Sara gave a small yelp as she walked into the kitchenette area the next day and saw Aidan standing in the corner, leaning against the worktop.
‘Christ, sorry,’ she said, putting her hand to her chest. ‘Didn’t know you were in here. I must’ve been in a world of my own.’
Aidan shrugged. ‘S’alright. Sorry if I scared you.’
‘It’s cool,’ Sara replied, before making herself a cup of tea. ‘You want one?’
‘Nah, I’m good.’
Aidan was usually more friendly and talkative than this, so she could tell something was wrong. He only tended to get moody and brooding when he had something on his mind.
‘Everything okay?’ she asked, as casually as she could muster.
‘Yeah, fine,’ came the reply.
She turned to face him. ‘You know I don’t believe you, don’t you?’ she said.
Aidan looked back at her. She could see a look in his eyes — a feeling — one she could only describe as pain.
‘You can talk to me,’ she continued. ‘If you need to, I mean. Or want to. I’m always happy to lend an ear. Anything you say won’t be repeated to anyone else.’
Aidan gave a small smile out of the corner of his mouth. ‘You really need to work on your arrest wording,’ he said.
Sara smiled back. ‘If I have to cuff you and book you in to get you to talk, I will.’
Aidan’s smile faded as his mind moved back to the issue that was troubling him. He dropped his chin down towards his chest, took a deep breath, then looked back up at Sara.
‘I’ve got a diary,’ he said. ‘Like a journal sort of diary, I mean. One I write in every day.’
‘Aidan, I don’t mean to prick your balloon, but I’m a DC. I’ve heard worse confessions than that.’
Aidan’s smile briefly returned. ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘That’s the easy bit.’
‘Okay,’ Sara said, picking up her mug, sensing he didn’t want to volunteer any more information than this. ‘Well, if you want to talk at any point, I’m here. I’m a good listener.’
Aidan’s response came unexpectedly and suddenly.
‘I found out Keira’s been going through it. We broke up.’
Sara’s jaw tensed slightly, although she wasn’t sure why. ‘Oh, Aidan,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. What happened?’
Aidan took a deep breath and let out a loud sigh. ‘The day before yesterday, just before I went to bed, I took it out of my bag and went to write in it, the same as I do every day. But when I opened it, I noticed that some of the loose scraps of paper at the back were in the wrong order. I mean, it’s not as if there’s a right order as such, but they weren’t in the order I’d put them in. It was as if someone had opened it, not knowing the scraps were there, and had tried to put them back without knowing what order they’d been in originally.’
‘And it definitely wasn’t something you’d done yourself?’
‘No. The scraps were notes I’d written when I didn’t have the diary on me, or when I wanted to go back and add something at a later date. I’ve always been careful to keep them in the right order to make it easier for me to keep track. But this time some of them were upside down or the wrong way round. Someone else had put them back like that.’
‘And you think it was Keira?’
‘It must have been. She’d been over at mine that evening, but went home at nine because she said she was feeling ill. There was a good hour earlier that night where I’d been in the kitchen cooking dinner and she was in the living room watching telly. My bag was on the sofa, with the diary inside.’
‘Do you keep it there all the time?’
‘Yeah, I take it everywhere with me. I mean, I don’t take it into the toilet or when I pop out to grab a pint of milk, but it comes to work with me, I take it on holiday, overnight stays, that sort of thing. It’s therapeutic.’
‘I see. Do you think that’s why she left suddenly?’
Aidan shrugged. ‘That’s how it seems. She was fine before that. Said she felt a bit tired, but who doesn’t when they get home from work?’
Sara thought for a few moments. ‘I’m really not sure how to ask this, but is there anything in there that might have upset her if she’d read it?’
‘Honestly? I don’t know. I just sort of blurt my thoughts and feelings to get them out. I’m sure there’ve been days where I’ve been pissed off with her and will have written something to that effect, but everyone has days like that. Everyone has times where their partner annoys them.’
‘True. But she might not have seen it like that at the time. It sounds like she just had an immediate instinctive reaction. Have you spoken to her since?’
‘Yeah,’ Aidan said, a sad look crossing his face. ‘I had to. After I’d written in it that night, I used an old trick I remembered seeing in a book as a kid. I put a tiny dab of glue on each side of the opening, then stuck one of my hairs to it, so it wouldn’t be immediately visible, but I’d know if anyone had opened the diary because the hair would be broken next time I went to write in it. Keira came over again the next night — yesterday — and seemed better. Like you said, I thought maybe she’d just seen something that’d taken her by surprise, and that she’d calmed down after sleeping on it. I decided not to say anything, but I’d already done the hair trick. Again, I left her in the living room with my bag after I came home from work, sorted dinner, had a shower. Then I came in, moved the bag and took the diary out.’
‘And the hair was broken?’
‘Yeah. She’d been going through it again. So I confronted her. At first she seemed shocked, which I put down to the surprise of being found out. But then she just got angry. Kept saying how could I accuse her of that, why would I do the trick with the hair if we were supposed to trust each other, that sort of thing. And I just thought, if she didn’t do anything and she’s trying to prove her innocence, why is she getting angry and throwing it all back at me, as if I’m the one in the wrong here? Anyway, when it came down to it I told her I couldn’t trust her and she told me she couldn’t be in a relationship where she wasn’t trusted. So I guess that’s that.’
‘Oh Aidan. And there’s definitely no-one else it could’ve been? Nowhere else you left the bag?’
‘No, not at all. Like I say, I take it everywhere with me. It comes to work with me in the morning, then I bring it home. Both days, the bag was in the living room with Keira for at least an hour. I don’t know, Sara. I just feel so… So crap.’
Sara reached out her arms to offer him a hug. ‘Come here, you.’
Aidan stepped forward, and the pair embraced, Aidan letting out his pent-up tension as Sara calmly rubbed his back.
From a little further down the corridor, Elijah Drummond watched on.