He knows he’s got it wrong as he proffers the cup to her and he doesn’t care. Manon can suck it up for once. She looks awful, too, perhaps as bad as him – puffy-faced, furtive.
‘What’s this, Davy? I don’t take it black.’
‘Have you listened to yourself?’ he says. Come on, if you think you’re hard enough.
‘All right,’ she says. ‘Jeez, who shat in your handbag?’
He woke at 5.30 a.m., remembering abruptly, as if cut from sleep by the hard steel of his guilt. He looked at Chloe, sleeping next to him. Her hair, sticky with the various products she put on it, lay across her head like a bandage. She’s been talking about ‘taking things to the next level’ and he finds it bewildering, because even a couple of weeks ago he’d have been all for it, but now … How little he tells her of the fresh torments in his mind. Yet his distance seems only to fuel her enthusiasm, and he wonders idly if this is the secret about women that other men have known all along and that he’s been slow to grasp. Perhaps it’s what made a toerag like Stuart Leach such a success with the ladies. Stuart seems to be able to shag Marie from Accounts and then barely acknowledge her in the office.
Davy tries Ryan’s social worker, Reeva Dell, again. She always sounds exhausted, a slow monotonous crawl to her voice. But then, social services was full of depressed people.
‘His mum moved, I told you – no forwarding address,’ says Reeva.
‘Right, but she’s still under the surname Wade?’ he says, thrumming in his mind through the police databases he could try.
‘No, no, hang on, she married someone. D’you want the name?’
‘Please.’
‘Hold on.’
Shuffling papers, clacking on a keyboard. No budget for Vivaldi. Davy wonders what manner of sociopath Ryan’s mum’s hooked her wagon to this time.
‘Right, yes, she’s going under the name Jones.’
‘Jones? You’re kidding me.’
‘Why would I be kidding you, DC Walker?’
How am I supposed to trace a Jones? he thinks. And he feels like crying, or pulling the phone from its socket and a chunk of the plaster from the wall, too.
‘Has Ryan taken on the Jones name? Has the new local authority been notified that he was on the “at risk” register?’
‘Like I said, we don’t know where they’ve gone. It’s not like she asked our permission. The boy was returned to her, don’t forget.’
‘Yeah, but only because …’ Davy trails off. It’s pointless hurling rocks at Reeva Dell.
‘I’m sorry I can’t help,’ she says.
‘No, no, it’s fine,’ he says.
Harriet has come to the desk he and Manon are sharing, resting her knuckles on its surface, her head low.
‘Helena Reed’s call log,’ says Harriet in a murmur so that only Manon and Davy can hear. ‘She tried to call you, Manon, three times.’
Davy looks at Manon but she is rummaging in her bag for her phone as if its physical presence will explain this.
‘I wasn’t on-call,’ Manon says, looking up sharply at Harriet. ‘I have the right to turn my phone off at the weekend, to have a life. You might want to be married to this job, Harriet, but I don’t. Anyway, I told you, the signal can be a bit dodgy in my flat; on and off, y’know?’
‘I know you weren’t on-call, and this isn’t part of any official investigation,’ says Harriet. ‘I’m just asking you. You know, what the fuck, Manon?’
‘That’s right, it’s my fault,’ says Manon in a swell of tears, and Davy and Harriet watch her make for the double doors, almost at a run, and slap through them like a swimmer into the surf.
‘Graham Garfield,’ Harriet says, louder now, so the department can hear. ‘What have our background checks given us?’
‘One student claims he made unwanted advances, and others say he had a reputation for trying it on,’ says Kim. ‘Sounds like more of a pest than a predator. Y’know, an opportunist – he tried it on, got knocked back a few times, but every now and then he got lucky.’
‘Mrs Garfield know?’ says Harriet.
‘Doesn’t look like it.’
‘When we were round there she was wavering about his alibi,’ Davy says. ‘Having first said she was with him at home after he came back from The Crown, she subsequently told us she only vaguely heard his key in the door as she fell asleep.’
Th e dank interior of The Lord Protector; wooden floorboards sticky, tinny tunes from fruit machines. Davy rotates his glass at their corner table and tries to tell Chloe what’s going on with him.