Paula looked at the clock on the dashboard. Only quarter to ten. She was due to meet Jana Jankowicz at eight. She could either find a cheap motel in Sheffield and sleep badly or head back to Bradfield for a few comfortable hours in her own bed. And that way she’d be able to show her face at Amatis. Maybe they’d get lucky and pick up a second ID on the photo. For sure, she would pay back some of the favour Chris Devine had granted her. For Paula, who always preferred debtors to debts, it was no contest.
Would he know she’d been spending so much time here? Would her presence leave a stain? Would he turn to her, like one of the three bears, saying, ‘Who’s been sitting in my chair?’ She might be blonde, but Carol was no Goldilocks. She swallowed the last mouthful of wine in her glass and reached for the bottle, conveniently placed within reach on the floor. There was something comforting about being here. Even though she’d just arrested a suspect who ran counter to Tony’s convictions about Robbie Bishop’s murder, Carol felt confident in her professional judgement.
It was her private emotions that gave her more trouble. It was easy to be sure of her feelings when he wasn’t here-she missed him, she could create a conversation between them on any subject under the sun, she could picture the shifting expressions on his face. She could almost dare to think the l-word. But when they were in the same space, all her certainties shifted. She needed him too much and her anxiety over doing or saying something that would drive a wedge between them became her overriding consideration. And so the things unsaid and undone loomed large in everything they said and did. She had no idea how to resolve it. And for all his professional expertise, she suspected Tony was no wiser than her in this crucial respect.
In his hospital room, Tony lay with the lights off and the curtains open. The thick clouds reflected the city’s glow, taking the edge off the darkness. He’d dropped off to sleep earlier, but it hadn’t lasted long. He wanted to be home in his own bed. Or at least on his own sofa, given how impossible the thought of stairs seemed right now. Nobody waking him at six with a cup of tea he didn’t want. Nobody making judgements about him based on his choice of boxer shorts. Nobody treating him like he was five years old and incapable of making his own decisions. Above all, nobody to let his mother in.
He sighed, a long, deep exhalation that left him hollow. Who was he kidding? He’d be just as restless and miserable at home as he was here. What he needed was work. That was what made him tick, what made his mind inhabitable. Without work, without direction, his thoughts were like a hamster on a wheel, circling and dancing with no destination and no possibility of arrival. With work, he could avoid anything but the most superficial consideration of Carol Jordan and his feelings for her. Once, there might have been a faint hope of them building a future. But circumstances and his reactions to them had blown that. If there had ever been a real possibility of her loving him, that was history.
And probably best that it was, for all concerned. Especially now his mother was back on the scene.
The insistent bass seemed to have taken up residence in Chris’s thighs. With every beat, her muscles contracted a fraction and her bones seemed to vibrate. She was sweating in places she didn’t know could sweat and her heart rate seemed to have shifted up a gear. Funny, when she was out clubbing for fun, she never noticed these reactions. She was too absorbed in the beats, too fixated on having fun with Sinead or whoever, too alive to the possibility of the night to feel the anxiety the music was creating in her tonight.
She was moving through the dancers, working round the fringe of the dance floor, leading with her ID, then fanning out the photos, making them stop and look. A few times, she’d had to grab T-shirts and go nose to nose with those either too recalcitrant or too high to want to co-operate. Every now and again, she would catch a glimpse of Kevin or Paula going through the same routine.
Kudos to Paula for coming back. Chris had been surprised when she’d seen the young detective moving through the crowd at the bar, but she’d been bloody delighted to learn about her success in Dore. Earlier, she’d heard about Carol and Sam picking up Rhys Butler. So now they had two avenues to pursue. One way or another, the search for Robbie Bishop’s killer was picking up the momentum it needed.
Sinead might as well have stayed on with her friends in Edinburgh for the weekend, Chris thought. The way things were going, it didn’t look like she was going to have a whole lot of free time in the immediate future. But hey, that was the way this job went. And the flexibility Carol Jordan had built into MIT meant she had more down time than she’d ever had since she joined the police.
Only one regret in all of this. She didn’t know a senior detective she respected who didn’t carry a similar weight. Talking to Paula earlier had brought it all back. Chris had once worked with a young detective who would have been stellar if she’d lived long enough to make it as far as MIT. A cop who was just beginning to fly when some bastard clipped her wings for good. A woman that Chris had failed to avoid loving more than she should have. A death that she couldn’t help shouldering some of the responsibility for. A gap that would always be there. A gap she tried to fill by doing the job as well as she possibly could.
‘You sentimental cow,’ Chris muttered under her breath. She pulled her shoulders back and moved into the eye line of the next dancer. It didn’t matter who you did it for. What mattered was doing it.
Garbled chunks of code scrolled down the screen. Algorithms were constantly battering them, unravelling the clues and making the strings of numbers carry meaning again. Stacey leaned back, yawning. She had done as much as was humanly possible with Robbie Bishop’s hard drive. Now it was up to the machines.
She got up from her ergonomically designed chair and stretched her arms over her head, feeling the creaks and crackles in her neck and shoulders. She crab-walked over to the window, moving muscles and joints cramped in one position for too long, then gazed down on the city below. So many people on the streets so late at night. Out there, trying to meet their needs. Hoping, searching, desperate.
Stacey turned away. That’s what you got for being needy. Friday night in Temple Fields, sad bastards craving something that would get them through the night. If they got unlucky, they might even get sucked into one of those greedy relationships that used up so much energy and resources.
She’d seen too many swallowed up that way. Good people with something out of the ordinary to give. But those needy emotional co-dependencies had fucked them up every time. If she did get it together with Sam Evans, it would never be that sort of cannibalistic, draining thing. Because the one thing she knew was that she was not going that way. Nobody was going to come between her and the mysteries she wanted to unpick, the solutions she was going to find.
Her parents wanted her to marry and have children. They had this strange notion that first Stacey, then her husband and their children were going to take over the family chain of Chinese supermarkets and food wholesalers. They’d never understood how different her destiny was from that. No marriage to come between her and her machines. If her biological clock demanded children, well, there were ways to deal with that and enough money to make it as convenient as she wanted.
