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there's a witch hunt you'll be tied to the next stake.” 
    “ I'm hurt by your comments.” He aims a playful punch at my arm.
    “ That's it, you're under arrest for assaulting a police officer, I'm turning you in to the alternative squad.”
    We both laugh, grateful of the tension release, as I slow the car to allow a scruffy looking mongrel to trot out of the way. The dog stops to growl at us, squatting to pass further comment on our unwanted presence here, the sound of urine splashing on the pavement is loud through the open window.
    “ You don't have to stay remote forever you know.” 
    He looks ahead as he speaks, but the pause before I answer is a beat too long.
    “ What do you mean?”
    “ Don't do that again. I'm not trying to intrude and you're nowhere near cute enough for me to be cracking onto you, but I would like you to consider me a friend.”
    “ I do.”
    “ Well then treat me like one. Drop the guard and get things off your chest every once in a while. Let's start getting together outside of work for a beer or a pint of embalming fluid, or whatever the hell else you do in your spare time. I've been your partner for months and I know precisely nothing about you outside of work.”
    “ Sorry, I'm not used to opening up. I tend to keep my own counsel, but I'll try.”
    “ Thanks. With that in mind, you can tell me what's bothering you about this CID case.” He registers my flicker of surprise before continuing, “because I didn't fall out of a tree, so I can tell that you're rattled right now.”
     
    * * *
     
    When I was young I often sat and played scrabble with my father's father. The board we used was old and tattered, with silver duct tape along the fold in the middle to hold it together and letters that had yellowed with exposure to time and tobacco smoke. The yellow matched  the pallor of my grandfather's skin in the lamplight – in any light – and no matter what the time of day, he drank whiskey neat from a chipped tumbler as we played, the glass daubed by smears of greasy fingertips.  You were supposed to add a drop of water to malt whiskey he told me, since that opened up the 'nose', releasing the true flavor and bouquet of the spirit, enhancing your enjoyment; but I never saw him add any. He was generous with his snippets of knowledge, but mostly he talked about the war; rats the size of cats, blood running in rivers and the screams of the dying amongst the dead. I was not upset or disturbed by his stories, even when his eyes would look past me and I could see the haunted sheen of tears. He'd been fifteen when he left to fight, had lied about his age at a time when few questions were asked; a few short years later he had returned home an old man in all but appearance.
    I was at the hospital when he died, but I wasn't allowed to see him, which seems a perversely protective act in retrospect. The corridor smelled of swimming pools with the fun extracted, and my little brother slept on our silent mother, who seldom spoke to, or looked at either of us, even in less sombre circumstances. 
    Granddad had told me before that there were things that had been done to her that could not be undone, and that in time I would have to learn to accept that she would never be like my friends mothers. I never told him that I had no friends and had therefore never met their mothers for comparison. I already understood that she should be left alone, had learned that lesson instinctively at about the same time that I had learned to walk and talk.  To pass the time in the corridor I read a book that had been abandoned on the waiting area table, quick to stifle a laugh when I turned it over and saw one of Granddad's giant rats on the cover; I felt her disapproving glare without daring to look up.
    Granddad taught me a lot of things, most of which I've never forgotten even a decade and a half after he passed away. He told me that life exists within narrow bands of acceptability, that nobody likes a genius