Craig McGee couldn’t phone home and laugh because there was no Mrs McGee any more to pick up the phone and smile at the sound of his voice. The phone would ring alone and unanswered on the blue painted table by the front door, secure in its secret plastic knowledge that Sylvia wasn’t ever going to come running out from the kitchen again, wiping her hands on a dishcloth and pick it up. Why phone home when your wife is dead? In fact if he didn’t have to feed her cats, Craig sometimes wondered why he went home at all. Everything there had her mark on it, her smell on it, her touch to it. Her absence mocked him, from the coffee jars full of shells she collected on holiday in Scotland, to the ridiculous carved magazine rack she bought at a heart foundation sale. Sometimes he woke in the night and stretched out to touch her neck, only to find the empty strip of bed as cold as marble.

He wondered if Brenner knew how lucky he was to be able to perform that simple but delicious act of phoning home.

Staff Sergeant McGee let his forehead rest against the wall above the cooler. He crushed the waxed paper cone in his hand and let it fall to the floor.

* * *

‘Don’t know why they don’t just send us out in a carton pulled by a sow. Be as much use as this heap of shit in the snow.’

Constable Sonny Morris was not enjoying trying to control the Ford Crown Victoria in the thickening blizzard, and his partner Dan Small made a nasal sound in agreement. Highway patrol was a joke in conditions like these. They’d be lucky to find anyone moving, never mind speeding.

‘You got to drive fast to keep control. I keep telling you. Drive fast.’

Sonny glanced sideways at Dan.

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Sure. It works. You see, the slower you go the more traction you lose. Tried it last winter in my wife’s Honda. Got the thing all the way up to Ledmore in one go. Three feet of fresh fall, and I made it in one go. You have to drive fast.’

The driver remained unimpressed, and maintained the stately twenty miles per hour that was taking them back to the detachment in Silver.

‘Like to have seen that.’

‘God’s truth. In one go.’

‘Nah. Not the driving bit. Just the fact you were in Moira’s Honda.’

Dan squirmed.

‘Hey come on. The pick-up was bust. I had to get to Calgary. What was I goin’ to do? Walk?’

‘Better than being in Moira’s Honda.’