Black Ops

Chapter 6

6

He sat for a minute and thought of the years of volunteering, the lies, the women he’d slept with in different country towns.

After the death of his wife, Helen, he had felt alone with only her shadow for company. Eventually, he and his business partner, Victoria, had fallen in love but for Tom it was a love based on mutual understanding, propinquity, and shared needs and Tom always suspected Vic felt more sorrow than l**t for him. Yes, he’d been unfaithful to her in a way he would not have allowed himself when Helen was alive. He hated himself for it but acknowledged that his affinity for the morals of the world had shifted since Helen’s death.

He used to care but things had changed. In fact, he felt a part of himself separate when Helen died. It left a shadow behind, a shadow filled with a desire that could never be sated and a want for revenge upon the world that had taken her, needlessly, from him.

Now Natasha was dead too. Tom didn’t feel cursed—he was the curse. Natasha was the first woman he had seduced for whom he had actually felt something other than l**t. The others were a balm to his loneliness, he admitted that to himself, at least. And he had fled from Natasha as cruelly and curtly as he had because, for the first time, he had wanted to stay. He had not given her any notice, fearing that her arguments to stay would have been compelling.

Natasha was dead. What now? He could not cast Victoria out of his daughters’ lives, not now that their grief had begun to diminish. Vic had filled her role of surrogate perfectly. It was not that he did not love her. It was just that she was not Helen. Or Natasha.

Tom took a sip of scotch and reasoned that this was real pain rather than the emotional pain and self-loathing he normally felt after returning home with the scent of another woman still on him. He sat facing the sunrise on the harbour, watching the light upon on the water.

Senior Constable Collins would be coming tomorrow, and questions would need to be answered. A chill went through him and he realised he had not yet allowed himself to grieve. Tom paused and glanced outside, and bright sunlight blocked his morning view of the harbour ferries’ customary dance of synchronicity.

Then a thought hit him. What if the police had tracked Natasha’s location back to the highway motel and discovered that both their cars had been parked there for most of the night? The room had been registered in Natasha’s name, and Tom had been careful about his entrances and exits, which was pretty easy in a motel like that where transience was the source of their economy. Besides, in uniform, one volunteer looked much like another. There would be no CCTV footage of him, and they had never been seen in public together. In fact, their meetings had been limited to motel rooms where they had all the entertainment they wanted or needed in each other.

Tom followed Vic from the balcony to the office and then to the bedroom for a short nap. He tried to rein in his thoughts, but his mind continued to shout j’accuse. If the affair hadn’t happened, Natasha would still be alive. It seemed he had a choice—petty desire or his partner and children? l**t or love? The truth was he wasn’t ready to think about the truth.