Chapter 22: Nothing Left to Hide

Joss's POV

Mari took one step toward Dennis, on the wet gravel, with the blue lights going over her face.

The officer holding his arm let her.

"I drank your tea for nine years," she said. "I'd sooner it had been poison."

Dennis opened his mouth.

She turned her back on him and walked to her sister.

That was the last I saw of him, going into the back of a police car with a hand on his head.

They took our statements at the station on Harrison Road.

I sat in a room with a table screwed to the floor and a detective constable who had a cold, and I told her all of it.

I told her July, and the bramble, and the club's law.

I told her what I'd said at the table, and why.

"You put a man through a table tonight," she said, not looking up.

"I did."

"Sixty witnesses."

"I'll answer for it."

"You'll answer for it," she agreed, and wrote it down, and nobody said any more about it.

She asked me what the worst of it had been.

I thought she meant the club.

"I let my wife believe I'd been with her sister," I said. "For nearly a month, I let her. I stood there and watched her take her ring off."

She put her pen down.

"Mr Holroyd. That isn't a crime."

"It's the one I did."

She wrote that down too, and I think she did it kindly.

At six in the morning I came out of the station into the grey.

The old brother was leaning on the wall in the car park, with a roll-up that had gone out.

"Table sat at four," he said. "Every brother who wasn't in a cell or in bed."

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