He pedals harder, away from the images the river conjures, of the body from yesterday – the inflammation of his flesh, his blue-purple colour inhuman. Just a boy. And Davy can’t help but think about Ryan – what might happen to him without the protection of Aldridge House. He resolves to put in more calls, see if the social worker can do anything. Davy must try his best to stop Ryan ending up like that boy in the river, because before you know it, it can be too late, and he finds himself in a silent argument with Chloe, because she was always saying, ‘You love those kids more than me,’ and going into a sulk.
He wheels around a bend in the towpath, following the curve of the river, loving the way the bike tilts with him on it, against the laws of gravity, almost – they should topple but speed keeps his wheels turning, and the wind roars into his face and through the bare winter trees. No, he tells himself, this thinking time is not for Ryan or the Hind case, it’s for Chloe. Tonight could be the night to broach the subject of The Future, yet every time they’re together and the moment seems appropriate, something puts him off: music coming on a bit loud in the restaurant; bumping into someone they know in the pub; the urgent need for a poo (his, not hers – she’d never discuss something so vulgar).
He slows his bike and looks up at a blue sign pointing left, which says March. He could duck down there, have a nosey around Deeping. The case is bothering him more and more: Harriet still nagging away at the Tony Wright alibi; Will Carter far from in the clear, his return journey from Stoke still not verified. Manon reckons they should be looking more closely at the Director of Studies – this Graham Garfield chap – because when Davy and Manon asked about Garfield during one of their many interviews with the Hinds, they’d expressed ‘doubts’.
‘Doubts?’ Manon had said.
‘Well, Edith called us up very excited during the first term she had him. Said he’d told her she was exceptional – the brightest student he’d had in years,’ Sir Ian replied.
‘Why would that raise doubts?’ asked Davy, genuinely nonplussed.
‘Perhaps it shouldn’t have, DC Walker. But when a middle-aged man is that effusive about an attractive twenty-year-old—’
‘Come on, Ian, that’s not fair,’ Lady Hind said. ‘Maybe Edith was just working at full tilt.’
‘Yes, maybe, but there were other reasons. When she’d been out with her peers – this was when she was an undergrad – she mentioned he was often around, in the college bar and such like. Just seemed a bit … creepy, that’s all.’
‘And there’s that girl he had a fling with,’ Lady Hind said, touching her husband’s arm.
‘Yes, what was her name?’
‘Oh God, I can’t remember. Edith told us they were sleeping together. She actually said something along the lines of “Ew, gross.”’
‘None of it, of course, was threatening,’ Sir Ian said. ‘I think he’s a bit of a, well, pest is the word Edith used, to be honest.’
Dirty shagger, Davy thinks, wheeling away from the sign and the left-hand turn he hasn’t taken to March. That’s what Graham Garfield was, same thing his mum called his dad when his dad went off with Sharon – ‘dirty shagger’ and ‘selfish bastard with no thought for anyone but himself’.
Davy suggested they go easy on the Garfield chap, there being no law against being a dirty shagger, and it was not as if there was anything directly linking him to Edith on the Saturday night, his wife having confirmed that Garfield came home to her after The Crown.
‘Remember what Harriet told us, about alibis given by wives and mothers,’ said Manon. ‘You think because Garfield reads Tennyson, he couldn’t rape someone? You’re a snob, Davy Walker.’
‘Not that, he just seems too … gentlemanly, like he’s never had it rough.’
‘Posh people do fucked up just as well as everyone else,’ she said, ‘sometimes better.’
And he supposes she’d know, being half-posh herself, or on the way to it after going to Cambridge. So he’s trying to view Garfield in the light of Manon’s mistrust – the way, for example, Garfield wore the uniform of the academic (corduroys and elbow patches) and had the books he’d written facing forward on the shelf. Manon said this showed intellectual insecurity, though Davy thought it just made him look clever. Shaved heads and tattoos, that sent a different message altogether, and he thinks of Ryan again and the rough estate he used to live on (though God alone knows where he’s living now) and the unsavoury men who circle his mother.
Davy’s thoughts go round and round like the wheels on his bike, when he’s come out here to think about Chloe, because New Year’s Eve can take a romantic turn, although if he’s honest, he’d rather be going out on the razz with his friends. Chloe doesn’t meld with them too well, and whenever he’s tried to mix the two – his girlfriend and the gang from school – he’s ended up in the corner of the bar asking her over and over what the matter is. Perhaps he’ll skip The Conversation, after all, there being no hurry …
He’s forced to squeeze hard and sudden on the brakes, and he turns the front wheel sharply, the gravel spraying. A duck proceeds on its stately waddle across his path, one eye blinking at him with faint disdain, until it plops into the river to Davy’s right.
Manon