Kind Hearts And Martinets Collection: The Complete Series

Excerpt from Kind Hearts And Martinets Collection

‘I’m dying.’

‘Again?’ She sighed, it would not be the first time he had died on her. A little over two months ago he had been shot rescuing children held by a paedophile ring on a Solent fort. He had died and been brought back. She carried on.

The voice from the bed stirred, a suggestion of delirium, she could not miss it; he had a forceful voice even in his weakened condition. ‘I see a fairy at the bottom of our garden, sunlit water, dappled pixels of sunlight, it speaks to me…’ he said, in an ephemeral, cotton candy voice, ‘…don’t go to work. Take Amanda off to a world of tranquillity, beauty, and seafood…escape as two lovers. You’ve done your bit.’

This did make her stop, and she looked over his prone form in the bed, beads of sweat on the raised wrinkles of the puckered skin that sank into the void of his right eye socket, refracting the early morning summer sun that penetrated to the back of the bedroom: strong, blinding, punching through the crack in the curtains. The vertical scar that ran from his forehead to an inch or so onto his right cheek, was raised a brilliant white, an iridescent reminder of a most horrific historic injury. Mumbling incoherent frontier gibberish, his good eye closed, he was unaware she looked at him. Sometimes, it was as if she had never before seen the disfigurement. She returned to her work.

‘Retirement is like dying…listen, like only the dying can,’ he called out like a poncy Larry Olivier, and Mandy stopped her flurry of housework, this fragmented sentence catching her attention. They’d spoken about retirement and whether they could hack it? She had this romantic notion of just taking the ferry, he called a fairy, out of Portsmouth and going on the missing list in France.

Jack became aware of the sudden inactivity and opened his good eye. His vision was blurred. He saw not a ferry but a more traditional fairy, in a knee length silk nightdress gently lowering herself onto the bed and sitting beside him, he gave up an involuntary gulp. She stroked his brow, picking up sweat, and leaving a residue of fairy dust and microscopic household mites as she looked into his one, unfocused, good eye. He responded with a throaty, rumbling groan to her soothing and gentle touch, a death-rattle? He sensed her breath in his ear, shuddered, and despite his failing health, was excited by the proximity of her radiant beauty.

‘Shut the feck up Jack, you are not dying, you have a hangover. Getting pissed with Alexander Petrov and Milk’O. Now, get up and give me a hand.’

Oh, the savage cruelty of the fairy world. He was awake now and any thoughts of a day off in bed were gone, uncomfortably reminding him of his own childhood, his Mum would say if he was ill, “Ask the teacher if you can rest yer ‘ead on the desk”. Other kids had days off. Groaning and expelling his sour breath into the dusty atmosphere, he replied to her clenched nose, ‘Ooooh Amanda, you can be so insensitive. What’re you doing anyway?’ He propped himself and twisted his aching body, so his good eye could face her without having to turn his painful head. His neck hurt, could be menintitearse, and he had a mild panic attack; how can he ask Mandy to put a glass on his skin and check?

Familiar with his hypochondriac hysteria, his getting words wrong, and speaking of his thoughts, she replied, ‘I’m picking up my clothes, where you threw them last night, and your tutu, which is covered in mud and grass stains, it's meningitis, get your own glass, and help me get the flat ready for Liz and Carly who are coming to stay for a week while they look for somewhere to live.’

‘God, I thought that was next week,’ he said, his vision clearing. Was this the clarity you sense before death?

She stood, grasping a bundle of clothes to her chest, predominantly stiff pink netting, ‘I appreciate you have your head full of the important things like Millwall feckin’ football club, Bernie having a cheese sandwich when you asked him what he wanted to drink, and the overthrow of the Government, but I thought there may have been a little room for a modicum of domestic information.’

He thought that was it and began to relax, but it wasn’t, she stayed, and appeared to be looking for an answer. What could it be she wanted to hear? What was the question? ‘What are you doing with my tutu?’ Nice save he thought.

‘Putting it in the wash,’ she replied, standing up, and sitting immediately back down as he tugged her hand. She fell across him and he planted a kiss, she noticed his eye was better focused and the Stratford upon Avon moment appeared to be over. ‘That’s nice,’ she said, and he kissed her brow. ‘Come on, let’s have coffee, they’ll be here soon.’ Mandy offered a token struggle, enjoying the warmth of this irritating man, raised her head just in time to see a cheeky thought make the tortured journey across his ravaged face.

‘Have I got any clothes here?’ he asked.

It made her think, a hint of a chuckle at his imminent embarrassment. ‘Crikey,’ she said, ‘there’s your old shirt I wore that time, when I had nothing at your house.’ She was thinking of clothes but Jack was recalling how beautiful she was in his shirt, reminiscing how in the sixties, as a young man, the screen sirens were often seen in just a man’s shirt and it affected him as much now as it did in his non-spotty youth. In fact, this woman had ignited a desire in him he thought may have been totally extinguished, and not just because he would be sixty in a few days. He had lost his lust for life and the lust for anything else after Kate, his wife, had been killed in a car crash a little over three years ago.

‘Just need some round the houses then?’ he said in his spiky, cockney accent. People didn’t really know what Jack’s accent truly was as he bounced from estuarine, cockney, Jane Austen English, and anything else that entered his mind at any prescribed time, especially Cod Irish.

Mandy went to the wardrobe, grabbed the shirt, and tossed it to him, ‘Let me think on the trousers, as revolting a thought as that is, get up and we'll have breakfast, and please, not too much Stratford upon Avon, eh?’

‘What?’ Jack said, mainly through force of habit, although he was a tad deaf, as he raised himself from the pillow, and with only a modicum of groaning, a token really, he got out of bed. He found his boxer shorts on his face, and as he lifted them off, Mandy was smiling. He acknowledged the accuracy of her throw and she held the shirt open for him. One arm in, he spun into her arms and embraced her, ‘Amanda Bruce, I love you.’ She was about to reciprocate when the phone went. ‘Leave it, it’s bound to be the Nick.’

You see, she thought to herself, he can be so irritating, so why do you love him? She had no answer; it was a mystery to her and everyone else. ‘Jack, you are a DCI, and I am a detective superintendent. Half of Portsmouth was blown up last night; you were there. We stopped a battle between Crusading Knights Templars and Saracens; you were there as well, and both times dressed as Angelina Baller-fucking-rina, so I think our colleagues may want us in today?’ To mollify the strength of her rebuke she applied her syrupy southern belle smile that he saw as a special treat for him. It made him think of the porridge his Mum used to make, and sometimes, for a treat, she used Golden Syrup, not that he thought Mandy looked Scottish; a ginger beard would not suit her. She leaned over to pick up the phone, not taking her eye off him, and again it appeared as if she looked to him for an answer, he sensed as he always did, a feeling of mild anxiety. What to say? Twice this morning, not good for his apolloxy which he was convinced he had, along with Oldtimers and Florets, and now, menintitearse.