No reply. This time, there is a message telling him her voicemail is full, so he can’t even leave another one. It’s the third time he’s tried this morning.
‘Just me again, Helena, checking in. DC Walker, I mean,’ he’d said previously. ‘If you get this, just give me a buzz, let me know you’re all right.’ Still, she has his number if she needs him.
The doorbell goes.
Chloe has straightened her hair so that it hangs in sheets on either side of her face. He’s always thought she looks better when she doesn’t pull down so hard on the straightening irons – like in the early days when he’d pulled her back into bed after her shower so she hadn’t had time for all that gubbins – the fake tan and the heavy black eyelashes which he isn’t sure are hers.
Her arms are full of the Saturday papers. ‘Thought we could catch up,’ she says, breathless.
‘Put them in the lounge,’ he says, and they pile them on the glass coffee table, the poly-bagged glossy magazines sliding out of the folded sheaves. A tower of innuendo, he thinks, slabs of unsubstantiated hearsay. He can hardly bear to look at them.
‘Right,’ he says, clapping his hands as the doorbell goes again. ‘That’ll be Mum.’
They settle, his mum and Chloe, around the kitchen table and Davy says, ‘Who’s for macaroni cheese?’
He’s trying to put the uplift back in his voice but it’s not working. It’s not been working for days. Manon’s rubbing off on him, that’s what it’ll be. Her gloom, the way she sees things – always the uncomfortable underbelly, never the bright side.
Last night, as they left the office together, he said, ‘I just don’t think we’re going to get to the bottom of this one’, and she put her palm across his forehead, saying, ‘Are you feeling all right, Davy?’
He frowned, jerked his head away, the crotchety teenager. ‘I mean it. It’s getting me down this … not getting anywhere. We’ve let Tony Wright go. That boy, in the river, that’s going nowhere as well. And all this love life guff. I don’t like it.’
‘You’ve got to let it emerge, Davy,’ she told him. ‘Ride out the confusion, the darkness. Things will become clear, you wait and see. But in the meantime, you’ve got to allow yourself to be all right with the not knowing.’
And all of a sudden he’d felt completely lost, like a sad hole had opened up beneath him and he was about to fall down into it.
‘What’s this you’ve put in it?’ says his mother, grimacing and pushing something to the front of her mouth, out between her teeth. She picks it out with finger and thumb and peers at it. ‘Nutmeg, is it?’ She wipes it on the table. ‘Didn’t you grate it?’
‘I did grate it, Mum. A shard must have fallen in. There’s a napkin there.’
The macaroni cheese is so dry he’s had to carve it. Even several tablespoons of Branston pickle are doing a poor job of livening it up.
‘Everyone at work wants to know the details,’ says Chloe. More animated, warmer in fact, than he’s seen her in quite some time. She runs a finger down the line of her hair curtain, pushing it from her eyes without disturbing its plate-like flatness. ‘Amazing you’re right at the centre of it, what’s on the news.’
‘Can’t talk about it, Chlo,’ he says, trying to masticate a rigid piece of macaroni.
‘I took some flowers – to George Street,’ says his mother. ‘Outside the house where the other bunches are.’
‘Why?’ he asks.
‘Well, you want to be part of something, don’t you? And it’s terrible. But to have it so near – in the same town. I didn’t want to miss out. What do you think happened to her?’
‘He knows everything, but he can’t say, isn’t that right, Davy?’ says Chloe, winking at him.
‘Dead then?’ says his mother hopefully.
‘Male and female lovers,’ says Chloe. ‘Who’d have thought? How many?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘More than one though?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘You do know, you’re just not saying,’ she says, the proud wife. ‘Takes all sorts,’ she says to his mother, and they are united at last.
‘Did her boyfriend know about it?’ asks Chloe.
‘I can’t talk about it, Chlo.’
‘No, course. So have the papers been in touch with you directly?’
‘All media enquiries are dealt with by the press office,’ he says.
‘Still,’ says his mother, ‘I bet they’d give you a tidy bit of money for extra info.’
‘I’d lose my job.’
‘Not if you were nice and discreet about it.’
‘But it’s wrong.’
‘Gosh, I bet her mother’s shocked,’ says Chloe. ‘Imagine having a daughter carrying on like that.’
‘And him a famous surgeon,’ says his mother.
Davy is staring ahead, the room’s light harsh and blue. He realises this kitchen is about as welcoming as a dental surgery.
‘They’re people,’ he says slowly. ‘They’re just people.’
He checks his phone again for missed calls or texts from Helena Reed. Perhaps he should pop round there, check she’s all right. But then she might have gone to Bromley to stay with her parents – get out of the heat until things calm down a bit.