He looked hot.
‘Beer? Or a soft drink?’
‘Coke? I’m driving.’ Suzanne went through to the kitchen to get the drinks. He wasn’t likely to want a trip to the pub if he was driving. When she came back into the room he was standing by the wall looking at her photographs. ‘Is this your son?’ He was in front of the picture of Adam, the one taken just after his eleventh birthday. ‘He’s about the same age as my Jeff.’
‘No.’ Suzanne swallowed a sudden bitter taste. ‘No, that’s my brother, Adam.’
‘Oh, right, he looks a bit like you. Is this recent?’
‘No.’
‘What does he do, then? Is he an academic too?’
Suzanne found it hard to say. ‘No. Adam – he died, when he was fourteen. Six years ago.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’ He looked embarrassed. He didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t want to know. ‘Look, Sue, this is really a business visit. It couldn’t wait until Monday. I had a call from Keith Liskeard.’ Suzanne recognized the name of the Alpha director. ‘He says he’s had the CID round asking questions.’
Suzanne’s stomach lurched. She should have warned them. ‘About Ashley?’ she said.
Richard looked serious. ‘You do know about it.’
‘Well, yes …’
He went on before she could tell him what had happened. ‘Look, Sue, I realize you were in a difficult situation – if you saw Ashley you had to tell them, no one’s saying you shouldn’t have done. But you should have let us know. I would have hoped you’d have come to us before you went to the police. It’s part of the commitment you make—’
‘Wait a minute!’ Suzanne was caught completely off balance. ‘What exactly do you think happened? What do you think I said?’
‘I can understand when there’s been a crime like that, if you saw Ashley near the scene you’d naturally—’
‘I didn’t.’ Suzanne felt a cold push of anger.
‘What do you mean?’ He looked confused.
‘I didn’t see Ashley and I didn’t tell them I’d seen Ashley. I didn’t volunteer to talk to them, I had to …’
‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying …’ He tried to pick up the initiative again but she overrode him.
‘It’s all a stupid misunderstanding. I specifically told them, specifically told DI fucking McCarthy that I didn’t see Ashley.’
He looked at her in silence for a minute. He obviously didn’t believe her. ‘There are some issues with Ashley at the moment. This couldn’t come at a worse time for him.’
‘What do you mean?’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t say.’
Their endless confidentiality! Maybe if she’d been given the information that Richard was referring to … ‘Why don’t you ask Ashley? He’ll tell you where he was.’
Richard looked uneasy. ‘It’s almost certainly because of these other issues … He hasn’t been to the centre since Thursday evening. We need to find him, get him to tell his story to the police before this gets out of hand.’
Suzanne found that her anger was being taken over by a sense of insecurity – had she done something wrong, something stupid? ‘I think you’d better go,’ she said.
‘Yes. I’m … OK, right.’ He turned in the doorway. ‘Keith is very unhappy about it,’ he warned.
She went to the pub by herself in the end, but left early. She talked to a few people: some of Dave’s friends who’d been her friends as well when she and Dave were married; one or two people she knew from the university. It could have been a pleasant evening, but she found that she didn’t really want to talk to anyone. The comedy evening was a let-down as well, though the rest of the audience seemed to enjoy it well enough. To her, the comedian’s laddish jokes were pointless and unfunny. She left early. He heckled her as she was leaving. ‘There’s another one off for her pension!’ It seemed that being over twenty-five was funny in itself now.
She walked back past the park gates and paused, looking down the path towards the woods. It was dark. She could see a small group of people hanging around in the shelter near the entrance. Teenagers, she assumed, though it was too dark to tell. Further in, the shadows were black under the trees. She could see a light flickering in the darkness, but otherwise it was quiet and still. The group by the shelter watched her as she stood under the street light. She could walk through the gate, follow the path to the third bridge, go out the gate there and be on Dave’s doorstep, be where Michael was. She couldn’t think of anything that would induce her to walk into that black silence.
Steve McCarthy had been home for an hour. He’d got home after eight-thirty and gone straight to his computer to log on to the network. His evenings would be like this now, until this case was over. There was always more information pouring in, more details often burying important details, and he intended staying on top of it all.
McCarthy was ambitious. He’d joined the police after leaving school, choosing to go straight in rather than going on to do a degree. He still wasn’t sure if that had been the wisest decision. He’d done well, promotions had come in good time, sometimes sooner than his best expectations, and he knew he was seen as a team player with a good future ahead of him. He was thirty-two, and the next hike up the promotions ladder was the important one.
He was working on their current database now, getting it to look for patterns in relation to other offences in the Sheffield area over recent months. He typed another command into the computer, getting it to sort the information in relation to drug offences. While he was waiting, he dug his fork into the takeaway he’d picked up from the Chinese on the way back. Cold. He looked down at the polystyrene tray. His chicken chow mein had somehow transformed itself into a grey, glutinous mass. He pushed it away impatiently. He could get something out of the freezer later, stick it in the microwave. He picked up his mug of coffee with little optimism. Cold as well. He couldn’t work without coffee. He went through to the kitchen and pushed the switch on the coffee machine.
The flat was modern, two-bedroomed. McCarthy had bought it because it was fitted out, convenient and he could move straight in. He’d heard someone say once, or he’d read somewhere, that a house should be a machine for living. McCarthy understood that. He wanted the place he lived in to service him. He wanted to go in and find it warm when the weather was cold, cool when it was hot. He wanted to be able to cook at the push of a button, wash at the flick of a switch. He wanted to have any disorder that living created reordered before he returned.
‘Christ, McCarthy,’ Lynne, his last girlfriend, had said, ‘why don’t you just lock yourself away in a cupboard at the end of the day?’ Another time she’d said, ‘What you need, McCarthy, is a wife. An automatic, rechargeable, super-turbo, fuel-injection wife.’ He’d laughed and started massaging her back, running his hands over her neck
