I say. ‘If I can ever buy you a drink back …’
‘Well, I’m frequently alone in London on Sunday evenings, when all my pals are doing family things. You can treat me to a convivial supper some time.’
‘I’d love that,’ I blurt, not giving myself time to fluster or dither or ruin the moment.
She gets to her feet, and I wonder what the hell I should do if she presents herself for an embrace. My finishing school didn’t cover that.
‘Well, it’ll make a nice change from Antiques Roadshow,’ I say, standing up.
‘Not for you, it won’t.’
She smiles and lingers there, eyes glinting. Is this some sort of cue for me to move in?
‘See you soon then, Donal,’ she smiles, searching my eyes.
What should I do?
She turns to leave, then, Columbo-style, spins at the door.
‘There is one case you might want to check out, from five or six years back, still unsolved. A bailiff named Nathan Barry.’
She lifts her open palm to the left side of her face and starts karate-chopping her cheek. I try not to look alarmed or confused.
‘Axed in the face. Really nasty. That’s the only one I know of. Worth checking out.’
Pyecombe, East Sussex
Thursday, June 16, 1994; 20.00
I set off home whiskey-bleak, intent on avoiding Zoe until the morning. At least I can count on the combined ineptitude of Southern Rail and London buses on that score. I’ll be lucky to make it home by midnight.
The trouble is, I know exactly how it will play out. At first, she’ll greet news of my dismissal from the Kidnap Squad with stoic, purse-lipped disappointment. She’ll get busy with something to avoid me – ironing, sticking labels onto Matt’s clothes, that damned dishwasher – humming in that way that makes me want to strangle her. Every now and then, she’ll stop suddenly to stare sadly into space, and sigh.
All the while, her forensic brain will be feverishly constructing the case for the prosecution. She can’t help herself. Soon the questions start. Did Crossley specifically say x? Did you consider all other options before you did y? She’ll shift, gradually, until it becomes clear that she’s entirely on Crossley’s side, albeit in her infuriatingly factual, reasonable and logical way. Indeed, her devout commitment to be ‘totally fair’ to all parties involved is what makes me apoplectic.
‘Why can’t you just take my side and support me, for once?’ I’ll snap.
And then she’ll launch her trusty cruise missile; the ‘shock and awe’ hate bomb that obliterates every penis over a radius of one square mile.
‘I just thought we’d be living closer to Mum. By now.’
Her mother, Sylvia, takes care of Matthew while we work. That’s his name when he’s over there, after she declared Matt ‘too communal garden’. For all her snobbery, Sylvia’s ability to mangle common phrases is her unwitting Achilles heel. Just last week, she complained that her new spectacles were impairing her ‘profiterole vision’.
Late last year, Zoe found ‘the perfect flat’ for the three of us in Crouch End, just two streets from her family home. Perfect, that is, if I’d been on a DC’s salary. I pointed out that we couldn’t afford it. Her parents offered ‘to help’ until I got my promotion. I refused – out of bullish, old-fashioned and foolish male pride, of course – forcing us to not so much downsize as capsize from cosy Crouch End to grungy Green Lanes, Haringey; home of the Turkish heroin trade, leering Albanian/Kosovan cigarette hawkers and heaving 24/7 traffic.
She’s never got over it, especially now that each working day is bookended by the Matt drop-off/pick-up, a tedious forty-minute walk to where we should be living. It’s as if I’ve failed in some fundamental, primeval, manly obligation that can never be reconciled. Postcode emasculation.
At least the grocers of Green Lanes never close. Hangover incoming, I snaffle two bottles of rancid Transylvanian Shiraz and shuffle home for my nightly ‘couched grape’ solo session.
I unlock the front door, quickly check on Zoe and Matt – both out cold – then open bottle one. As the cork pops my mind snags on my mother-in-law Sylvia’s cutting observation. ‘Failed relationship’ … why does that rankle so? Is it the non-attribution of responsibility – blame – as if our status as a couple is so doomed that Zoe and I are powerless to save it? Or is it the shock realisation that, were we to split up, our incompatibility will be judged by the world at large as a personal failing on both our parts?
As I wince through the first aquarium-scale glug, I decide it’s time to pinpoint where this ‘failing’ began, and which of us is to blame. Top of my list: the chronic lack of sex.
By her own admission, Matt’s birth marked the death of Zoe’s sexual appetite. Of course, I wasn’t there – I didn’t even know Zoe then – but her oft-repeated, harrowing descriptions of the thirty-four-hour fanny-buster does little for either of our sex drives, in truth.
She lays the blame squarely on the National Childbirth Trust (NCT). It was the ‘Nipple-Cracked Tyrants’ – Zoe’s term – who convinced her to undergo childbirth without drugs. As someone who won’t clip a toenail without a tub of Savlon to hand, the notion of ‘natural childbirth’ boggles my mind. Ever since, she’s suffered crippling bouts of thrush, so we just ‘don’t go there’ any more, or even talk about it.
So imagine my surprise when I pick up her flashing mobile, on charge in the kitchen, click on a message from ‘Charles’, and read the words: Z, when can I see you again? Missing you every second!
My first reaction is disbelief. It’s been sent to the wrong number. Or it’s a prank. Or she’s being stalked by some loon. We’ve had that before – a hazard of her job as a forensics officer. Crime scene weirdos find out her name, rank, place of work and won’t stop calling her. But they’d never get hold of her mobile number …
I walk into our bedroom. She’s a snoring bed hump. A human landslide. It is 11pm after all.
It can wait until morning. There has to be a simple explanation, surely. I tip toe into Matt’s room. As usual, he’s face down in the cot, bum-in-the-air. I touch his hot little back, my hand earthing the familiar beats of his busy little heart. We always joke how we never want that tiny heart to be broken. Whatever her feelings for me, Zoe wouldn’t do it to him. Never.
I pad back into the sitting room, click off the TV and the lamp, pour a greedy red and fidget in the street-light orange gloom. For some reason, the Kübler-Ross model flashes into my mind. This is the Five Stages of Grief we’d been taught about – useful knowledge to any murder detective. DABDA – Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression. Then, finally, Acceptance. In a murder case, any close associate of the victim failing to adhere to the DABDA protocol becomes a suspect. It’s not murder suspects I’m worried about here,
