CHAPTER 62
We did let things lie for a little while, as there was another event looming: a wedding. Candice had made the usual and expected noises about Hen Night Armageddon, with flights and matching T-shirts, and I simply told her to get stuffed. We were already down for a long-haul flight for the wedding, and I really didn’t fancy wasting any more time or money in airports. There was also the matter of the fresh meat, for while I didn’t want to leave them out of the team-building exercise (debauch) they were still ‘stranger’ enough for a holiday together to feel uncomfortable.

Something else came up a while before our appointed liver-destroying session, and it was a matter that left me profoundly confused. Elaine had asked to meet up for a chat, and as was usual with her it was what she was not saying that brought my agreement. Blake drove us out to Porthcawl, where we found a café on the seafront and waited for Elaine. When she appeared, she was carrying a laptop bag and looking a little worried.

That, on its own, set my alarms going. I had come to depend on her as the steady one, the calm head in every crisis, even if she had let her temper off its leash during that particular arrest, but every now and again she showed cracks in her armour. I had first noticed it with her focus on ‘three suspects’, but the vulnerable moments were steadily increasing in frequency.

Leave it for now, DC Owens.

“Hiya, Lainey. Toasties are nice! Grab a cuppa first, yeah?”

She grinned, and it was almost the old Elaine.

“Send the hired help, girl. Tea and a ham and cheese, Blake? I’ll sort you out after, aye?”

My man just grinned.

“You’ll sod off with that game, Lainey! Friends don’t run tabs”

Once we were all settled again, she started stringing power cables and other crap for what was indeed a laptop, and once her sandwich was delivered, she gave me a searching look.

“Got some photos from over in Surrey, Di. Up to you if you want to see them”

I did my usual trick for reassurance, taking Blake’s hand and receiving a squeeze in return. He gave our answer.

“This be from that engagement party, Lainey?”

“Yes. I wasn’t sure if Di would, you know… Just in case. They are here if you want”

I made my decision, and she turned the laptop so I could see the screen as she navigated the pictures, and it was obvious she had played with the order they were in, and I had to wrestle down the urge to skim through to the important ones because, in the end, they were all important. She started with a picture of a tall and bony woman with auburn hair, a shorter man snuggled up to her.

“This is Steph Woodruff, the one you heard about, aye? And her hubby, Geoff”

Blake snorted. “You are joking!”

“Nope. Just happened that way, though they are as much a double act as the names might suggest. This is my little sis Sarah and her two men”

I had to smile at that, because the picture in question showed a little boy laughing happily as his parents grinned for the photographer. Sarah looked happy, while her man just looked smugly satisfied with life. I pointed that out to Blake.

“That be us in a few years, love? Smug?”

He squeezed my knee.

“Smugger, Di. Much smugger”

Elaine laughed, nerves easing, but her tells still twitchy. “Right, then: our Uncle Arwel and his missus Alice, Steve and Arris, Annie’s best mate Ginny…”

She paused on that last photo, a tall woman with Post-Office-red hair, and I caught the slightest tremble of her hand before she clicked on to an astonishing photo of a dumpy and dark-haired woman in a little black dress and heels. She was clearly on some sort of stage together with the Woodruff woman, and where the redhead was sawing at a violin with her hair flying free, the brunette’s own hair was soaked with sweat as she did something to a flute.

Annie, obviously, Adam as was. Elaine had to fill our silence.

“Both of them get a bit manic when they play. This one is our cousin Hywel, doing Jethro Tull with them. That was a bit bloody special, aye? And this one…”

A very large settee, with Siân slumped against Elaine while Annie, hair a mess, was in a similar position with a slim man, her hair a mess and all four people with the same soppy grin of utter contentment.

“That’s Eric. Her fiancé. Good bloke, he is”

I looked across at my own fiancé, raising an eyebrow, and once more he just smiled and pulled me to him, so we could match that position of relaxed happiness. Elaine passed the computer to me, and I spent a few minutes with Blake simply flicking through the images. What struck me was how utterly right they felt, how real Annie was, and it came to me that I had no reason to mourn Adam because he had simply thrown off a little bit of camouflage and stepped into the real world. She looked happy, full of fun and, in a couple of the last frames, completely and utterly lost in love with her man.

I closed the laptop in the end, so we could concentrate on other gossip, and our toasties, and as I handed the device back to Elaine I found myself grinning, tension eased.

“You know, Elaine, sometimes I get things right, even if only by accident. Thank fuck I never made a proper pass at her!”

Thank everything. One more worry lifted, and just in time for the hen night.

