working-class origin. In fact, she was very minor aristocracy. Her cousin was thirty-ninth in line for the throne of England. Or something. Her own family was broke, but luckily she was high enough in the social order not to give a damn about social appearances. Had she been a little less upper-class she might have insisted on a showroom home with atouch of Regency-style furniture. But she wasn’t. She’d married so far beneath her in the social order that it couldn’t be interpreted as anything but an escape and a relief.
Peter knew that the decision, ultimately, was hers to make. “Are we taking it?”
“Christ. Yes.”
So, twelve years on and just two days after Christmas, he found himself in his workshop, sorting horseshoes that didn’t need sorting, just so that he wouldn’t have to feel angry about Tara.
Genevieve had appeared at the workshop door. “Leave the sodding things, Peter. You promised yourself a week off. Come and play with the kids.”
“Right. Coming.” He clattered some shoes into a wooden box, where they rang like tuning forks.
T WO DAYS LATER HE was sitting in his car outside Richie’s house again. This time he had taken the step of switching off his engine. It was raining. The windshield and the side windows of the car had steamed up and he had to wipe the glass to see out. Not that there was a lot to see.
Peter sat there for maybe fifteen minutes. A light burned in Richie’s house—the same dim table lamp he’d seen before, deep at the back of the house. No one seemed to move in front of it, anyway, and no one went into or out of the house.
The condensation on the windshield glass matched Peter’s state of mind. He was misted, paralyzed between the act of getting up and knocking on the door and sinking farther into his seat. He and Richie had been childhood friends up to and until shortly after Tara’s disappearance. They shared a lot of history: childish things, stupid things.
One time, when he was eleven, Peter had been foolish enough to walk across a frozen pond. In the middle of the pond he’d dropped straight through the ice. His weight had cut a perfect and circular hole. As he struggled to haul himself back onto the ice it splintered in his hands and gave way again and again, each time sending Peter plunging back down into the freezing water. Richie did everything you are instructed not to do in such a situation: hewalked calmly across the ice, reached down an arm, and pulled Peter out of the water.
“Stupid,” Peter spat, shivering as they walked home together, he soaked and freezing. “You could have gone through the ice, too.”
“Yeh.”
“You pulled me out.”
“Yeh.”
“We both could have died.”
“Yeh.”
“Stupid.”
“Yeh.”
Two years after that Peter repaid him. One beautiful summer evening, with the air smelling of sweet, new-mown grass, they were playing cricket on the playground along with some younger kids. Two older boys appeared, strangers, their faces creased with mischief. One of them had a stick with a rope noose at the end of it. Just for fun, just for meanness, the boy with the stick strolled right up to Richie and hooked the noose tight round Richie’s neck. Richie was brought to his knees, his face puce, struggling to breathe.
Peter was holding the cricket bat. Without hesitation he stepped up to the mean youth as casually as if he were moving to the wicket and going to bat. He swung the bat hard and struck the boy across the ear. The boy’s head made exactly the same pleasing sound as a cricket ball on a bat, leather on willow. The boy went down as if he’d been shot.
The second aggressor turned pale. “You’re fuckin’ mad,” he said. “You coulda killed ’im!”
“You want some?” said Peter.
Richie, still purple in the face, tore the noose from around his neck and used the attached stick to thrash at his tormentor, who lay on the ground, guarding his head. The second boy chose to say no more.
“It’s