Above and Beyond

Chapter 11

  The marriage thing (hers, not ours) was swiftly becoming the main topic of conversation whenever we were all gathered together, and it started to gather even more legs when my legal beavers in London started getting involved – but unfortunately they ended up reluctantly agreeing with what Suzie had said.

  A few days later, as the sun started to settle in the sky, Sue and I –we decided to drop the Sexy Suzie bit, except in private - were in her electric launch and I slowed it down to almost stationary, and the silence, except for the gentle lapping of the river on the bow was totally relaxing and I quietly wanted to kill David.

  Sue, who was stretched out on the bench seat with her head on my lap, her long legs raised up over the gunwale and almost disappearing from sight quietly said ‘well what do you want to talk about?’ ‘You have been trying to get me alone all day’.

  Taking the bit between my teeth I said ‘Shaun, I just have this feeling that we don’t have the full picture, perhaps I have been reading to many novels but something is not sitting quite right with me’.

  ‘What can we do about it?’ she said, I am destined to the oldest virgin bride in history’.

  ‘David is in desperate need of a break; remember that thing in the art gallery?’

  ‘Remember it – it almost turned me into a nun’, she interrupted.

  ‘Well David took it hard, he wasn’t actually there but he is my Director of Security and therefore felt totally responsible for Brenna’s death whilst under the protection of his team, along with James and Kurt, and almost losing his friend Pierre – he feels that he shouldn’t have let him talk him into being part of the team in the first place, and last but not least what happened to me.’ What do you mean almost turned you into a nun?’

  ‘I’ll show you later, it will be nice to re-visit the church’.

  This was starting to get complicated, but I continued ‘what he needs is a break from it all, a real break; he is turning into a regular ‘old woman’. Sure he has had his vacations, but I think that what he needs is not to have to worry about work for a while, and he is also missing Charlie’.

  ‘Who’s Charlie?’

  ‘His friend from school, he died in Sweden’.

  ‘How?’

  He jumped off a cliff to commit suicide after losing his fiancé in that drugs thing in Florida’.

  ‘How tragic’, she said quietly.

  ‘Not really’ I said, ‘he was wearing a parachute’.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what is going on in that pea brain of yours, or am I going to have to drag it out via your testicles’?

  Decisions, Decisions, Decisions.

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