The background checks on Garfield, as well as some uncomfortable questioning of the professor about his Facebook usage, were insufficient grounds for his arrest. No, it was all going nowhere. Garfield had shifted uneasily in interview but not, Davy thought, out of shame, his expression saying: I am a man. I accept my peccadilloes; why can’t you?
The press have started to itch their beards in longer think pieces, analysing the parameters of the investigation. The police have looked too closely at her immediate circle, is the latest offering from The Mirror. Officers have not given sufficient thought to the possibility of a stranger, driving out of the night. A random attack.
How people love to criticise, Davy thinks, shaking his head. It’s never a stranger. Well, almost never.
And all the while, Manon is harping on about which new restaurants to try. ‘I’m ardent,’ she told him yesterday, sitting in the car with brown paper bags on their laps from the fast-food place.
They were on a surveillance job – drugs and prostitution. His lap was warm, his mouth filled with a synthetic coating of trans fats and salt. He murmured, hiding his irritation with a full mouth.
‘If there’s two people, I’m always the one who’s more keen.’
He nodded, biting further into his cheeseburger.
‘Except when I’m not,’ she said. ‘Mostly, I don’t like people. And then I’m not ardent at all.’
‘Riveting,’ muttered Davy, staring ahead.
‘What I mean is, it takes me ages to find someone I think is really great and then, well, sometimes I knock them over with enthusiasm.’
‘Like a St Bernard.’
‘Bit like that, yes.’
‘Shall we have another cheeseburger?’
She’d nodded, chewing. ‘Only 99p.’
‘I don’t think the price is the issue, is it?’ said Davy.
‘Get them in.’
He ought to be happy for her but he isn’t, and Davy is getting used to his meaner thoughts being in the ascendance. He wonders if he should apply for a transfer – move far away and start over, away from the feelings which are making the minutes and the seconds lugubrious, but he has this new connection with Stanton, like the fragile push of a shoot from a seed, and he can’t pretend he hasn’t harboured hopes for what it might do for his career.
Time itself has become heavy, the consistency of treacle, and yet he is sure time, for Manon, has sped up in the past fortnight. She talks about Nana as if it’s her dog. ‘Nana’s moulting,’ she says tolerantly, picking the hairs off her skirt. He pictures that stoic dog, ears like furry sails flapping at the sides of her head, and the image passes smoothly on to Chloe and those plates of straightened hair.
He misses her. He misses her, he misses her, he misses her. Some nights he cries so much his pillow’s too damp to lie on. Seven miserable lonely days of missing someone he never should have been with in the first place, yet wanting her back even so. He wonders if he could overlook her lack of human sympathy and generalised air of bitterness, just so he could have the feeling of being together again. Perhaps he misses the chap he was before Helena Reed died, cheerfully intending to marry Chloe, his very own poisoned chalice. Simultaneously, like some sick, celestial seesaw, Manon’s personal happiness has supplanted his own, and every day he is faced with a vision of love’s smug young dream, written all over her just-had-a-shag face.
He has raked a small but pleasing harvest of earwax under a nail and he rolls it now, between thumb and forefinger, turning from the window. He looks up to see Manon come in through the double doors. She smiles at him across the room and mimes lifting a cup to her lips, mouthing, ‘Coffee?’ at him.
‘Can I have your attention, please?’ says Stanton, with his ever-present files under his arm. He smiles at Davy as Davy comes near.
‘Everything all right?’ he says warmly, to which Davy says, ‘Yes, boss.’
‘Right, just a quick word, everyone. DI Harriet Harper is taking a leave of absence due to personal circumstances. Any issues arising come to me or DS Manon …’ He scans the room then finds her. ‘Ah, there you are, Bradshaw.’
Elsie must have died, thinks Davy. Poor Harriet. She’ll be heartbroken.
‘You two can take it from here, can’t you?’ Stanton says to Davy and Manon, with a hand on Davy’s shoulder.
It had begun at Helena Reed’s funeral on Friday. Davy stood beneath a black umbrella as the rain streamed in a wall around his personal octagon, all the mourners spattered in silver droplets, the puddles splashing at their patent pumps and polished brogues.