‘Hi,’ said Stuart in a stage whisper.
He was late and had squeezed his way past a couple of other people in order to sit next to Maud.
She nodded at him and turned her attention back to the lecturer.
‘Contract law is the legal body that encompasses the origination, enforcement and enactment of all legal contracts. A contract is essentially an agreement between separate parties initiating mutual obligations enforceable by law.’
Stuart was scrabbling in his leather messenger bag for a pen. Maud slid over one of hers.
‘Companies and consumers both use it almost every day. Does anyone have an example of how they themselves have depended on it today?’
‘Did you get my message?’ Stuart hissed as hands were raised.
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t reply.’
‘Sssh.’
‘There are four basic rules of contract law,’ the man was saying. ‘Offer. Acceptance. Intention to create a binding legal relationship. Consideration. We will take these in turn.’
Stuart and Maud sat side by side, Maud taking notes in her meticulous cursive, Stuart occasionally making hasty scrawls amid his doodles.
‘Well?’ Stuart said as the lecture came to an end and the class were gathering their things together and pushing back their chairs.
‘Yes.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes, I’d like to go out for a meal with you on Thursday.’
‘Great. And how about a drink now?’
Maud thought of the work she needed to do on the Kira Mullan case. She was tired, but full of a restless energy that she often felt at the start of a new investigation, her brain working away and trying to make a shape out of the fragments. She looked at Stuart, and once again felt a slight uplift, a sense of coming alive again after so long in the dull aftermath of her grief about Silas.
‘One quick drink,’ she said.
He was easy to talk to, smart, funny. They didn’t talk about previous relationships, nor about their work, though they discussed the other people on the course and which bits of the law they found tedious. They swapped snippets of information about their lives. He came from Dorset; she from East London. He was one of two; she had four brothers. His parents were both alive, though his father had heart failure and was probably on borrowed time; her mother had died when she was a teenager and her father had brought the family up single-handedly. He hated Christmas; she hated making New Year resolutions. He hated flying and she hated enclosed spaces.
‘Another,’ he said, pointing at her glass.
‘One drink meant one drink.’
‘Okay. We’ll see each other in a couple of days.’
‘Actually, we’ll see each other on Wednesday: it’s the last class of the term.’
‘I’ve got to give this Wednesday a miss,’ he said.
‘Thursday then.’
They went out onto the street.
‘I’ve got my bike,’ he said, pointing.
‘I’ll say goodbye.’
‘Maud.’
‘What?’
‘I just…Shit. I’m out of practice.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Maud, and put her arms round him and kissed him on the mouth, then pulled back.
‘Night,’ she said, and walked away with a smile on her face that he couldn’t see.
A few moments later, he biked past her.
‘Your rear light’s not working,’ she called.
He raised a hand and waved.