'Well done.'
'So how did the geology creep in?'
She shrugged her shoulders. 'I needed a second subject, and there's a growing interest in it. It's always held a fascination for me, since I was a little girl. When the other kids received a doll for Christmas, I got a magnifying glass. My dad used to take me and my brother walking along the beach and we'd collect stones and bring them home. Afterwards we'd try to identify them from pictures in books. I suppose that's where it started, although by the same process I could have become an ornithologist or a biologist, meteorologist, just about anything. Dad was a polymath, in his own quiet way, and encouraged us to be the same.'
'What did your brother become?'
Rosie lifted her heavy glass and studied the liquid in it, with its characteristic bloom. 'A sailor. He ran away to sea when he was sixteen.'
'Ran away?'
'He joined the Merchant Navy, I've never seen him since.'
'Your dad sounds a bit like mine,' I told her. 'He was interested in everything, taught me to ask questions, never to be afraid of making a fool of myself. 'There's always someone wanting to know the same thing but daren't ask,' he used to tell me. Was your dad a teacher, too?'
Rosie gave a tiny involuntary jump, coming back from wherever she'd drifted off to, and smiled as she said: 'No, he was a baker. We owned a bakery in South Wales, near a village called Laugharne. Mum was a great fan of Dylan Thomas, who had lived there for a while. That's how we came to know the place.'
'So you're Welsh. You don't have the accent.'
'No, I'm English. We originated in Gloucestershire and moved to Wales when I was three. And that part of Wales used to be known as Little England. Then… afterwards… we moved to East Anglia. Cromer and a couple of other places.'
Afterwards, she'd said, with some emphasis, but I decided not to pry. I wanted to see her again, not learn her life-story. I decided to stay on safe ground. 'So it was fresh bread every morning,' I stated. 'My mouth is watering at the thought of it.'
'It was wonderful. We lived over the bakery and awoke to the smell. Dad started work at three in the morning but he'd be finished by noon, so he was always there to meet us from school and that's when we'd go walking on the beach. We looked for fossils and collected various shells and pebbles. He taught me how to identify minerals by doing scratch and hardness tests. Things like that.'
I felt envious, and my stomach reminded me that I'd had a canteen pie for lunch and a bowl of cornflakes before I dashed out to the class. OK, so it was a large bowl, and I'd had a sliced banana with honey on the flakes, but I'm a big lad.
'It sounds idyllic,' I told her. 'So what brought you to Yorkshire?'
'It was, but it couldn't last. Dad… he died, and Mum started to follow the same route as her hero, Dylan Thomas. She hit the bottle. We went from warm, loving, nuclear family to totally dysfunctional in less than three months. I scraped into university and married a fellow student who turned out to be a total waster. Took me twelve years to realise it, unfortunately. I walked out on him and headed north, in search of no-nonsense, northern straightforwardness and hospitality.'
'Ha! And did you find it?'
'I'm not sure.'
'I'm sorry about the family. I take it you have no children?'
'No. Have you any?'
I looked straight at her, face composed, as I replied: 'I imagine so,' but I couldn't maintain the look and broke into a grin. 'No, no children,' I admitted.
'And is there a Mrs Charlie Priest, as in Roman Catholic?'
'That's my line.'
'I know. That's what you told me when I asked you your name at enrolment.'
'You remembered. I'm flattered.' I held her gaze and saw that hint of a blush again. 'No, there is no Mrs Priest. Same story as you, except she walked out on me, left me holding the J-cloth.'
'She found herself a rich boyfriend,' I added, in an attempt to clear myself of any responsibility for the break- up.
'Same again?'
'I'll get them,' I said, reaching for my wallet.
'No, it's my turn. G and t?'
'No, just an orange juice, please, with lemonade.'
I watched her go to the bar and decided that there was something I liked about Rosie Barraclough, and it wasn't just those slim hips and that handsome face. There was a strange mix of vulnerability and strength in her character, a joy that hid a deep sadness, and I knew for certain that I wanted to play a part in trying to ease that sadness. I never dreamed how wrong I could be; how I would make it a million times worse.
'So what about you, Charlie?' she said as she placed my drink in front of me. 'You've learned my life-story, now it's your turn.'
When you are a cop, a detective, you learn techniques for getting people to open up and confide in you. You learn all there is about them without giving away a single thing about yourself. Sometimes it's like opening a bottle of ketchup: nothing comes out for a while and then suddenly you're covered in it. In the police station, on the job, that's good, but you find yourself doing it in your private life, too, and that's not good. I had nothing to hide from Rosie, nothing at all, but I don't like talking about myself. If you keep quiet, people give you the benefit of the doubt. Why open your mouth and prove them wrong?
'There's not much to say,' I told her. 'I've lived in Heckley all my life, went to Heckley Grammar School where I was captain of the football team, then art college, one marriage, met Rosie Barraclough whilst studying geology. I do quite a lot of walking, occasionally paint a large abstract when I'm feeling fraught, and like to do all the normal things that you see in the personal ads. I've a GSH and WLTM an NS for an LTR, or something.'
Rosie eyes crinkled as she smiled at me. 'Have you ever advertised?'
'No, honest. Have you?'
'I've never been so desperate. I suppose some people are trapped by their circumstances and that's their only chance to meet people.'
'I suppose so.' I was going to add that night classes were a better way, but decided not to. We talked about our families for a while and I learned that Rosie's mother was still alive, in a nursing home in East Anglia.
'Another?' I asked, pointing at her empty glass, but she shook her head and said she ought to be off. As we walked across the car park I told her that I'd like to see her again. Rosie said she'd look forward to that and we agreed to meet on Saturday night. When you are single it's the weekend evenings that are most difficult to fill. She wrote her phone number on a pay-and-display ticket for me and I put it in a safe place.
'Drink, Chinese, curry, pictures, theatre?' I said. 'If we want to go to the theatre I'll have to get the tickets.' We were standing alongside her car as she held the driver's door open, and a light drizzle had started to fall.
'Not the cinema or the theatre,' she replied. 'Let's go where we can talk.'
'Chinese and a drink?'
'Lovely, and perhaps then I'll learn a little bit more about the enigmatic Charlie Priest.'
'I'm afraid there's no more to tell. I'm a very shallow person.'
'That I don't believe. I'm still worried about that ammonite.'
'The ammonite?'
'The crinoids. You knew perfectly well what they were, so why did you call them an ammonite? Was it to encourage Miss Eakin, which would be kind of you, or was it because you're a control freak, laughing at everybody from behind your sleeve?'
'Damn, you've rumbled me. It was because I was trying to win the heart of Miss Eakin. Either one. '[he pair of them would have been beyond my wildest fantasy.'
'I'll believe you. And you can tell me all about the secret art of the graphic designer. It's a mystery to me what they do.'
'A graphic designer? Who said I was a graphic designer?'
'You did, the first night. We were admiring the drawing you did of a trilobite and Tom asked you what you did
