Any more questions?’
Carol fixed him with the cool grey stare that had worked so often in police interview rooms. ‘Did I get the job?’
Morgan smiled. ‘You got a job, DCI Jordan. It may not be the one you expected, but I think it’s fair to say you’re not going to be a Met officer for very much longer.’
Driving back to her Barbican flat, Carol was barely conscious of the traffic that flowed around her. Although she liked to think that, professionally, she always expected the unexpected, the course of the afternoon’s proceedings had caught her completely unawares. First, the appearance out of the blue of Paul Bishop. Then the bizarre turn the interview had taken.
Somewhere around the elevated section of the Westway, Carol’s bewilderment started to develop an edge of irritation. Something stank. An ELO’s job wasn’t operational. It was analytical. It wasn’t a field job; she’d be flying a desk, sifting and sorting intelligence from a wide variety of sources across the European Union. Organized crime, drugs, the smuggling of illegal immigrants, that’s what she’d be focusing on. An ELO was the person with the computer skills and the investigative nous to make connections, to filter out the background noise and come up with the clearest possible map of criminal activity that could have an impact on the UK. The nearest an ELO should ever come to primary sources was to cultivate officers from other countries, to build the kind of contacts that ensured the information that made it through to her was both accurate and comprehensive.
So why did they want her to do something she’d never done before? They must have known from her file that she’d never worked undercover, not even when she was a junior detective. There was nothing in her background to indicate she’d have any aptitude for taking on someone else’s life.
In the stop-start traffic of the Marylebone Road, it dawned on her that this was what troubled her most. She didn’t know whether she could do this. And if there was one thing Carol hated even more than being blindsided, it was the thought of failure.
If she was going to beat this challenge, she was going to have to do some serious research. And she was going to have to do it fast.
Frances was chopping vegetables when Tony walked in, Radio 4 voices laying down their authoritative counterpoint to the sound of the knife on the wooden board. He paused on the threshold to appreciate something so ordinary, so comfortable, so relatively unfamiliar in his life as a woman preparing dinner in his kitchen. Frances Mackay, thirty-seven, a teacher of French and Spanish at the high school in St Andrews. The blue-black hair, sapphire blue eyes and pale skin of a particular Hebridean genetic strain, the trim figure of a golfer, the sharp, sly humour of a cynic. They’d met when he’d joined the local bridge club. Tony hadn’t played since he’d been an undergraduate, but it was something he knew he could pick up again, an accessible part of his past that would allow him to build another course of brickwork in his perpetual facade; what, in his own mind, he called passing for human.
Her playing partner had moved to a new job in Aberdeen and, like him, she needed someone regular with whom she could construct a bidding understanding. Right from the start, they’d been in tune across the green baize. Bridge parties had followed, away from the club, then an invitation to dinner to plan some refinements to their system before a tournament. Within weeks, they’d visited the Byre Theatre, eaten pub lunches all along the East Neuk, walked the West Sands under the whip of a northeast wind. He was fond, but not in love, and that was what had made the next step possible.
The physiological cure for the impotence that had plagued most of his adult life had been at hand for some time. Tony had resisted the pull of Viagra, reluctant to use a pharmacological remedy for a psychological problem. But if he was serious about making a new life, then there was no logical reason to hang on to the shibboleths of the old. So he’d taken the tablets.
The very fact of being able to get into bed with a woman and not have the dismal spectre of failure climb in alongside was novel. Freed from the worst of his anxiety, he’d escaped the tentative awkwardness he’d always experienced during foreplay, already dreading the fiasco to come. He’d felt self-assured, able to ask what she needed and confident that he could provide. She certainly seemed to have enjoyed it, enough to demand more. And he’d understood for the first time the macho pride of the strutting male who has satisfied his woman.
And yet, and yet. In spite of the physical delight, he couldn’t shake off the knowledge that his solution was cosmetic rather than remedial. He hadn’t even treated the symptoms; he’d simply disguised them. All he’d done was find a new and better mask to cover his human inadequacy.
It might have been different if sex with Frances had been charged with an emotional resonance. But love was for other people. Love was for people who had something to offer in return, something more than damage and need. He’d schooled himself not to consider love an option. No point in yearning for the impossible. The grammar of love was a language beyond him, and no amount of pining would ever change that. So he buried his angst along with his functional impotence and found a kind of peace with Frances.
He’d even learned to take it for granted. Moments like this, where he stood back and analysed the situation, had become increasingly rare in the circumspect life they had built together. He was, he thought, like a toddler taking his first clumsy steps. Initially, it required enormous concentration and carried its own burden of bruises and unexpected knocks. But gradually the body forgets that each time it steps forward successfully it is an aborted tumble. It becomes possible to walk without considering it a small miracle.
So it was in his relationship with Frances. She had kept her own modern semi-detached house on the outskirts of St Andrews. Most weeks, they would spend a couple of nights at her place, a couple of nights at his and the remainder apart. It was a rhythm that suited them both in a life with remarkably little friction. When he thought about it, he considered that calm was probably a direct result of the absence of the sort of passion that burns as consuming as it does fierce.
Now, she looked up from the peppers her small hands were neatly dicing. ‘Had a good day?’ she asked.
He shrugged, moving across the room and giving her a friendly hug. ‘Not bad. You?’
She pulled a face. ‘It’s always horrible at this time of year. Spring sets their teenage hormones raging and the prospect of exams fills the air with the smell of neurosis. It’s like trying to teach a barrel of broody monkeys. I made the mistake of setting my Higher Spanish class an essay on “My Perfect Sunday”. Half the girls turned in the sort of soppy romantic fiction that makes Barbara Cartland sound hard-boiled. And the lads all wrote about football.’
Tony laughed. ‘It’s a miracle the species ever manages to reproduce, given how little teenagers have in common with the opposite sex.’
‘I don’t know who was more intent on counting the minutes till the bell at the end of the last period, them or me. I sometimes think this is no way for an intelligent adult to earn a living. You knock your pan in trying to open up the wonders of a foreign language to them, then someone translates coup de grâce as a lawnmower.’
‘You’re making that up,’ he said, picking up half a mushroom and chewing it.
‘I wish I was. By the way, the phone rang just as I came in, but I had a couple of bags of shopping so I let the machine pick it up.’
‘I’ll see who it is. What’s for dinner?’ he added, as he walked towards his office, a tiny room at the front of the cottage.
‘Maiale con latte with roast vegetables,’ Frances called after him. ‘That’s pork cooked in milk to you.’
‘Sounds
