In the saloon bar of the pub, Grace ordered Cleo Morey her second Polstar vodka and cranberry, and himself a Diet Coke. One large Glenfiddich had been enough - he was going to have to return to the Incident Room later this evening and needed all his wits.
They sat on cushioned seats at a corner table. With less than a dozen other people in the pub the place was not very busy. A one armed bandit at the far end of the room winked and blinked away forlornly like an old tart in a windswept alley.
Cleo looked stunning. Her hair, freshly washed and shining, hung down over her shoulders. She wore a classy-looking light suede jacket over a beige tank top, white jeans of fashionable three quarter length, revealing her slender ankles, and plain white mules.
Grace had dashed from Mark Warren's apartment to the Incident Room to get copies of Davey's diagram faxed out to the team, and from there went straight on to the pub, still arriving an hour and twenty minutes late. Of course he had had no time to change or even tidy himself up. He was wearing the plain navy suit he had put on early this morning in case he had to appear in court, with a white shirt and plain navy tie - now slackened and hanging at half mast with his top button open. Compared to Cleo he was feeling very dowdy.
'I've never seen you in civvies before,' he joked.
'Would you have felt more comfortable if I'd turned up in my green gown and wellies?'
'I guess it would have had a certain je ne sais quoi about it.'
She beamed at him, and raised her glass. 'Cheers!'
She had a great figure. He loved her blue eyes, her small, pretty nose, her almost rosebud lips, her dimpled chin, her lean body. And she smelled stunning too, as if she had been marinated in some very classy perfume. Some difference to the reek of Trigene disinfectant that he normally associated her with - tonight she radiated femininity, her eyes sparkled with fun, and every man in the pub was j ogling her. Grace wondered if they would still be ogling if they knew| what she spent her days doing.
He poured some more Coke over the ice cubes and lemon an<|| raised his glass back. 'Good to see you.'
'And you, too. So, tell me about your day?'
'You don't want to hear about my day!'
She leaned closer, all her body language receptive to him. If she came any closer still she would be snuggling up to him. He felt very good, very comfortable sitting here with her, and for a moment all his cares were parked in another space. 'I do,' she said. 'I want a blow-by-blow account of every minute!'
'How about the edited version? I got up, had a shower, went out, met Cleo for a drink. That enough?'
She laughed. 'OK, that's a start. Now talk me through the bits you edited out.'
He gave her a brief summary, mindful of the time. It was a quarter past nine - in an hour he had to be back in the Incident Room. He shouldn't have come on this date at all, he ought to have cancelled because of everything he had to do, but hell, didn't he have the right to enjoy himself just once in a while?
'Must be tough, interviewing the bereaved,' she said. 'In seven years I should have got used to seeing people, often within a few hours of getting the news that their loved one is dead; but I still dread every single one of those moments.'
'It might sound callous,' Grace said, 'but catching the bereaved within a few hours is the best chance we have of getting them to talk. When people have just lost someone, their first automatic response is to go into shock. While they are in that state they will talk. But within twelve hours or so, with family and friends gathering around, they start to close ranks, and clam up. If you are going to get anything useful, in my experience, you have to do it in those first hours.'
'You like what you do?' she asked.
He sipped his Coke. 'I do. Except - when I run up against people in my organization with limited minds.'
Cleo poked around in her drink with a cocktail stick as if looking for something, and for a moment the intensity of her gaze reminded
Grace of her at work in the post-mortem room, when she was taking ft tissue sample. He wondered what it would be like if he ever made love to her. Would the sight of her naked body remind him of all the naked cadavers he had looked at with her? Would he be put off by knowing that beneath her beautiful skin were the same hideous, slimy, fat-coated internal organs that all humans - and all mammals - shared in common?
'Roy, there's something I've been wanting to ask you for a long time. And of course I saw that stuff in the papers last week. How did you get interested in the supernatural?'
It was his turn to probe his drink. With the plastic cocktail stick he squeezed the lemon flesh, releasing some of the juice into the Coke. 'When I was a kid, my uncle - my dad's brother - lived on the Isle of Wight - in Bembridge. I used to go and stay every summer for a week - and loved it. They had two sons, one slightly older than me, the other slightly younger -1 kind of grew up with them from about the age of six. I don't know if you've ever been to Cowes?'
'Yes, Daddy's taken me sailing there during Cowes Week lots of times.'
Mimicking her posh accent, Grace said, 'Ew, Deeaddy would.'
Grinning and blushing, she gave him a friendly prod in the arm. 'Don't be mean! Carry on with your story.'
'They had a tiny terraced cottage, but right opposite was quite a grand house - a townhouse, four storeys high. There were two very sweet old ladies who lived there, and they were always sitting in a big bay window on the top floor, and they'd wave at us every time we saw them. When I was fourteen my aunt and uncle sold their house and emigrated to New Zealand, and I didn't go back there for about eight years. Then, in the spring of the summer that Sandy and I got married, I was taking her on one of those kind of meet the ancestors tours - and I thought it would fun to show her Cowes and the place where I'd spent so many happy holidays as a kid.'
He paused to light a cigarette, clocking Cleo's frown of surprise, then continued. 'When we got to my uncle's house, the beautiful townhouse opposite was in the process of being demolished - to make way for an apartment building. I asked the workmen what had happened to the two old ladies and they introduced me to the
