Anthea couldn’t keep the disgust from her voice. She would have preferred Shaw to be telling her that she was sacked.
‘I could report you for harassment,’ she said, knowing as she spoke that the sergeant would take her words as an admission of defeat.
‘Go right ahead.’ He smiled.
‘One day you’ll tie that dick of yours in knots.’
Shaw’s laughter echoed down the station’s narrow corridor.
After her first shock and recoil, Anthea realised that he’d chosen a time when Chris would be away for some hours. She walked out of the station, closing the door quietly behind her.
His taunts followed her across the street.
‘Fucking a paedophile! What do you expect?’
Anthea felt dirty and ashamed. What had Shaw done but squeeze her breast and buttocks? It seemed much worse than that. His expression had said that this was the beginning and she’d better get used to it. Would another woman have ignored him? Would another woman have shouted and kneed him in the balls? Of course, that was what the sergeant wanted, for her to act in a way that would put her in the wrong.
Normally, Anthea prided herself on her ability to think clearly, to take one step at a time. But Olly’s arrest had changed that; a part of her mind and energy was locked up in the cell with him.
She recalled the nightmares she’d had for years after her parents died. In many of the nightmares, their death was her fault. She’d learnt self-reliance at an early age; she believed she’d had to, and she still believed that. It wasn’t everyone whose parents were killed in a car accident when they were three. She had almost no memory of them; sometimes, when she was feeling down, she told herself that she had none at all. But then, persistently and quietly, there would come to her, the feeling of her small hands held in two large ones, the feeling of her feet placed one in front of the other, down a path under tall trees in dappled sunlight. The picture wasn’t fake. It was a memory, and hers.
Anthea had loved her grandparents, and was in no doubt that they had loved her. But by the time she was ten — Bobby’s age — she’d begun consciously watching them grow frailer, dependent on each other and increasingly on her. She had known then that she must learn to think and act for herself. But the mistakes you make creep up on you, and you don’t see them for mistakes until it’s too late. This had been an early lesson too.
Anthea thought of Graeme, on whom, as she now saw it, she had wasted years. Her failure to recognise that Graeme didn’t love her made her doubt her ability to judge men and their feelings. She should not have gone along with the proposal that Olly look after Max without thinking it through. She should have allowed herself more time to get over Graeme, settle in to Queenscliff, get used to the idea of living by herself.
Now she was faced with a plunging sense of failure, made worse by Shaw’s insults and crude but confident sexual advance.
‘Something’s happened,’ Chris said.
Anthea had not decided what, if anything, to tell him, held back partly by the knowledge that Shaw would expect her to complain, partly by her own confusion.
But now she had to say something. As she stumbled through an explanation, Chris’s face grew red and angry.
‘Put in a written complaint.’
‘If I do, he’ll arrest me as Olly’s accomplice. I’m fair game.’
They were sitting on the bench under the black lighthouse. Anthea said she preferred that to being inside.
‘It’s his word against mine.’
‘I’ll back you up.’
Shaw was like a rubber ball; dented, he sprang back with increased velocity. Was this the sign of a truly narcissistic personality? Chris told himself that was a question for later, not for now.
When he’d left the station earlier that day, on an errand he now recognised had been dreamt up for him by the sergeant, he’d noticed a car with a green stripe on the side of the number plate parked over the road.
Instead of driving away immediately, he’d waited. Ferguson and the tall man Chris recognised from the railway yard had got into the car.
When he questioned Anthea about the tall man, she shook her head. She’d been in the back office with the door shut, and had stayed there till Shaw called out to her.
Chris had seen photographs of the Director General of ASIS, the only member of the organisation who could, by law, be publicly identified. He couldn’t be sure, but he had an idea who the tall man might be.
They went back to her flat for lunch. While Anthea made a herb omelette, Chris sat at her laptop searching through photographs.
He’d believed the tall man must be stationed on the island. But was this necessarily the case? The morning Bobby’s body was found, he could have come by helicopter. Apart from his height, ‘their’ man, as Chris was beginning to think of him, had no features that stood out.
They washed up their few dishes. Anthea said she was too tired to talk.