Yes, was going to do this anyway.
The call data lines have given her a headache. She’s too exhausted to sit at this desk into the night. Her decision to go home has nothing whatever to do with the fact that Mark Talbot is working at her kitchen table. She can neither bear to be within his orbit, the sexual tension being so … tense, nor out of his orbit, when the lack of tension causes her to be immediately asleep.
Mark is outside having a cigarette.
Manon frowns, down the lines of Ross’s financial records, printed off the O drive. The difficulty with going through this material is its greyness; numbers, references which don’t mean anything to the reader, line upon line upon line. A lot of police work is grey these days: phone work, ANPR, digital data, and hours of CCTV.
She yawns.
Payments were made on Jon-Oliver’s company credit card to a Claybourne Leisure under the reference ‘Ents’, all in the high thousands. Eight thousand six hundred, nine thousand. Over and over again, Claybourne Leisure appears. More than a gym or club membership. More than restaurant food. Was he throwing relentless corporate events? What form of entertainment could ‘Ents’ be?
She hears the muffled sound of Mark’s mobile phone through the French windows. She can’t hear what he’s saying.
She Googles Claybourne Leisure. Not a single hit. A few results about domain names and registering your company. How can a functioning business have no web presence whatsoever? It must do something, sell something, provide something, surely. She tries again, wondering if she has the spelling wrong, but Google will usually offer a ‘showing results for’. Nothing. Claybourne Leisure does not exist on the Internet, and if you don’t exist on the Internet, do you exist?
She glances again through the French windows, relieved to have some distance from him. She’s exhausted by her feigned detachment, when every molecule in her body stands to attention when he is near. She is so tired of it, so fed up with her libidinous self. Sometimes, she must escape to the downstairs toilet to check herself, to breathe deeply, let out some wind and get away from the intensity of being in his orbit. She stands now to get away, as he re-enters the room – goes out to the cool of the hallway where the loo is situated under the stairs.
They pretend, they pretend.
Or is it only Manon who is putting on this charade of disinterest? Perhaps for him it really is nothing after all. She doubts it. She thinks there is collusion in the ‘working from her home late into the night’ set-up. He could get out of it, potter off, but he doesn’t.
She looks in the toilet mirror and sees the marionette lines like open and close brackets on either side of her mouth, the sagging jowls which make her look miserable even on the rare occasions when she’s not; lopsided eyes, brown sunspots mottling her cheeks. She is becoming invisible, pushing her trolley up and down the aisles of Waitrose towards oblivion, picking up some grapefruit-scented all-purpose surface spray on her way there. Her desires exhaust her, her inability to act on them. She is too obedient, too ready to tidy her needs away into the cupboard under the stairs.
What would she think of herself, what would the world think, if she were to hurl her haggard self at Mark Talbot, lay her Francis Bacon body at his feet? Or pinch the bottom of a younger man next to the photocopier in the office; to deny, as men do, the ageing of her flesh? Why can’t she, as men do, say: yes, I am pot-bellied, wrinkly-bottomed, short-sighted, but I will make a play for that 28-year-old nevertheless? Why should she hide her desires inside the acceptable consumption of table lamps and Boden cardigans and heritage tomatoes as if this is compensation, when what she wants is callous and vivid?
Obedience. She dries her hands on the damp lavender hand towel, sniffs the Baylis & Harding hand-wash – it, too, pretending to be classier than it is. Jon-Oliver Ross answered all the requests of his flesh – for coke, sex, money, more sex with someone new, someone younger and firmer – and did he ever wonder if other people would think that was all right? He is dead, to be fair, so things haven’t worked out all that well for him.
If she has a girl, she thinks now, laying a hand on the tight drum of her bump, she will try to inculcate her with a sense of rebellion. At the very least an ability to throw off the shackles of duty (unless, of course, that duty is to her own mother, in which case it should take precedence). She vows to teach her daughter disobedience, within acceptable parameters of course (one doesn’t want to raise a sociopath); make her into a woman who can go her own way (though only up to a point, obvs).
Obedience: is it drummed into girls or is it hard-wired? She was always slavishly obedient about schoolwork – always a day early, even if the work would’ve been better a day late. She longed to be one of those dishevelled types burning the midnight oil, but was too ruled by fear of censure, as if she mustn’t cause a wrinkle in the smooth running of anyone else’s life. She’s the same now, even at 42 – if the teacher at Fly’s school ever asked where that permissions slip for the school trip had got to, she grew breathless, panicked. ‘No, I did, I did sign it. There’s been a mistake.’
She returns to the kitchen, a glance at Mark: mop-headed, lovely glasses. Writing on his pad. The kitchen clock says 11 p.m. She settles back down. She must interrogate this Claybourne Leisure, see what Companies House has to say about its incorporation.
‘How can a company not exist on the Internet? Ross paid tens of thousands to this Claybourne Leisure but it appears not to do anything.’
‘Probably a shell company,’ says Mark, without looking up from his writing. ‘Didn’t he set those up for a living?’
‘So how do I find out who owns Claybourne Leisure or what it does?’ she asks.
‘You can’t, would be my guess. Shell companies are notorious. Lots of governments want to put a stop to their ownership being hidden. Creates a massive window for money laundering. Think the Cayman Islands aren’t keen though.’ He smiles at her. Oh joy.
Back to the grey lines of the Ross bank statements.
‘Is it me,’ she says, yawning, ‘or is it stuffy in here?’
He hasn’t looked up. They still have a pile of case-file documents to get through. The table is strewn with crumbed plates, mugs with rings of cold tea and coffee. Wine glasses (not hers) with puddles of red at their base; a plastic carton of olives with feta cheese, its film lid ripped and oil from the olives dripped across the table. She’s too tired to clear it all up.
‘I’m going to sit somewhere more comfy,’ she says, moving to the kitchen sofa – a blue and white striped affair from Ikea, with low white coffee table, at the far end of the room.