The moment I said Broken Harbor to O’Kelly, every faded scar in my mind had lit up like a beacon. I had walked the glittering lines of those scars, obedient as a farm animal, from that moment straight to this one. I had moved through this case shining like Conor Brennan had shone on that dark road, a blazing signal for predators and scavengers far and wide.
Most people have no reason to know how memory can turn rogue and feral, becoming a force of its own and one to be reckoned with.
I like incongruity.
Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming.
Every time you say no to your big brother, God kills a kitten. Come on.
Ask any economist: broke is made of how you feel. The credit crunch didn’t happen because people woke up any poorer than they’d been the day before; it happened because people woke up scared.
Take what you want and pay for it, says God.
Children – and Rosalind was little more – don’t tell pointless lies unless the reality is too much to bear.
I laid a hand on his cheek; it was so bright that for a second I thought it was burning me, a pure painless fire.
The thought of a mortgage round my neck makes me edgy.
Everything about her is pure faultless middle-class–the accent, the clothes, the hair, the china patterns, it’s as if she ordered herself from a catalogue–but you can see the incredible effort that goes into every second of it.
Corruption is taken for granted, even grudgingly admired: the guerrilla cunning of the colonised is still ingrained into us, and tax evasion and shady deals are seen as forms of the same spirit of rebellion that hid horses and seed potatoes from the British.
Liv was never afraid of cot death or of Holly falling out of bed and hitting her head or any of the standard-issue parental boogeymen. All she worried about was that Holly might wake up, in the middle of the night, and think she was all alone.
Have a good laugh at this,... Deep down, I never for a second never thought they would find anything.
I looked out over the water, into the night that was coming in on the tide, and I felt nothing at all. The beach looked like something I had seen in an old film, once upon a time; that hotheaded boy felt like a character from some book I had read and given away in childhood. Only, somewhere far inside my spine and deep in the palms of my hands, something hummed; like a sound too low to hear, like a warning, like a cello string when a tuning fork strikes the perfect tone to call it awake.
Few deaths can match the refined agony of being the one left behind.
Rambo was, naturally, some kind of terrier-based mutt that weighed about five pounds soaking wet. The name had given him a Napoleon complex, complete with territorial issues.
He had taken up woodworking, there was sawdust on his soft worn trousers; his wife had wrapped a scarf around his neck and kissed his cheek as he went out.
Faye had always been sweet, flaky but sweet, unlikely to ask about your problems but deeply concerned about them if you reminded her they existed.
The corners of Cooper’s mouth tucked in, which is as close as he gets to a smile. He said, “Do come in.