On arrival at Huntingdon station, he says goodbye to his constables, who are heading off for a pint together.
‘I’ll see you lads. I’m going in here to get myself a sandwich,’ he says to them, before heading into the station buffet.
After paying, he slides the receipt alongside others in his wallet, thinking how these jobs put a serious dent in his efforts to eat his five a day. It is with relief that he sinks into the seat of his car, throwing his sandwich onto the passenger seat. Cars at night are lovely – warm and easy.
Headlights sweep past him both ways, illuminating the smears on his windscreen, then returning him to darkness on Hinchingbrooke Park Road.
He is within sight of Judith Cole’s house. He can see her front door, but his car is under the shadow of a tree and as good as invisible. If she’s lying – and that’s the consensus in the department – then he wants to know why, even though he has been denied authorisation for any kind of trace or surveillance.
Another wash of headlights. Her front door opens, a slice of yellow light from her hallway. She pads outside to put a bulging bin bag into a black bin to the side of her driveway. She’s wearing slippers. The front door closes again as she goes back in.
Anyway, this isn’t surveillance. He’s just parked here, in the dark in an unmarked car, eating a cheese sandwich for his supper.
The darkness of the car is soporific. He yawns, brushes the sandwich crumbs off his lap, checks his mobile. He Googled Giles Carruthers while on the train and apart from the Dunlop & Finch web pages on which he was featured, with its expensive profile photography, Davy unexpectedly found a Wikipedia page. He had the urge to check the IP address, on the suspicion that Carruthers had written the page himself. He was a boarder at Gordonstoun from the age of eight; his father was a stockbroker, his mother a housewife who went on to become a magistrate and active in the local Conservative Party. As mentioned by Linda, Carruthers had been on the Goldman Sachs training scheme before joining Dunlop & Finch.
Davy is so tired and Judith Cole is wearing slippers so his hunch hasn’t paid off. He looks at his phone again out of boredom – looks at it far too much, like it’s an addiction. When he’s not looking at it, he’s thinking about looking at it.
Yawning, he accepts he might be wrong about Judith Cole. The idea had come to him in the middle of the night; made him sit bolt upright. It was the moment Judith Cole’s husband had said he was ‘unexpectedly working from home’ on the afternoon Ross was killed.
Davy starts the engine. Tonight his moment of inspiration has proved a dud – that can happen with ideas, he finds. They need to be road-tested. But he’ll stake her out again, just in case.
Birdie
I can see his portrait on the wall from here, the Rt Hon. Blair. Tony has always had the courage of his convictions, whereas I don’t have any convictions. I flip-flop between varied feelings. I’m all up and down and side to side. I can be full of mean-spirited thoughts, like wanting Angel out of my flat, wanting to be alone yet needing her to stay.
And when I feel happy, as soon as I notice it, then I’m not happy any more. It’s like a fleeting ghost that disappears if you catch sight of it. One must notice happiness only by stealth, whistling, as if it doesn’t matter at all – which it doesn’t, I suppose. I’m going off the point again, into generalities.
My roof began to leak. In my box room, water was gathering in the join between the ceiling and the wall. I got a chap in – Jacek – chap I always get in for bits and bobs around the shop like extra shelving or fiddling about with the alarm. He’s really good and when he’s here, I feel insulated from some of the more irksome aspects of life, which must be how it feels to have a handy husband. I can say to him, ‘That light doesn’t work; you couldn’t take a look, could you?’ And he’ll fit it in around the main job. A hook on the back of the door. A bit of skirting filled and repainted. But the downside of Jacek is his quoting method.
To cut a long story short, any job quoted as ￡300 by Jacek will come in at about a grand, not because he’s ripping you off, but because the first quote has been rendered insensible by his desire to please. So one must ignore Jacek’s quotes. Or add a couple of thousand to them.
I knew the roof would come in at about ￡2k because Jacek had said it was a quick job that shouldn’t take more than an afternoon and would cost about ￡500. And I didn’t have ￡2k. I was talking to Angel about this, explaining the situation, and she said, ‘I can give you the money. Least I can do.’
She gave it to me in cash, just like that – great wads of twenties rolled in a ball and held tight with an elastic band. She didn’t seem bothered by the amount and there was no mention of me paying it back. It was as if she’d handed me a fiver. She said, ‘If you wanted to get Jacek to give the flat a lick of paint, I could pay for that too if you like. In lieu of rent.’
At the same time as she was generous, Angel was also annoying the hell out of me. She was forever in my space – never going out. The further we got into evening, the more slurry she became. And I was becoming more and more curious about the money, the posh toiletries, the stalker dossier I hadn’t yet had a chance to look at properly. I was waiting for her to go out again, for long enough to have a more satisfying snoop about in her things.
It was the first week of December – about two to three weeks after she’d first moved in – she told me she was going out. She was jittery, kept going from room to room, another spray of perfume, checking her makeup. I asked her where she was going, all dolled up, but she said, ‘You don’t need to know. Something I’ve got to do.’ Then, as she was leaving, she said, ‘Wish me luck.’
When she came home a couple of hours later, her hair was hanging funny and she avoided my eye – scuttled to the window and lifted the nets to look out, like she always did.
‘Everything all right?’ I said, quite confrontational as it happens, and trying to get eye contact because I was gearing up to tell her to jog on. I couldn’t take it any more: didn’t want to share my space. Her being out made me realise how much I wanted my flat back. I’d had a bath, watched TV in my bathrobe with my feet up on the recliner, and it’d been bloody marvellous.
She didn’t reply.
‘Angel?’ I said, without trying to keep the irritation from my voice.
She turned then, to look at me. The first thing I saw was the tear tracks down her face – trails of mascara like black rain. The second thing I realised was that she’d been beaten up. The skin was split on her cheekbone and her right eye was closed up.
‘Shit a brick, what happened to you?’
‘Nothing,’ she murmured, all watery and wobbly.
‘That’s not nothing.’
‘Just got … jostled a bit.’ She put a hand up to her cheek but didn’t touch it, just let the tips of her fingers hover shakily over the cut.