He drained his glass and poured again. ‘It’s true, though, isn’t it? Police work is all about trampling over lives, regardless of the consequences.’
Without a word, she took the tumbler out of his hand and put it down on the rug. ‘Marc, I can’t believe you’re saying this. It’s so over the top. Look, we’re both tired, you’ve obviously had plenty to drink already. It’s not even dark yet, but never mind. Why don’t we have an early night for once?’
‘You always have to have the last word, don’t you?’ he said bitterly. ‘I will go up, but maybe I’ll spend the night in the spare room. You can get on with your work as late as you like without any disturbance.’
His words were like needles entering her flesh. ‘Why are you doing this?’
He gave a curt nod in the direction of her briefcase and laptop. ‘You’ll have brought work home, presumably? As always. You’re forever saying you need to catch up with the paperwork. Well, here’s your chance.’
‘I don’t need to…’
He sprang to his feet, although the decisive effect was compromised by a slight stumble which caused him to knock over the glass of whisky. As Hannah let her voice trail away, she watched an amber stain spreading out over the rug. Reaching out for the music system remote, she brought an abrupt end to
He stopped at the door, seemed to waver for a moment. ‘Goodnight, then.’
She didn’t answer. Tonight there wasn’t anything more for them to say to each other.
She’d never asked Marc directly about his love life in the years before they got together. It wasn’t that she was incurious; far from it. But there were some questions — a lot of questions, actually — that it was better not to ask. You never knew how easy it would be to live with the answers.
Unlike her previous boyfriends, he seldom talked about himself. Except at their most intimate moments, when he gave himself to her without reservation, there remained something unknowable about him, something other- worldly and remote. In those heart-stopping weeks after she’d first slept with him, she’d vowed that she would suppress her natural inquisitiveness and concentrate on the here and now. All that mattered was that she never lost him.
Of course, she couldn’t resist playing the detective game. As time passed, she became assiduous in picking up crumbs that he dropped. Marc was no monk in his earlier days, that was for sure. He’d lost his virginity to an older woman whom he’d met while working in a hotel during his gap year. Maybe from her he’d learned the patience and technique that made him as different from her previous lovers as Mozart from Meatloaf. He’d taken lovers at university, but out of term time he kept going back to a Brackdale girl he’d first courted as a diffident, acned schoolboy. Dale Moffat.
Hannah sat in the living room, rifling her memory for the bits and pieces of information he’d let slip about Dale. After consigning the Erik Satie CD to the bottom of a box of their least-played music, she’d put on Diana Krall and gone in search of comfort food. In a corner of a kitchen cupboard she’d discovered a forgotten box of Belgian chocolates. The legend boasted that the contents represented an exquisite combination of refined taste and time- honoured tradition: how could she resist? She’d worry about her weight in the morning. In the absence of sex, chocolate wasn’t such a bad substitute.
As for sex, every community had at least one Dale. Pretty, vivacious, narcissistic; smart enough not to cheapen herself by spreading her favours too thickly but not quite smart enough to do a Tash Dumelow and hit the jackpot. When Marc was sixteen, she’d dumped him for the star centre forward of the school football team. By the time he came back as a student on his first vacation, the acne was long gone and the soccer player wasn’t scoring any more. Hannah gathered that Marc and Dale liked each other’s company and liked going to bed together even more, but it was never a grand passion. Long before Marc took his degree, Dale caught the eye of a married man and, in time-honoured tradition, finished up pregnant. She’d kept the baby but not the boyfriend.
When the child was a little older, she and Marc had resumed their affair on a sporadic basis. As far as Hannah could figure out, it was a fallback position in more senses than one. If Marc was ever without a girlfriend for the night and Dale wasn’t otherwise engaged, they usually finished up in bed together. In the unlikely event that matrimony had ever been on the cards, Hannah had no doubt that the presence of Dale’s boy Oliver was enough to deter Marc. For a lifelong commitment-phobe, taking on a stepson in addition to a wife was too much to ask. Perhaps that was why he insisted on surrounding himself with books. The dusty tomes never threw up or got toothache, they never made demands.
‘She does know about you and Dale?’ she’d asked when Marc said that he’d invited Leigh Moffat to run the cafe at Amos Books.
‘Of course, those two don’t have secrets.’ The question seemed to amaze him. ‘But it’s not an issue.’
She’d thought about joking that it would be different if the boot was on the other foot, and she was proposing to set up with the brother of an ex, but she let it go. It would never occur to him that she might suffer a pang of jealousy. In a way, she felt flattered that he regarded himself as incapable of betraying her. Only in the darkest moments of self-doubt did she wonder if she was fooling herself. Or if he was fooling himself.
Leigh was less blatantly alluring than her sister, but to Hannah’s mind more attractive. Like Dale, she’d never married; Hannah didn’t have a clue why not. There had been relationships with men, Hannah gathered, but nothing that lasted, and she seemed content to spend a lot of time with Dale and Oliver, upon whom she doted. Apparently she’d been on her own for years, making a modest career in catering while Dale drifted from job to job. Both were intelligent women, but neither seemed to possess any burning ambition. Hannah couldn’t relate to such a lack of drive. To her, it was an article of faith: any woman with talent owes it to herself, and to her gender, to make the most of her potential. From childhood, she’d been determined to make her own way and never to be beholden to a man.
Leigh wasn’t the type to worry without good cause. Whenever Hannah met her, she radiated a calm assurance that verged on the intimidating. Impossible to imagine that in her entire life, she’d ever allowed a souffle to sink or stepped outside her front door without the benefit of a discreet touch of blusher and eye-shadow. If neither she nor Dale was the anonymous caller, why so much angst over what they remembered of the day when Gabrielle Anders had been murdered?
Unless, Hannah supposed, they remembered something about Marc that they didn’t want anyone to know.
The choice was simple. She could imitate Marc and take refuge in booze to stop worrying herself sick. Or she could do something. No contest. She found herself reaching into her case for the personal organiser, and then for the phone.
She was halfway through dialling Daniel Kind’s mobile number when she asked herself what she was doing. Already it was mid-evening; soon it would be dark. He would be busy with his work or doing whatever he did in the company of his partner, the journalist. They weren’t even friends. It was — well, Lauren Self’s phrase would be quite inappropriate. What would he think if she called him out of the blue, without an excuse?
As his phone rang, she cut off the call. Perhaps he was out. Besides, she wasn’t sure what to say if he answered. The impulse to dial his number was inexplicable: why not Nick, or even Les Bryant? It wasn’t as if she fancied him. That morning, she’d taken care not to look straight into his dark eyes, so reminiscent of his father’s. The trouble was, all he had to do was to check who had called in order to discover that she’d called for a couple of seconds, only to think better of it. Embarrassing.
Given the option, it’s always better to do something than nothing.
How many times had she heard Ben Kind say that? As a piece of philosophy, even he’d admitted its limitations, but right now it was apposite. What did she have to lose?
She dialled the mobile number again.
Chapter Seventeen
‘This is Hannah Scarlett.’ A long pause. ‘Have I called at a bad time?’
‘No, no,’ Daniel said hastily. ‘It’s fine, absolutely fine.’
‘I felt guilty about rushing off this morning, after I’d dragged you over to Kendal.’
‘No need.’
‘I really didn’t give you much of an insight into Ben as I knew him. I’m sorry if you thought it was a wasted
