Ferreira spent forty minutes on the treadmill, trying to find the ‘bright idea’ Zigic wanted. Stepping off with nothing but a twinge in her calf, she showered quickly, thinking about the drink she’d earned and the new series of Scandal she’d left downloading while she was at work.
The streets were already busy with people out rehearsing for the weekend as she drove through the centre of the city. She wasn’t in the mood for it, though. By the time she pulled into the car park under her building her legs were beginning to ache and for once she ignored the stairwell and took the lift up to the fourth floor.
She slipped the key in the lock, threw her bag down and only distantly registered that the radio was playing in the kitchen.
Had she left it on this morning?
Something cracked and she heard a muffled curse.
Instinctively she looked around herself for a weapon, couldn’t find one. She had a baton but it was in the car. The knives were all on the other side of whoever was in there. For half a second she debated giving them fair warning and decided against it. Drop them first; ask questions later.
As she headed for the door, clenched fist held poised to strike, Adams came out, a glass in his hand, tea towel over his shoulder, looking for all the world as if he belonged there.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
‘Welcome home, yourself,’ he said, the smile he’d been wearing straightening into a wounded line. ‘Thought you might fancy dinner. I bought steak.’
‘How did you get in?’
He held the glass out like a peace offering but she didn’t take it.
‘Come on, Mel, don’t be like that.’
‘You broke in.’
‘I was trying to do something nice for you.’ Again he pushed the glass on her and she took it, needing the alcohol to calm her down. ‘And I didn’t break in. Your neighbour saw me waiting in the hall and took pity on me.’
Adams went back into the kitchen, where a chopping board sat on the worktop, red peppers and onions finely sliced, a row of spices lined up nearby. Reflected in the darkened window it looked like an ordinary scene, him cooking, her sipping a drink, but it didn’t feel right.
‘Which neighbour?’
‘The woman next door,’ he said, slamming the flat of the knife blade down on a clove of garlic. ‘She had a key. The tenant before you gave her it so she could look after his plants.’
Ferreira noticed the small silver key lying on top of the day’s mail, pocketed it. ‘Why did she think it was okay to give you a key to my flat?’
He flashed her a pointed smile. ‘You know how persuasive I can be.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘I told her I’d lost mine. She seemed to think I lived here.’ He went for his wine. ‘You’re acting like I’ve done something weird.’
‘How would you’ve felt if you came home to find I’d conned my way into your place?’
‘If I came home and found you standing in my kitchen in a little pinny …’ He took a step towards her, his hand running around her waist, and despite herself she felt her body mould automatically to his, head rolling away as his lips brushed her ear. ‘I’d eat whatever you put in front of me.’
She pushed him off her. ‘Don’t do this again.’
He wasn’t forgiven and she wouldn’t forget, but he was in the flat now and she was hungry and there was no point sending him away before she had what she wanted.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go, though. They weren’t a couple, they didn’t go in for thoughtful gestures. They just fucked.
Ferreira peeled off her jeans and threw her jumper onto the chair in the corner of the bedroom. What did he want from her? Some cosy night in in front of the TV, some semblance of domesticity? Adams wasn’t the kind of man who craved that.
Adams – Christ, she couldn’t even use his first name in her head. That was how emotionally intimate their ‘relationship’ was. Some men would only ever be their surnames, the ones you had to keep at a distance, the ones whose depths you weren’t interested in fathoming. Even in bed, even when she was breathless and half blind, every muscle in her body clamped around him, he would never be Billy.
She pulled on a pair of wash-faded pyjama bottoms and a vest, then dragged her hair into a high, unflattering ponytail. No make-up, not even the bare minimum swipe of lipstick. If he wanted to play at domesticity she could do that.
In the kitchen she found her glass refilled and the look he gave her when she walked in suggested her choice of outfit wasn’t entirely successful. Shouldn’t have gone with the white vest, she thought, as she took a long mouthful of dark rum.
‘Is that quinoa?’
He sparked the gas under the pan. ‘It is.’
‘I don’t eat that.’
‘Have you tried it?’
‘It’s wanker food.’ Ferreira took a tin of tobacco out of a drawer. ‘Can’t you do rice?’
‘Let’s just agree that I’m actually a slightly better cook than you, yeah?’ He started measuring out spices and stirring them into the quinoa.
‘You don’t know what kind of cook I am.’
‘So, next time you can make dinner.’
Already assuming this was going to become a regular thing. She sealed her cigarette and moved the pan aside to light up, wondering if she’d been stupid not to see it coming.
While he cooked they talked about work, discussed the challenges of the case and the situation within the Sawyer family, getting through more drinks and more cigarettes, the smell of spices filling the kitchen and then the hiss and sear of the steak, which smoked so much as it hit the heat that she had to open the window. She switched off the lights and watched the cloud of fumes billowing into the night air.
Along the street she saw a taxi pull up outside the Meadham and thought about Aadesh and Simone for the first time in what felt like days. She still hoped one of them might feel stirred by Corinne’s murder into coming forward with information she was sure they had, but held out little hope. They both had far too much to lose.
‘Close up,’ Adams said. ‘Dinner’s ready.’
They took their food into the living room, ate sitting on the floor at the coffee table, and for awhile the meal distracted them. He did most of the talking, his favourite chefs and which supermarket had the best butchers, a restaurant in town she really should try. Adams was way more of a foodie than she’d realised and, she had to admit, he was a pretty decent cook too. The steak perfectly done, the quinoa nicely spiced. Even the wine he picked was okay.
‘How was the wanker food?’ he asked when she’d cleared her plate. ‘Better than rice?’
‘It was fine.’
