the narrow gate and turning back with a smile that turned Doddsy’s gut and reminded him of his own misgivings. He was looking fifty in the eye, he reminded himself, too old even to justify a mid-life crisis.

‘Nah.’ Tyrone said, with an easy laugh, and slowed to allow Doddsy to catch up. Out of uniform he went for a look more suited to his age, jeans and a Newcastle United football shirt, a baseball cap defying the faint and declining sun. To the casual onlooker they must look like father and son. ‘She knows better. She says what she has to say and that’s her duty done. She does think a lot of duty, my mum.’

Doddsy came across Tammy more regularly than most of the other CSIs, largely because of the mutual regard in which she and Jude held one another and the consequent fact that they liked to work together. Her chilliness with him wasn’t, he sensed, personal. If it was only Tammy’s displeasure he had to think about, he wouldn’t have worried. Time would smooth out the wrinkles and eventually, if anything came of what was growing between him and Tyrone she’d get used to it and if nothing came of it her worries and her resistance would melt away like snow off a dry stone wall, her tolerance only to be tested when Tyrone found himself another, younger, man.

The morning’s meeting had shown him that there was much more to worry about than Tammy. ‘And what about your dad?’

‘Let’s get a coffee.’ Tyrone accelerated away again, shot across the road just before the lights changed from red to green and turned to wave across the stream of traffic that passed between them. When the lights changed again and Doddsy made his more sedate way across the road to join him, he was grinning at him. ‘You know what dads are like. They’re just like mums, only more macho. Let’s get a cake.’

They settled in a seat by the window and ordered tea and cake, Doddsy opting for chocolate cake that he never usually ate and Tyrone choosing the lemon drizzle. It was a strange occasion, Doddsy told himself, feeling like an old maid on a first date. It wasn’t the first time he'd been out with Tyrone but his own awkwardness, the lifting of an internal curtain on his own heart, made it different. Suddenly it mattered to him what happened to the Garner family, and whether they were torn apart by criminal activity or an old-fashioned intolerance or whether they made up and stayed together. He’d become invested in what happened to them, purely because it mattered to him that Tyrone was happy, with or without him. For the first time he understood exactly why Jude had been so conflicted over Mikey’s struggle between right and wrong, how hard it must have been for him to take the decision that, to an outsider like Doddsy himself, should only ever have gone one way.

‘So,’ said Tyrone, when the waitress had delivered their cakes and an enormous pot of tea, ‘what were we talking about? Dads, that was it. And aren’t they strange things?’

Slicing the corner off his chocolate cake, Doddsy allowed himself to remain in a spellbound silence.

‘I mean. My dad’s a man’s man.’ Tyrone sighed. ‘Rugby and cricket — the men’s game, never the women’s — and he’d never wear pink. He does the cooking, but only when Mum isn’t there. He always drives, unless there’s drink involved, in which case he drives there and she drives back. And he’d be appalled if ever saw her drink a pint.’

Doddsy had seen Tammy sink a few pints in his time. He suppressed a smile. ‘It’s a generational thing. My dad’s like that.’

‘I thought as much. Though even the metrosexual parents, the ones who think they’re right up with it… even those ones are perfectly happy for everyone else to be gay but they can’t help questioning things a little bit when it’s their boy. In my experience. That’s where my dad’s coming from.’

‘Mine too.’ Doddsy’s childhood was a generation removed from Tyrone’s but it was

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