I really missed Bridget’s presence on the actual day, for she and Tammy would be flying directly to Punta Cana and stopping off in Wales would have been stupidly expensive. I would have consoled myself with Elaine’s presence, but my bastard of a future husband had claimed her for the stags. We compensated for that by claiming reciprocal rights on her wife.

Siân was a real surprise, so different to my previous encounters with her. Then, she had been a carer, picking me back up as I collapsed at the rape trial, and I had seen why she loved my old boss as well as why Elaine was as stuck on her as that picture had hinted: she cared. Now, though, she was unleashed and, to put it bluntly, bloody raucous.

We made quite the group as we made the rounds of licensed establishments, with Abby and Lexie from the fresh meat teaming up with Candice, Omar’s mum Debbie, Deb, Kimberley, Gemma, Charlie, Tiff… I lost count. Candice got the ball rolling, though.

“Ladies! Our boy Chris, who is good with colours and knows what he has in his wardrobe, has found these for us! Get ‘em on, girls!”

T-shirts, of course, all the same, all in shocking pink, and all with the cheekiest of slogans: they read ‘Talk to the hand’ from a distance, but close to, legible only by peering at the chest from a foot or so, the full wording was ‘Talk to the tits and the hand will slap your face’.

Not for the first time, I wanted to grab our camp friend and ask him exactly how old he was.

Of course we all wore them. Some things are traditional, and they served to give normal punters a bit of a warning as we approached. Eventually, minus the youngest girls and Omar’s mother, we ended up in the obvious place. There was a new sign over the door to the main room, reading ‘Elaine Powell Bar’, and a sign over the actual bar itself:

‘Welcome Blake and Diane. You and your friends leave your hands out of your pockets’

Marlene was on form, microphone in hand as she muted the disco.

“About fucking time! How am I going to afford my next fucking holiday when you cows spend all your money in other pubs?”

Siân shouted back “What fucking difference does it make when you tell us we can’t pay?”

Marlene roared along with the punters, and strode down the steps in incredibly high heels to hug her way round the group, and our debauch really took flight, right up until the arrival of the stags and Elaine’s equally subtle bellow of “Who’s got the whip?”

Once again Marlene was on the ball.

“Well I’ve got the chains, darling, but I’m a bit tied up right now!”

I was very, very drunk by the end of the night, and when I say ‘night’ it was actually some time in the morning. I remember thinking ‘never again’ as I sat up in bed once my body had finally accepted that morning was fully there, and looking over to Blake, still asleep beside me.

‘Never again’ was right, for I already had the one I needed.

Our flight was on time, we had no problems with security, Mam and Dad didn’t faff, our hotel wasn’t a building site, it wasn’t pissing down with rain and nobody got food poisoning, the beach we were to wed on was pristine and…

The evening before, separated from my man for all the traditional reasons, I took a walk out to the wave line as the night gathered its depths to itself and the world around me. I needed some time to think, and it had to be by myself, as I tried to explain to Mam. She just smiled.

“I understand, love. Don’t go too far”

I stood in that darkness, lit from behind by the lights of the resort, watching the waves advance and fall back, remembering another night with that rhythmic shush, shush. Shop-soiled. Damaged goods. Hot piss on my back, Ben and Peter crying together over much the same thing. A serial killer sharing our pain. A young man scrubbed so raw he was bleeding. An educated and intelligent girl as an addict and street prostitute. Deb hearing the landing floorboards and praying the creaks would go past to someone else’s room.

So much shit, so freely and casually delivered, and in the end we survived, and one by one the predators found their own cages as ours opened. Fuck you all, you bastards, I am still here!

I realised there was someone beside me, and I turned to see Bridget’s gentle smile.

“You right, mate?”

I laughed. “Yeah. You know, you sound more and more Aussie every time I speak to you?”

“Yeah, well, been there a while now. What else would you expect? Old ghosts?”

“Yes. Not cold feet, Bridge. Not about that man”

“He’s a good’un, all right. You’ve been thinking about that bastard who raped you, haven’t you?”

I sighed. “Yeah. Others, as well, but mostly him. Hard not to”

“Well, you know what they say? The best revenge is a life well-lived. Now, I’ve got some pebble here. Shall we start?”

“Eh?”

She sighed, and handed me the first stone.

“Di Owens, this is a piece of shit called Ashley Evans. You want him?”

“Hell, no!”

She took it back from me, then hurled it as far into the sea as she could with a snarl of “Fuck off and never come back!”

She had quite a pile of stones with her, and one by one we worked through my demons, as well as some of hers, until we stood panting and laughing. Bridget turned to look behind her, and the old and gloriously impish sense of humour was there in full.

“You got undies on, Di?”

“Of course!”

Off came her dress.

“Last one in’s a wimp!”

Life, well lived.