Manon cut-and-pasted most of it from someone else’s profile – a woman called Liz Temple from Berkhamsted, who claimed life was not about ‘sheltering from the thunderstorms’ but ‘learning to dance in the rain’. Except the bagging area joke – that was Manon’s and she was pretty pleased with it, feeling it made amusing reference to emotional baggage, of which there was a surfeit on the Internet.
Were she to tell the truth, her profile would go something like:
Misanthrope, staring down the barrel of childlessness. Yawning ability to find fault. Can give off WoD (Whiff of Desperation). A vast, bottomless galaxy of loneliness. Educated: to an intimidating degree. Willing to hide this. Prone to tears. Can be needy. Often found Googling ‘having a baby at 40’.
Age: 39
Looking for: book-reading philanthropist with psychotherapy training who can put up shelves. Can wear glasses (relaxed about this).
Dislikes: most of the fucktards I meet on the Internet.
‘Mustn’t give up, Sarge,’ says Davy.
‘Like I’d take relationship advice from you. Still treating you mean, is she?’
‘She keeps me on my toes.’
‘That’s one way of putting it.’
Davy is twenty-six but seems still a boy; has been in the force since eighteen, and something about him is irresistible to Manon. He has this naive intensity – like an only child, neither at home with the adults nor one of the children – and those enormous ears always on the alert. His affable demeanour and positive outlook have earned him the nickname ‘Silver’ among the DCs. Silver Lining, the boy who’s always looking on the bright side. He thinks the world might still come right if he just tries hard enough – which he does, all the time, mentoring at youth centres and looking out for every troubled child who crosses his path. But every silver lining has a cloud, and that cloud is Chloe.
Manon has seen them together more than once, though she and Davy never socialise outside the safety of office dos, Davy being of a different generation and this gulf becoming canyon-like outside the familiar hierarchies of work. One evening, however, they found themselves in the same pub, The Lord Protector on Mayfield Road. Manon was in a group from the station – a rowdy bunch, all pissed and telling terrible jokes (‘Invisible man’s at the door. Tell ’im I can’t see ’im. Hahahahahaha.’); Davy sat in a quiet corner with Chloe. Table for two.
Manon had watched them as the hubbub went on around her: Davy all animation, eyes on Chloe as if she were lit by some celestial cone, describing something to her. Chloe was looking over his shoulder, her face unmoving. She was a woman in a perpetual sulk and Davy was forever chivvying her out of it.
‘Face like a slapped arse,’ said Kim Delaney, looking across the room with Manon. ‘Dunno what he sees in her.’
But to Manon it makes perfect sense. Davy’s at his best when rectifying. He often comes into the office with a carrier bag destined for the youth centre where he volunteers – ‘Choccy Weetos for Ryan’, ‘Rex needs socks’ – and the brightness in his eyes tells her how much satisfaction this tenderness gives him. Warming up a frozen, miserable girlfriend is his destiny. If Davy got together with someone indomitably cheerful … well, Manon doesn’t know what he’d do with himself. End it all, probably.
‘I believe this leads to the abode,’ he says, as they turn down a wooded track. Bare tree branches bend over the car and verges rise up on either side. The sky seems to darken as the countryside burgeons around them.
‘Drop the Shotley guff, will you?’ says Manon, irritably. Davy loves the jargon they inculcate at police school. He’s forever saying the suspect ‘has made good his escape’ with his ‘ill-gotten gains’.
‘Bit peckish?’ says Davy, reaching into his pocket for a rich tea biscuit, which he hands to her.
‘This place is a bit Hansel and Gretel, isn’t it?’ says Manon, eating the biscuit and peering up at the menacing tree fingers that reach for each other above the windscreen. The car is rocking over stones.
‘Shouldn’t be far down this track,’ says Davy.
The track is bordered by logs, sawn ends forming a honeycomb grid. Their tyres plough through mud, which splinters with ice in places. The light lowers a notch, soaked up by the seaweed-gloss leaves on a row of bushes – rhododendrons, Davy says – ribboned with snow.
He is hunched towards the windscreen as they emerge in front of an ivy-clad house, broader than it is tall, with a pitch-roofed porch and a carport to the side. The house is ensconced in countryside, the woodland growing denser and darker to the sides and behind them.