‘I’ll convert you, give it time.’
He topped up her wine and she leaned back against the sofa. Maybe this was better than the evening she’d planned after all. He was talking about Walton again and she tried to focus, but the words washed over her, all she caught was the defeat in his voice. He wanted to nail Walton so badly but even he could see the prospect slipping away.
Suddenly he shook out of it. ‘Dessert?’
‘I’ll get it.’ Ferreira struggled to her feet, swaying a little. ‘Coffee?’
‘No, let’s finish the wine.’
She found a chocolate torte in the fridge, cut two thick wedges and went back into the living room. Music playing soft and low, a Dirty Three album she hadn’t listened to in years, too many memories snagged in its plaintive strings and the feverish build of the tempo. A tangle of sheets and fingers twisted in hair, one last performance before the fighting started.
I Remember a Time When Once You Used to Love Me.
He couldn’t have picked a worse song if he was inside her head watching the scene play out, the break-up sex she didn’t know she was having soundtracked by it. Of all the things she hated Liam for that was what stung the worst, taking her to bed knowing what he was going to say before he’d even regained his breath.
‘This is a bit morose,’ she said, flicking on to another artist and composing her face before she turned back to him.
She curled up at the end of the sofa and he moved next to her.
‘You know what I don’t get,’ he said. ‘Why was Corinne interested in blokes all of sudden? Do you think he was a closet job?’
Ferreira licked chocolate off the back of her fork, letting the tines scratch her tongue. ‘You realise gender and sexual orientation are two different things?’
‘I’ve heard that, yes. But seems to me nobody spontaneously turns at that age. You’re either born like it or you’re not.’
The music was still running in her head, a few bars of raw violin on repeat, mixed up with the conversation she’d been having the last time she heard it. The same thing they were talking about now but with more heat and desperation. Even the setting was uncomfortably similar, another rented flat that didn’t feel like home yet.
‘Doesn’t really matter, does it?’ she said, putting her plate on the table and draining her wine glass. ‘Sexuality isn’t binary, it’s on a spectrum. Colin was probably bi when he was a man and then he’s Corinne and he could explore it easier.’
‘Matters if it got her killed.’ Adams slipped his hand inside the leg of her PJs, no insinuation in his touch. ‘Her girlfriend can’t be very happy.’
‘I don’t think Sam killed her. She’s upset, understandably. She loved and accepted every version of Corinne. I guess she thought that was enough to keep her.’
‘Not if Corinne wanted cock.’
‘You can buy all the cock you want in Ann Summers.’
‘But it’s not like the real thing,’ he said. ‘You can joke about it but if she wanted a man she wanted the full package. Being bi was just a stepping stone.’
Ferreira stretched out on the sofa. ‘Why do men always think a bi-guy is secretly gay and a bi-woman is secretly straight? You all think your cocks are so special.’
‘You seem to enjoy it.’ He lay down next to her and she wriggled away to accommodate him on the sofa, his arm under her neck, knee slipping between her legs. ‘Mel, I know what happened.’
She gave him a warning look. ‘No, you don’t.’
‘I heard—’
‘You heard what? Station gossip. That’s all you know.’ The alcohol had dulled her anger but it was making her maudlin and she wished she hadn’t mixed her drinks. Wished she’d thrown him out the second she saw him standing in the kitchen doorway. She ignored her instincts far too often.
She’d done it with Liam. Seen the signs, but she wasn’t prepared to let him go without a fight, even if it cost her her dignity.
‘We all make bad judgements,’ Adams said, stroking her arm. ‘We think we’re above it because of the job we do, but the truth is we lose all reason once we’ve clocked off. Especially when it comes to relationships.’
‘I knew what he was,’ she said. ‘He never lied about it.’
Adams waited and she didn’t mean to say it, but the drink and the day and that heart-punch of a song conspired to loosen her tongue, and she was talking, uninterrupted, the first time she’d told anyone.
They’d met in a gay bar in the city centre, Ferreira with her brother Paolo and some of his friends, Liam there with another group, and during the night they merged, the two of them the only smokers and the trips outside got more frequent, the conversation more flirty, until they decided that his flat was the right place to finish it. In the taxi she joked about him going to gay bars to trawl women, knowing he’d have his pick, but he insisted it wasn’t like that. She didn’t believe he was bi, not in the taxi and not in the one she took home the next morning.
She didn’t believe it when they went on their second date, or the fourth or the tenth. Not when she saw the gay porn in his bedroom or when he asked her to use a vibrator on him.
Twenty-three years old. A good Catholic girl, by upbringing if not belief, well into rebellion. She found it funny when he fancied the same men as her, a turn-on when they watched porn together. She played the man for him when he asked her to, connecting with some new part of her sexual make-up she hadn’t known about before.
They made plans for the future, talked marriage and kids. Maybe he wasn’t as serious about it as she was. At the time it felt like an equal conversation but memory was a slippery, sly thing and now, looking back, she knew she’d deluded herself, or else how could he have dropped such a massive, obliterating bombshell on her, six months after she moved in with him?
‘Turns out he’d been seeing this guy for months,’ she said. ‘It was “the real thing”. I was just … shit, I don’t know, a test.’
Adams was giving her that soul-boring look of his. ‘You didn’t turn him, Mel.’
‘I couldn’t keep him though.’
‘And you think you just weren’t enough woman for him?’
‘Obviously I wasn’t.’
She felt raw and exposed and half of her wanted Adams to leave, let her work this shit out on her own, but the other half needed the distraction of the platitudes and compliments he was whispering in her ear, the pressure and rhythm of his fingers between her legs.
Some things just had to be fucked out of your system.