He drapes his coat over the back of his chair and is about to get a coffee from the filter machine where it stews and burns, when Manon enters the room. He lifts his empty mug at her and she nods back, a thumbs-up. She seems to be walking gingerly, and having trouble taking off her coat. As Davy gets her a coffee, he sees Stuart, the new recruit, approach and lift the coat from her shoulders while she winces, and they both laugh at something.
Davy doesn’t know how he does it, but every time Stuart looks up from under his Disney Princess eyelashes, every woman in the room titters as if she’s at a sixth-form disco. He’s got so much confidence, like when Harriet had been talking to him about some quirk of the HOLMES database, and he’d picked a bit of fluff off the shoulder of her jacket and, momentarily, she hadn’t known what on earth to do with herself. Davy would never have the guts to be like that with senior police officers. Marvelling, he carries two coffees back to his desk, puts down his own and hands the second to Manon, who takes it while looking at her screen.
Christmas is weighing on Davy’s mind, especially what to buy his mother. Bed socks, perhaps – cashmere – or would that be too strong a reference to her bedridden years? All those weeks and months when Davy cast himself as the light bulb to her dark recess. He wants to get her something nice, because Christmas is hard on her, the way it dredged up painful memories of when his father left, seventeen years ago. She asks Davy endless questions about his father, who continues to live happily with Sharon the lollipop lady in Kent. He couldn’t, of course, go and spend Christmas with them – even though their Christmases sound rather raucous, with Sharon’s extended family gathering for one long knees-up and walks along the Whitstable seafront. No, that would be a disloyalty too far.
‘There’s a briefing,’ he says to Manon. ‘This afternoon. Child protection teams, multi-agency. It was on the board.’
‘Can’t go to that,’ says Manon, sipping her coffee. ‘Too much to do.’
‘Boss says we have to. Three-line whip.’
‘What time?’
‘Three o’clock. Short one, but we can’t get out of it.’
Davy is glad it’s compulsory. They should know, his colleagues, what’s really happening – what he sees at the youth centre. He’s been mentoring a lad called Ryan, twelve years old, who was taken into care at ten after being admitted to hospital a second time with broken forearms. There were boot prints on his skin. Every time Ryan walked through his front door at home, he got a pummelling, if not from whichever lowlife his mum was seeing, then from his mum. She liked to put her cigarettes out on him.
Davy bought Ryan a fart gun for his eleventh birthday, which Ryan looked at with contempt, saying it was for babies and he wanted a Nintendo DS or a Wii, but Davy had ignored him, letting off the gun under the table at McDonald’s so that diners at the next table began to whisper and grimace. Back at the centre, Ryan started to play with the gun, parping and trumping at his friends as they texted irritably on the red foam sofas. Ryan laughed and laughed, ticklish, tearful giggling, and it was as if he was four years old, and six years old, and eleven – all the ages he hadn’t been allowed to be. He loved to laugh, Ryan did, once he granted himself the freedom of it, which was hard to come by, and when the laughing overtook him, as it had with the fart gun, his face radiated like sparkling sunshine on water.
‘They’re sending me back,’ Ryan told Davy on his last visit.
‘Back?’ said Davy, stunned. ‘Where? Back to your mum?’
Ryan nodded, swallowing. ‘No room for me at Aldridge House no more. They cut back two of the staff – Evangeline and Rob, the only nice ones. Now there’s not enough adults for all the kids – the ratio, they call it – so I have to go.’
‘What does your mum say?’
‘Dunno, they haven’t got hold of her yet. All she cares about is the money.’ He put on a screeching voice. ‘“How am I supposed to feed ’im when I got naaa money?” C’mon, let’s play.’
Then, when they were standing around the green baize table taking turns, Ryan returned to the subject. He had the snooker cue across his shoulders, his arms draped over it like a coat hanger, and he said, ‘Least I’m not Jayden.’
‘What’s happened to him?’ asked Davy, leaning his whole body on the table to pot the red.
‘He’s been kicked out of Aldridge an’ all. Been placed in a house with two paedos. Everyone knows they’re nonces but social services say it’s all they’ve got. I’d rather be on the street.’
‘How old is Jayden?’ asks Davy, rubbing chalk on the end of his cue while Ryan walks around the table, looking for angles.
‘Ten.’
If Davy could do what he actually wanted this Christmas, he’d spend it with Ryan at the youth centre. Serving watery turkey with packet stuffing. Playing pool in his snowman tank top with a paper hat on and letting off the fart gun when Ryan least expects it.
Manon
She gazes into the middle distance, yawning while the room settles. They’re waiting for a morning briefing with Harriet, who is ensconced in her office with Stanton and the search adviser.
Colin is bowing his head low over the desk and muttering in Italian.