Anne surprised him with her reaction. She didn’t seem concerned that she’d put her foot in it, or offer him the customary condolences. Instead, ‘I’d kind of figured,’ she said.
‘You had?’
Anne took a drink and shrugged. ‘I had you pegged as either a divorcee or a widower. My money was on widower.’
‘What made you think that?’ A widower, thought Fleet. Good grief. Was that really the persona he projected? At thirty-six years old.
‘The fact that you’re staying here, for one thing,’ said Anne. ‘And I field your phone calls, remember? If you were living with someone, I assume I would have spoken to them by now.’
Fleet couldn’t argue with the logic. ‘Maybe you missed your calling,’ he said. ‘It seems I’m not the only detective in the room.’
Anne smiled at the drink in her lap. Sadly, Fleet thought.
‘I almost did join the police force, as it happens. A long time ago now.’
‘Oh?’
‘But it was only to get back at my dad. A threat because he was such a bloody crook. Only small fry by your standards, I expect. Although everyone’s small fry in this town.’
Fleet gave a sniff at that.
‘Anyway, my dad – he had a finger in whichever pie was cooking. A touch of fraud, a spot of fencing. He brought the money in, I went to school and ran the household, from the point my mother left us when I was twelve. That was the deal, until one day I came home and found him at the kitchen table with a set of scales and a bowl of white powder.’
‘I’m guessing he wasn’t baking a cake,’ said Fleet.
Anne laughed. ‘Now that would have been a shock.’ She ran a finger around the rim of her glass. ‘I was sixteen by then,’ she went on, ‘and I’d already seen what drugs had done to some of my friends at school. Not friends, really, but I knew them, and I wasn’t having any part of it. Because I knew my dad and I knew he’d be looking for me to act as his little gofer. So I told him to flush it down the toilet or I’d go to the police.’
‘How did he react to that?’
‘I went to bed that night with a fat lip. But the next day I came home from the careers office with a brochure and an application form, and left it filled out on the kitchen table for him to find. I was serious, too. I would have joined. And when he confronted me about it the next evening, my dad saw that, too.’
‘So what did he do?’
‘He went straight,’ said Anne. ‘To the coach station, that is. Took what he needed to and left. Which is how I ended up here.’
Fleet frowned his confusion.
‘My grandmother owned this place originally. My mum’s mum, who’d disowned my mother when she’d run out on us, and had always loathed my dad. So she was only too pleased to take me in. I had to do my bit – by the end it was just me and her running things – but nothing I wasn’t used to doing at home, back on the other side of town. And when my grandmother died, she left the place to me. The mortgage as well, but that’s a different story.’
Anne took a long swallow of her brandy, almost draining the glass. She winced.
‘And that, in a nutshell, is me,’ she said, clearly trying not to cough. ‘It’s not even the short version, either.’ She waved a hand. ‘There are a few car-wreck relationships I could throw in, I suppose, which Freud would probably have found interesting but most normal folk would assume were par for the course. For a forty-three-year-old spinster like me, I mean, whose only excitement these days is an occasional illicit shot of brandy.’
Fleet watched her as she finished her drink. He wondered whether it was the alcohol that was making her so open, or – more likely, he thought – the loneliness.
‘So, how about you?’ said Anne. She set her glass on the windowsill and folded her arms, wriggling to make herself comfortable.
‘Me?’
‘I’ve shared my story,’ said Anne. ‘What’s yours?’
Now it was Fleet’s turn to drink. ‘You must have heard by now,’ he said. ‘If you didn’t know already.’
‘I’ve heard rumours,’ Anne admitted. ‘But I’ve been living in this town long enough not to believe anything that carries on the wind. Mainly because it has a habit of changing direction.’
As if on cue there was a gust of rain against the window, the breeze across the harbour gaining strength. Fleet thought about Mason: the way the community, one minute, had been ready to lynch him, but were now up in arms about the supposed incompetence of the police. Although maybe they were right on both counts.
‘The stories I heard … they were to do with your … sister, was it?’ said Anne. ‘Was she older or younger?’
Fleet felt a tightening within him.
‘Younger,’ he said, and that was all.
Anne took the hint. ‘Sorry. Too far. I didn’t mean to open up old wounds. And anyway, I was actually asking about …’ She tipped her head at his wedding ring. ‘You know. Unless that’s an open wound, too. Shit, just tell me to mind my own business. You probably only had a drink with me in the first place to be polite!’
Ordinarily Fleet would have shied away from both topics, even in the safety of his thoughts, but there was something about Anne’s directness that he couldn’t help responding to. Holly was direct, too. Painfully so, sometimes. In fact, it was the very characteristic he’d been most attracted to the first time he and Holly met, six years ago now, not long after Fleet had made inspector. He’d been asked to give a presentation on personal safety at Holly’s university campus, aimed
