He’s been attempting to explain about work, how much it’s a part of how he sees himself. He’s trying to describe their duty of care to Helena Reed and how they’d failed her, and how he couldn’t get it off his mind. They’d ticked the boxes they were supposed to tick, so why does he feel so bad?
Some part of him is taking umbrage already at the criticism that’s heaped on them as officers – always the question of what they could have done better, faster, with immaculate paperwork and utmost sensitivity; what they should learn from what they’ve got wrong. That person on the night team, DC Monique Moynihan, will probably lose her job, and maybe that’s right. But all the while it feels like a war they’re fighting, without enough resources. They were only doing their job.
He’s trying to form this into words to her; he needs her to understand him at this most crucial time. But when he looks up, he sees that familiar thing Chloe does with her face, allowing all her muscles to go slack in the cheeks so it’s like her face is dripping, her eyes stony, like she so often made them – distant and looking over his shoulder.
Instead of chivvying her out of it, he says, ‘What’s the matter now?’
She shrugs. ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘I’m fine.’
‘No you’re not; you’re in a huff again. What is it this time?’
She seems wrong-footed by his directness, but she maintains the hangdog slack cheeks. The cheeks of doom, he thinks. Bitter mouth.
‘I just think it’s weird, you caring so much for a dead girl. A lesbian dead girl,’ she says.
‘Tell me you’re not serious,’ he says.
Chloe shrugs. ‘Your mind’s always on other things: poor Helena Reed, poor Ryan, isn’t Manon the genius. You’re never here, in the moment.’
‘Christ, Chloe, have you ever wondered why? Have you ever thought what the moment might feel like, for me?’ He is rising out of his chair now, surprising himself. ‘Being here in the moment with you is like … it’s like being sucked down into quicksand. It’s like drowning.’ He feels like ten-year-old Davy, pulling open the bedroom curtains with gusto; his mother in the bed, never getting up, one day to the next. ‘You make me suffocate, Chloe,’ he says, and he’s letting her have it – both barrels. ‘You make me suffocate in the misery of it.’
And he finds himself grabbing his coat off the back of the chair and walking out, and even as he’s walking, he knows this is one sulk he’ll never be able to rectify.
Manon
Is it over so soon, after her stupid outburst in bed? Has she scared him off? He’d communicated with her from the very surface of himself in the morning and she had the feeling he was annoyed that she was cluttering up his daily routine: the showering with an astringent body wash (mint – she tried it and it made her privates sting with unnatural cold), the coffee, the dark neatness of his suit. If only she could undo it – maintain her reserve – she might be transformed in his mind into the perfect lover he almost had. Un-haveable Manon. She aches for Alan Prenderghast.
‘Dad?’ she says, propping herself up on her pillows, the phone to her ear.
‘Hello, lovely,’ he whispers. She hears him heaving in the bed, a groan in the background, and Una’s voice saying, ‘What sort of time d’you call this?’
Manon looks at her watch. It is quarter to eleven.
‘Hold on,’ he says. ‘I’ll take it in the study.’
She hears shuffling and the receiver goes down. Click. And then he picks up and his voice is expansive at last. ‘So, my darling girl, what’s the news?’
‘She pissed off again?’
‘No, Manon, don’t do that. Una was just dropping off, that’s all. Don’t … How’s things? How’s work?’
‘Things are all right,’ she says sadly.
‘Is the case getting you down? I saw on the news, that poor Reed girl. Stanton’s taking a lot of heat.’
He is always so very interested, the police his vicarious pleasure. She thinks to tell him the truth about Helena Reed, if only she could grasp where the truth begins and ends, how far her guilt seeps into the corners of it, because he would understand, would believe in her better self. He would tell her it wasn’t her fault while acknowledging that some of it perhaps was. They would be silent on the phone, their receivers pressed to their ears, and it would be honest.
‘Actually, Dad, I’ve met someone.’
‘Really?’ he says, and his voice is genuinely taken aback.
Christ, she thinks, I’m not that bad.
‘So, go on,’ he says.
‘His name’s Alan. Alan Prenderghast. He’s a systems analyst.’
‘A systems analyst?’ he says in the same voice he used to say, ‘It’s a hedgehog, is it?’ when she showed him her pictures from primary school. ‘What’s a systems analyst?’
‘I don’t really know. He lives just outside Ely.’
She could have added ‘drives a Ford’ as if she is saying Darcy, yes, Pemberley.
‘And you like him?’ asks her father, sounding incredulous.
‘Not that hard to believe, is it?’
‘No, no, I’m sure he’s very nice,’ he says.
Can’t he hear the wonder of Alan Prenderghast, her systems analyst from just outside Ely? With the nice glassware? And Nana the dog? Can’t he see how huge this is?