Written In Blood

16-2

ZACK TURNED TO THE constable on his sofa the moment he heard his front door close on the sergeant. “Now he’s out of the way, how about a drink? I don’t know about you, but I could do with a coffee.”

“Sure, a coffee would be good,” Melissa agreed. She had been annoyed by Mitchell’s dismissal of the offer of a drink on her behalf, and was happy to take advantage of the second offer.

“How do you like it?”

“White, three sugars,” Melissa said, flashing an apologetic, and slightly embarrassed, smile when Zack paused to look back at her. “I’ve got a really sweet tooth. Everyone’s always saying I should be really fat, probably diabetic, and missing at least a few teeth; don’t ask me how I’m not, I guess I must have a super-fast metabolism or something.”

“Consider yourself lucky, there’s plenty of people who’d kill for a metabolism like that. I’d be happy with one half as good,” Zack commented. “It seems like since I hit thirty, my metabolism’s hit the brakes.”

Almost the moment he was out of the living room, Zack heard stealthy footsteps; he guessed that Melissa was looking around to satisfy her curiosity, either about him personally, or about his visit from Lucy. He knew he should be offended, but he didn’t care; no matter how hard she searched, he knew the constable would not find anything that would suggest he had had anything to do with either Lucy’s disappearance or Georgina Ryder’s murder.

“Here you go.” Zack returned after a couple of minutes with the coffees, and found that the curious constable was once again seated on the sofa, as if she hadn’t moved.

“Thanks.” Melissa lifted the mug she was handed straight to her lips, and let out a satisfied sigh after taking a sip. “Oh, that’s good. Strong and sweet, just the way I like. This isn’t cheap coffee, is it; it’s much better than I’m used to.”

Zack smiled. “I’m glad you like it. And no, it’s not cheap coffee. I spent years living on cheap coffee when I was a detective, and longer putting up with the fancy teas my wife insisted on. She’d go out of her way to buy the nastiest-smelling teas because they were the latest fad, but would just get whatever coffee came to hand for me. The only time I got good coffee was when I bought it myself; now I’m doing all my own shopping, I make sure I always have good quality coffee.”

“I can see why; I’m gonna be reluctant to go back to the cheap stuff,” Melissa said. “I want to ask how much this stuff costs, but I’m sure the price’ll scare me.”

“Why don’t you ask the question that’s been on your mind since you got here instead,” Zack suggested. He had not missed the way her gaze kept straying to his chest, and it was not hard for him to work out why. “You want to know about my scars, don’t you.”

Melissa’s cheeks reddened, but she didn’t deny that she wanted to know about them. She took several long swallows of her coffee to give herself time to collect her thoughts, only then did she speak. “They are pretty nasty looking, and definitely hard to miss. How did you get them?”

“I was young and stupid,” Zack answered without hesitation. “I got them in a bar fight.” It was not something he was proud of, but neither did he shy away and try to pretend it had not happened. He saw the constable’s curiosity was not satisfied, so he expanded. “I was having a drink in a pub, celebrating an arrest, and drank a few too many; there was a group of lads there, they’d had way too much to drink and were giving the barmaids, and pretty much every other woman in there, a lot of hassle. There was four of them, and I was on my own, but I was feeling pretty cocky so I confronted them.”

Zack watched the constable as he related his story, and was amused to see that she was hanging on his words as though he was telling a spellbinding story.

“It started off as just words, but soon enough one of them pulled a knife, and another was smashing a bottle to attack me with. By the time it was all over, me and the two guys who attacked me were on our way to hospital, and I was left with the scars you saw. They got lucky on the scars front, but not so lucky on the staying out of jail side of things – they both went down for attempted murder, eight years apiece.”

“Wow, you must be a really good fighter to beat four guys in a fight,” Melissa said admiringly.

“Not really,” Zack said with a shake of his head. “I got lucky. Besides, only two of them were actually fighting, the other two backed off when things got physical, and they were so drunk they didn’t really know what they were doing. Even so, I was lucky to get away with just a few scars.” He was all too aware of exactly how lucky he was – he had been left with a punctured lung that cost him over a month in hospital “Since we’ve broached the subject of your curiosity when it comes to me, why don’t you go ahead and ask me whatever else it is you want to know,” he invited.

Melissa was a little taken aback by the offer, just as she had been by Zack Wild’s ready admission that he had been involved in a pub fight – the incident had been mentioned in the summary of his personnel file, but she had not expected him to admit it or explain it. She couldn’t let the opportunity pass.

“How did you go from being a detective to being an author? A pretty successful one as well, from what I’ve discovered.”

Zack was sure that was not all the constable had discovered about him, though he doubted she had found out anything that might be a problem for him.

“I guess you could say it’s something I fell into,” he said. “I was assigned to help CID with research when I was a young constable, and I stumbled on a cold case that got stuck in my mind – I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I went over the file and learned everything there was to know, then I investigated on my own time. It turns out I’m a better than average investigator - before long I’d solved a thirty-year-old murder.” He spoke of it in the tone of someone who considered what he had done nothing significant. “The story got in the paper, I got promoted to sergeant, and a friend of my ex-wife’s came knocking – she works for a publishing company, and thought the story of how I solved the case would make a good true crime book.

“I wasn’t sure, either that it would make a good book, or that I wanted to write one, but Paula can be pretty convincing when she wants to be; she talked me into doing the book, talked her boss into giving me a contract for the book, with a small advance, and then she showed me how to structure the narrative and everything else I needed to know to write a book - when I started the book, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. The book did surprisingly well, much better than any of us expected, and Paula’s boss offered me a deal for a second cold case I was working on in my spare time; that time I had a better idea of what I was doing, so my notes were easier to turn into a book.” His coffee was all but cold by then, but his throat was dry, so he drank it anyway. “Paula’s boss wanted a third book when the second did better than the first, but I didn’t have another cold case to write about, I did have an idea for a detective novel with a character I created – he liked the idea and gave me the contract.

“Paula had a falling out with my ex-wife around that time, and wasn’t able to help me after that; fortunately, she had taught me enough to write the book without her help. I wrote several more books after that, some fiction and some true crime; each one did better than the others, and when I got divorced, I decided to make several changes in my life. The biggest was to resign from the police and take up writing full time.”

“You must be doing pretty well at it,” Melissa said, “to be able to afford a new house and a fancy car, that Aston Martin must have cost you a pretty penny, after getting divorced.”

Zack shrugged. “Probably not as well as you think, not yet anyway. I’m doing alright, but royalty payments are always at least six months behind, so I’ve got a while to go before my bank account looks healthy again, especially after the number Cathy did on it during the divorce. When the money comes in I’ll be able to get myself sorted, until then, I’m only getting by.”