Source: https://randomthoughtslimited.co.uk/library/122-bodies/bodies-complete-book/135-front-cover?start=45
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 08:44:08+00:00

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The daily miracle occurred: waking up to start afresh again, curious to see what new entropy the day would bring. Rabbit had phoned last night, asking me to meet her at Charlie’s office. I stepped out into a flaught which lashed my face like a wet towel. I took the short-cut along the walled walk to Fore Street. The sky was black and no one was abroad in the lanes.
Rabbit was in no-nonsense mode. She had trapped her hair in a severe bun. Electronically, perhaps, as a pink glow tipped the wings of her spectacles. She wore a grey pin-striped suit and draped over her shoulders like a trailing parachute was an immense white silk scarf with the heads of horses and other equestrian symbols and the name of the manufacturer printed on it in gold and green. Rabbit had a good seat, but I’d never seen her on a horse. She led me into Charlie’s little office. I perched on the edge of the table. She closed the door as Charlie used to do when she sat in the next room and brushed her hips past my knees in a cloud of scent that reminded me of the night I had got out of bed to take a pee and put on her dressing gown by mistake. She settled in the rickety leather armchair behind Charlie’s desk and placed her hands palm down on the ink blotter.
“You’re not taking over the practice?” I asked.
She withdrew her right hand from the desk and left the other pointing towards the silver sailing trophy which Charlie had won when we were all twelve years old. Engraved on it was ‘Most Improved Sailor — Section B’. It was what they gave you when you didn’t win any races all year. Charlie had kept stubs of pencils in it. Now it was empty and tarnished. The blotter had been full of telephone numbers and doodles. That was empty, too.
On her fourth finger was a small heap of sparkling shards a hermit crab could have moved into.
Her fingers formed a fist and she dragged the crab’s house down my cheek. When we were kids she used to do that with hairpins. In bed, she drew blood with her fingernails. I winced.
“Eddy, naturally. I finally gave in.” She took herself to the window to admire the ring in the light.
There was no room to lie down in either office. I tried to guide her thighs on to the table, but she resisted. “The leg is held on with tape,” she said. My brain seized up for half a tick before I realised it was the table she meant. So I removed the ink blotter from the desk. My last impression of Rabbit was from the rear, sprawled chest down on the imitation leather panel set into the top of her brother’s reproduction partner’s desk, her tailored charcoal pinstripe skirt ruffed up over her pudgy bottom, thighs ringed with the marks of her tights, which were pushed down now around her knees with her pink knickers, while the windows darkened, the sky turned black and a squall hammered the rain down like rivets on the former fisherman’s cottage which housed the premises of Segui and Cooper, all partners now demised. Rabbit moaned and thrashed and her hair spun adrift while I pictured Angie spread-legged like this and Charlie’s silver ‘Most Improved Sailor’ trophy tinkled and tottered towards the edge of the desk. On the last stroke I thought, ‘And this one’s for you, Eddy Starr, for bonking me on the head.’ The silver trophy fell to the floor with a great, satisfying clang, the engagement ring which he had approved spilling out of its mouth.
She pulled up her tights with the knickers inside them, retrieved her ring from the floor and went into the tiny loo. When she came out her hair had been retamed and she looked like a schoolteacher again.
“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?” I didn’t know who she meant, so I kept quiet. She went to the filing cabinet and pulled out a thick file. She thumped it on the table. She took out two folders. One was labelled ‘DNA Comparison: Farthing-Tattersall v. Ferguson’. I stared at that for a moment before I remembered that Matty’s surname was Ferguson. The other folder was labelled ‘DNA Comparison: “B. Streb” v. Deceased’. There was a third folder in the file which she did not remove.
“You know the results of these tests?” she asked.
Rabbit opened the top drawer of Charlie’s desk and pulled out a pad of pink adhesive post-it notes advertising ‘Eternity Funeral Services (Formerly Dinsmore’s)’. She tore off two slips and wrote on them with a souvenir of her former husband’s business, an outsize pen that was also a pocket torch and had a slogan printed on it: ‘Harris Stationery Supplies, all ways the write choice’. She kept a box full of them in her kitchen.
“This is what Charlie tested.” Rabbit placed a slip on each file folder. The slip she stuck on the folder labelled ‘DNA Comparison: Farthing-Tattersall v. Ferguson’ now read ‘Farthing-Tattersall v. “B. Streb”’. On the pink slip which she stuck on the other file, the one labelled ‘”B. Streb” v. Deceased’, she had written ‘Ferguson v. Deceased’.
My mind reeled. ‘Angel Child’, Gwendolyn’s baby, had been fathered by Lord Nick. “Which means Matty is not really Nick’s daughter,” I said almost to myself.
“You know what it means — about Matty’s father — don’t you?” I nodded, but she went on anyway. “It could be you.” She trilled the last word like the TV ads for the lottery. Then she walked to the red safe, stooped, and pulled the door open. Inside there was only a single file folder. She gave it to me. It was a fat blue folder and on the cover was Charlie’s doodle of a sun rising out of the sea and a label which read ‘Blue Horizon’.
“Why do you say that?” I reached for the file. She let me take it.
I opened the file. Stapled top and bottom to the inside cover was a list of names and telephone numbers. I could not recognise any of them, but some were headed ‘Capri’. Charlie’s idea of secret codes was simple: think of another island starting with the same letter. Next to the word ‘Chopper’ was an E-mail address. The original had been crossed over and another substituted. I made an instant decision and memorised the original. Something had been slipped behind the page, held in place by a paper clip.
I answered Rabbit. “I was just wondering, why would he leave all this incriminating evidence behind?” Tucked in behind Charlie’s list was a small card: a pocket Westowe Sailing Club tide table. With blue highlighter on the dates of the full moon plus two days.
“I discovered another file in the safe. Charlie’s stolen all the investments I put through him. So I’m going to give this to my fiancée. It should get him a big promotion.” She held out her hands for the file.
“There’s one more thing I’d like you to do for me,” I said.
As I followed her into the outer office I slipped the little card from under the paper clip and put it where pocket time tables belong. I gave Rabbit the file. She removed its contents and placed them on her desk and then took the folder to the photocopier. On a notice board on the wall above her desk were pinned a local bus timetable and a rail timetable for Kings Ferry services. While her back was turned I unpinned them and slipped them into the sheaf of papers. She handed me the photocopy of Charlie’s contacts and replaced all of the papers into the file without looking at them. Eddy would lay all this at the feet of Detective Superintendent Radcliffe. He was a clever man. He would know the significance of transport timetables for men on the run and perhaps lose his inconvenient interest in tides.
“There’s just one more question I’d like to ask,” I said.
“Matty will have to sign a consent form,” she said.
Rabbit was digging in the file drawer again. She extracted a sheet of paper. “Charlie always took a few precautions with wandering clients,” she said. It was a Segui & Cooper letterhead, blank except for Matty’s signature at the bottom. Rabbit fed it into her typewriter, and, fluffing out her skirts, sat down to copy out a consent form.
“You’re a brick,” I said.
“Beazer for ballast.” Rabbit’s eyes were moist and so were mine. She grazed my cheek with her wire brush hair, the wing tips of her spectacles, and her lipsticked lips, in that order, before pushing me out the door into the drumming plash.

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