Manon’s mind feels along the territory of the things she could have done: deployed protection to Helena’s flat as soon as Crimewatch made mention of a female lover; have Davy escort Helena home from Newnham, right then on the Thursday, refusing to take no for an answer; monitored her work phone over the weekend, as she would normally have done, though she wasn’t on-call. Four days of neglect, in which Manon did none of these things, for no other reason than she just didn’t. Base, looked-for pleasures, and Manon’s hunger for them at the expense of every other thought. The shame, the shame of it.
Soon, very soon, it is too much and the lines begin to shift. She tells herself there was nothing she could have done; that she couldn’t possibly have known; that she wasn’t on duty. Had she been on-call, her phones would have been on. She tells herself defiantly, triumphantly, that her weekend was her own, this job does not own her; so she is not lying when she defends herself to Harriet Harper. She is telling a kind of truth.
‘Awful,’ says Alan, as the colours darken through the double-height windows of his glorious barn. She watches the horizon, a line of fire suppressed by the blue-grey sky.
‘Yes,’ she says. She approaches his big body, thickened by a woollen navy cardigan with leather buttons, and puts her hands on his hips, her forehead to his chest.
‘Poor thing,’ he says, kissing the top of her head, and she doesn’t know if he means her or Helena Reed.
‘Worst thing is, she had nothing to do with it – just got caught up in someone else’s mess.’
‘Mmm,’ he says, his chin resting on top of her head.
‘She was ashamed, really ashamed,’ she says, and the bubble rises up into her throat and she feels she might cry out. ‘She just experimented, that’s all, and all of a sudden it was public and the shame of it, the guilt of it—’
‘Don’t cry,’ he says, his hand on her cheek, and she wonders if he means it as solace or whether he is actually asking her not to emote in his presence. She is descending and he is floating up, like the birds beyond his window. The landing and the flying off.
‘I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,’ she says.
He looks at her.
‘The poem. She was saying she wasn’t the lead in her own play.’
On the way over, she’d sat in her car in a traffic jam and she’d looked at all the little heads and shoulders in front of their steering wheels. All these people locked in their own thoughts, enmeshed in complicated lives, each of us believing we’re at the centre.
‘Wine?’ he asks, and she watches him walk away towards his grey, steely kitchen.
‘Yes, please.’
She sits in his sagging armchair but there is no view now that the last line of sun has been extinguished. They are together and that’s a fact, and she packs her frightened, lonely feelings away. Edith, she thinks. Edith was one of those people who saw herself as the lead. Careless and selfish. Yes, there is corrosive pleasure in blaming Edith Hind. And Helena, the attendant lord, deferential, glad to be of use.
‘What does it mean for the case?’ he asks, bringing her an oversized goblet of red which fills her hand. Even his glassware is nice.
‘There’ll be an enquiry. Independent Police Complaints Commission. See if we dealt with her properly, which we mostly did. But actually we didn’t, of course, because she asked for assistance and the night team didn’t respond, or at least not fast enough.’ But she stops short of the detail, both to him and to herself. ‘We could have stopped her,’ is all she whispers into her glass, taking a sip. He has gone back to the kitchen, turning his levers.
‘Will you be under investigation?’ he asks. ‘You personally, I mean.’
She shrugs. ‘Each of us on the Hind team will be, as a matter of course. It’s standard procedure when someone dies after contact with the police. Won’t happen for months, though, not while the Hind investigation is still active.’
He is clattering about in the kitchen. She gets up to join him there, coming up behind him and putting her hands on his hips again.
‘I know you have a rule,’ she says, ‘about week nights and everything, but can I stay? Please? Tonight? I don’t want to be on my own.’
‘Of course,’ he says, and for a moment she is relieved and she hugs his back, and then she is filled with a sense of imbalance; that he is tolerating her.
He shares his steak, rare, and the brown and yellow grains of mustard trail in its wake of blood, the broccoli crisp and dark green. They consume a bottle of red and it makes the threat of Helena Reed come nearer and Alan’s unreachable quality, a loneliness too far. Something about him is just beyond her grasp, though she cannot identify it in anything he says precisely. Her movements are clumsy with the wine, and with her sorrow and guilt.
She thinks they might bridge the gap in bed, that this is where the imbalance might be redressed, but he is even more distant as they come close. It is so nearly there, this almost-love, and every part of her reaches for it excessively. She towers over him, her mouth and her body, the red wine making her woolly and dark, her chest expanding so that nothing is manageable. As they finish and lie back, she bursts into tears – not demure Edwardian tears but incontinent blubbing of the kind that gives rise to rivulets of snot.