The ringtone of his mobile jolted Fleet from his thoughts.
When he saw who was calling, he hesitated, contemplating letting the call ring out. But really there was no question about him answering.
“Are you fucking kidding me, Rob?”
The voice of his wife—soon to be ex—came blaring through the earpiece the moment Fleet swiped the screen.
“Hello, Holly.”
“Don’t fucking ‘hello, Holly’ me. After all the shit you’ve put me through. You’re there. You’re part of it.”
“Calm down, would you? What are you talking about?”
“You know full well what I’m talking about. I spotted you last night on the news. I’m talking about you, and the girl, and whatever the fuck happened with her friends. Have you been there all this time? Since the beginning? Skulking around in the background, letting your boss cover for you in front of the cameras?”
Fleet sighed. He was careful to do so away from the microphone. He had an urge to light a cigarette, but Holly would have heard that, too.
“I’ve been here since the beginning, yes,” he said. “But I haven’t been . . . how did you put it?”
“Skulking,” his wife spat.
“Right. That. I’ve just been getting on with the job. I haven’t been trying to hide, from you or anyone else.”
The lie came easily, perhaps because he’d half managed to convince even himself. He looked again at the green door.
“The job,” Holly echoed. “Jesus Christ, Rob. Since when was self-flagellation part of the job?”
Holly lectured on English literature at the university. She used these words to rile him.
“Self-what? Remember I don’t speak Chaucer, Professor.”
Holly sniffed. “Self-flagellation. It’s a Catholic thing. Which I know you claim you’re not, but you aren’t half good at it sometimes.”
It was another attempt to get a rise from him. Fleet stayed quiet, conceding the point, and eventually the silence softened.
“Seriously, Rob. What are you playing at?”
Fleet pictured his wife pacing the kitchen at home. Her home now, he reminded himself. Fleet’s home, if you could call it that, was a shitty little bedsit in a block he remembered being called to more than once when he’d been a PC working the night shift. He could afford better, a bit. He just didn’t want to commit to anything longer than a week-by-week contract. Not yet, he told himself. The same thing he’d been telling himself for the past eleven months.
“I’m not playing, Holly. They asked me. That’s all. What could I say?”
“You could have said no.”
“I could have. I suppose. But . . . you know.” A bloodhound, the superintendent had called Fleet, and like it or not, that was his reputation. He found people. He didn’t always himself know how. Holly’s theory, meant more as a criticism than a compliment, was that it had something to do with Fleet knowing so intimately what it felt like to be lost. But whatever it was, finding those who’d gone missing had become Fleet’s main remit now on the force, to the extent that he no longer really fitted into the central command structure. He went wherever he was needed: from being seconded to a remote Scottish island, where a trail of lies and cover-ups in the local community had led Fleet to discover a priest’s body buried under a cairn, to—most recently—an investigation run by the Met into the identity of a torso found floating in the Thames.
There was silence for a moment at the other end of the phone line.
“Have you been back?” Holly tested.
“Back?” said Fleet.
“You know what I mean. Back home.”
“No, I . . . I’ve been staying away.”
“Good. Keep it that way.”
Fleet glanced again at the green front door.
“I’m serious, Rob. Don’t even think about it. This isn’t the same. Even I can tell from here, it isn’t the same.”
“No, I know. I do know, Sprig, I promise.”
Sprig. When was the last time he’d called her Sprig? It was a silly nickname, one he’d never used other than in private. He couldn’t even remember when he’d started using it. But Holly, sprig of—it was stupid, but at some point it had stuck.
“What are you eating?” Holly asked him, and Fleet had to laugh.
“I’ve been sticking mainly to a liquid diet,” he told her.
She knew he wasn’t much of a drinker. “Coffee, you mean? It’s battery acid, Rob. Especially that stuff they brew at police stations. I know. I’ve tasted it.”
“I’ve cut out the sugar,” Fleet said, resting a hand on his ample belly.
“Meaning you’re basically running on empty.”
Jesus, thought Fleet. He couldn’t win.
He smiled.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Seriously, Holly.” Because he knew that was really what she was calling to check, even if her initial mind-set had been kill rather than cure. And the tone they’d settled into now showed Fleet they’d made progress, of a kind, since their separation. Before, the instinct had always been to pick a fight, on both sides. Their conversations lately reminded Fleet of the time when they’d first started dating, when Holly had lived up in Cambridge and Fleet had been down on the coast. They’d spoken for hours sometimes, deep into the night, the distance somehow drawing them together. These days their conversations were briefer, because irrespective of the cessation of hostilities, it never seemed to take long before matters came to touch on the very thing that had driven them apart. It remained like a chasm between them, wider than any gap that could be reckoned in miles. He could forgive her, and she could forgive him, and still they could never be together.
“You don’t sound fine, Robin,” Holly said, slipping into the use of his full name. In the past she’d deployed it as a sign of affection, because she knew exactly how much he hated it. Or had, once, before Holly had turned it into something good.
