She is smiling to herself, up the steps of HQ, into reception, thinking how she must type up her notes, prepare for tomorrow’s briefing. Her head is down, unaware of her surroundings, when Bob on the front desk says, ‘Sarge, someone to see you.’
Manon looks up, and there he is: his flappy coat, the stoop, horrifying and wonderful – Alan Prenderghast.
‘Hello,’ he says. ‘I didn’t expect to see you. I was just dropping this off.’
He holds out a small white paper bag, folded over at the top, with a green chemist sign on it. Manon opens it and takes out an oblong box. The label reads: Chloramphenicol eye drops, for the treatment of Conjunctivitis.
‘Crikey,’ she says.
‘I feel a bit like a criminal caught in the act,’ he says.
‘Gosh – I haven’t had time, as you can see.’
‘Look,’ he says, rather urgently, ‘I don’t know the form for this. Am I still a witness or something, in the case?’
‘No, why?’
‘I was wondering if I could take you out. For dinner or something. Or a film, where we sit in the same row. Adjacent seats, even.’
There is a red patch creeping up his neck.
‘I don’t know, I’ve got a lot on at the moment.’
They both look down at the white chemist’s bag.
‘Why don’t you think about it?’ he says. ‘I’ll give you my number.’
He puts a hand out to take the chemist bag back off her and pats his pockets for a pen, only to find Bob holding one out to him. ‘I enjoyed our coffee after the film,’ he says, while writing on the bag against his palm.
‘Thanks,’ she says, looking down at his writing. The numbers are all bunched up and tight. ‘Look, I’d better go – got to prepare for a briefing first thing. Just had a murder come in, plus it’s Crimewatch this week,’ and she lays it there, her job as a police officer, which he must admire, what with his very pedestrian work as a systems analyst.
‘Well, OK then,’ he says, and she watches him go out of the station doors and down the steps to the car park.
When she turns, Bob is frowning.
‘What d’you do that for?’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Turn down a nice chap like him?’
‘What would you know about it, Bob?’
‘I know it’s nice to have someone to come home to.’
Tuesday
Davy
‘For me,’ Kim is saying thoughtfully, ‘it would have to be tuna pasta bake with back-to-back Place in the Sun.’
Davy is just about to put in his two pennies’ worth, which involves crackers and cheese and Quincy, but Harriet has shot everyone a look which says: Shut your fucking gobs, the boss is here.
DCS Gary Stanton has a collection of important-looking files under one arm and his buttons are straining over his stomach. Time to size up on the shirt front, Davy thinks.
The whole team is gathered around a circular table, which is part of a new stratagem brought back from the States by Stanton, when he went to NYPD on a skills swap residential last autumn. For Davy, things got much more confusing after the residential, because Stanton returned armed with incomprehensible management-speak. Davy’s all for a spot of police jargon, which clarifies the lines drawn between good and evil (only last night he watched a DCI on the news outside the Old Bailey telling how they’d ‘exposed the villain’s web of wicked lies’). But this corporate mumbo jumbo – it didn’t clarify; it did the opposite, scribbling over itself in loops and meanderings. It started with just having to ‘action’ things, instead of do them; then Stanton wanted to ‘sunset that line of investigation’, which seemed to mean not do it any more. They had moved from ‘breaking’ an alibi to ‘putting it on the radiator to see if it melts’. But then Stanton started talking about ‘shifting the paradigm’ in order to ‘leverage our synergies’, and that’s where he lost Davy altogether. At one point, Davy had felt quite worried about keeping up in the department, but then he overheard Harriet hissing at Manon, ‘What the fuck’s he talking about?’ and felt better.