Thursday legends - Skinner 10 by Quintin Jardine

was joking.'
    'That's
good. Handling rejection's never been my strong suit.'
    'What
do you mean?' 'I mean I don't like being chucked.' 'What happened with your
fiancee? Who really chucked whom?'
    'Let's
say that we agreed it wouldn't work.'
    'Sure
you did. And that's why you have her photograph on the sideboard downstairs.
All these girlfriends of yours, yet she's the only person on display, other
than your mother. Something big happened. What was it?'
    'Don't
push it.'
    'Ah,
you did catch her, then.'
    Sharp,
way too sharp. 'Actually, she got pregnant, then had our child aborted without
telling me about it.' 'So you broke off the engagement?' 'Yes. Immature, eh?'
    'No.
Principled, I'd say. I can tell how much it hurt you to finish with her, yet
you had to.'
    'Oh
yeah? And why did I have to? Why couldn't I have gone along with it?'
    'Because
if you had, you'd never have been your own man again, not completely. And
someone like you has to be, doesn't he?'
    He
looked at her, so close that it was an effort to focus his eyes on her. She was
right; he had searched for months for an answer to the riddle of himself. Now
Rhian had come up with it, on "their second night together. And of course,
Alex, her father's daughter, was exactly the same; she had his no compromise gene. That was why it could never work again,
because neither of them was physically capable of doing the thing that would
make it so; yielding to the other's will.
    'So
what about you?' he asked. 'What would you do in Alex's shoes?'
    'I'd
have the baby ... but I'm not Alex. I
mean, I'm not knocking her or condemning what she did. It was her right. But
families are a two-way commitment, aren't they? Could you handle a family,
properly, and your job at the same time?'
    He
rolled on to his back and stared at the ceiling. 'You were at that post-mortem
this afternoon. Did it affect you?'
    'I'm
a doctor, or I'm going to be. I'm being trained not to form emotional attachments
with live patients. Dead ones on a slab should be no problem for me.'
    'Don't
give me theory, give me fact.'
    She
thought about it for a few seconds. 'It wasn't the dissection,' she said finally.
'It was the commentary; the way Sarah described, for the tape, the things that
had been done to that man. Did you know that he actually drowned in his own
blood?'
    'No,
but it doesn't surprise me. I looked into the guy's face, or where his face should
have been, as soon as we took him out of the water. I saw his hands and feet,
his legs, his chest, everything that was done to him.
    'I
saw worse on Friday night; yes, worse than that. And you know what? Afterwards,
I went home with Karen, my sergeant; she was there, she saw it too. We've got a
history together, and right then we needed to help each other get over that
hellish thing. We spent the night together because neither of us could face
going home alone. I'm sorry if that hurts you, but it's the truth.' He looked
into her eyes, and saw her flinch.
    'Now,
to bring it all back to your original question, could I handle family life? The
fact is, Rhian, I don't know for how much longer I can live as I do, and carry
on doing my job. I'm really envious of Bob, in that respect. I need stability,
I need the normal home life that Alex and I had for a while. I suppose I've
been looking for it since we split.
    'Otherwise,
things like Alec Smith's murder, or like looking at that bloke last night and
realising that there's a fair chance we'll never even find out who he was ... I have this fear that the job will
either break me, or take me over to the point that there will be no room in me'
- he tapped his chest - 'here, inside me, for anything else. When I can look at
an ex-colleague with his-' He stopped himself. 'When I can look at that then go
home as if it's just another day at the office, as a man, I'll be done.'
    She
gripped his fingers in hers, squeezed them and held them between her breasts.
'Then let's just make sure, that there's always someone there for