Outside the café in Staveley, Nick walked back to the table, careful not to spill the brimming glasses of lemonade he was balancing. Grace was gazing into middle distance, he saw, notebook open on the table, tapping absently at the page with her pen. She closed it with an apologetic smile as he approached.
“Sorry. Difficult to get your mind off the job sometimes.”
“Hey, I’m the last person you need to explain that to.” He managed to put both glasses down without slopping their contents and took the chair opposite.
The café was a glorified sandwich shop, with a small outside seating area cordoned off by narrow planters filled with geraniums, colourful enough to catch the eye of passing trade on the main street a short distance away.
Nick expected her to order a salad but when he nodded towards the menu, still folded on the table, her smile became conspiratorial.
“I don’t need to see that. Not when I’ve been tantalised by the smell of bacon butties since I got here.”
Nick shook his head and went back inside to order, wondering just how often this woman was going to surprise him.
When he returned, Grace was looking round, taking it all in, professional. Something told Nick she would be able to describe the place in great detail, long after she’d walked away from it.
“I rarely eat outside these days. Not since the smoking ban—it’s usually like an ashtray.” She flicked her eyes over his hands. “Of course, I’m taking it for granted that you’re not a smoker.”
“Reformed,” he said, reaching for his glass. “Nearly five years.”
Grace smiled faintly and raised her own glass in a silent toast. “Nearly?” she queried.
He grinned, caught out. “Four years, six months and, oh, about fourteen days.” Can still remember the day I quit. The day Lisa told me she was pregnant with Sophie…
“Was it hard—giving up, I mean?”
He shrugged. “I knew I needed to stop, so I did. Looking back, I only ever did it as a social thing. Stupid really, but I grew up in pubs at a time when everybody smoked. If you wanted to fit in, you did, too.”
“You grew up in a pub?”
He smiled at the doubtful note, took a swig of his drink. “My dad ran a series of dives for one brewery after another. By the time I was twelve, I could bottle up a bar single-handed.” Often had to, when the old man had a death-grip on his bed in the morning.
“What about your mother?”
Nick forced himself not to tense. “She left,” he said shortly. “I was about seven, just a snotty-nosed kid. Can’t say I blame her, though. My dad liked to play the field.”
Grace nodded but didn’t go through the usual sympathetic motions and Nick was grateful. Instead, she said, “It’s quite a journey from running a pub to your current occupation,” with enough interest in her voice to make it a question.
He sat back, as if considering. “Maybe I decided that if I had to break up fights every Saturday night, I might as well do it with CS spray and a warrant card, and get paid for the privilege.”
It was glib. He saw from her face that she was disappointed by it, and added, “My first undercover job was getting myself hired to run the bars in a very dodgy nightclub, so the experience stood me in good stead.”
She was leaning forwards slightly, putting all of herself into the attention she gave to him. Nick tried not to be flattered; it was just a technique. Grace would have made a good interrogator. People would talk just to watch her listen. The men, anyway.
“Was it successful?” she asked now. “Your first undercover assignment.”
Nick gave a wry smile. “Even as we were being raided, the boss was telling me to keep my mouth shut and he’d see me right, so I think it’s safe to say my cover was pretty solid.” Best not to remember the time when it wasn’t. He reached for his glass again and said, only half-joking, “So, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a job like this?”
For a moment Grace frowned into her mineral water, then said candidly, “I was already involved in photography—strictly amateur, you understand—when a solicitor friend asked if I’d take some pictures of a building where a robbery had taken place.”
“Like today, you mean?”
She gave an elegant shrug. “An office building, rather than a workshop, and I’m afraid the idea of the exercise was to prove the prosecution’s witness couldn’t possibly have seen what he was claiming, from the position he was supposed to have been in at the time.”
“And were you successful?”
“That depends on your point of view.” She sat back and crossed those long denim-clad legs. “We proved our argument, if that’s what you mean. My friend’s client got off and afterwards Richard Sibson approached me and told me—rather cheerfully, I thought—that I’d ruined his case. Then he gave me a card and said if I was ever interested in working for the side of the angels, he could use someone with my eye—his words.”
“So you took him up on his offer.”
“Not right away, no. After Max and I separated I enrolled at college over in the northeast. By the time my divorce came through I was qualified enough to accept.”
There was something in her voice and Nick glanced at her, but her expression gave nothing away. Treading carefully, he asked, “Didn’t your ex want you to take the job?”
She pulled a face that held amusement more than irritation. “He didn’t want me to take any job. He was making enough to support both of us, so why did I need to work?”
Her matter-of-fact tone rankled him. As if all working husbands were faced with the same dilemma. “I assume, after the settlement, you still don’t need to.”
Grace picked up her glass again and gave him a cool stare over the rim. “And I would have thought in your job you’d have learned by now to assume nothing.”
He grinned at her, raising his glass to acknowledge the point. “Speaking of which, do you want to let me have your assumptions about this robbery? D’you reckon they really didn’t know about that window?”
They chatted over Grace’s initial conclusions until other customers arrived. Then their food came out, two huge hot bacon sandwiches, and they gave themselves over to the business of eating in companionable silence.
She ate with delicate determination, Nick noticed, not picking through her food or worrying about the calories. Perhaps she’s just naturally slim? He remembered the meagre contents of her fridge. Or perhaps she just doesn’t eat much at home. And his thoughts turned to inviting her to share another meal with him. A quiet dinner, maybe, when they didn’t have work on their minds…
When their plates were empty, she asked quietly, “You’re still worried about the girl, Edith, aren’t you? What are you going to do?”
Nick glanced across, found her frowning.
“I’m not sure.” Like her, he kept his voice low, careful of the nearby tables. “I was hoping to get someone from the…office to speak to her, but that’s going to be tricky. Her father will know I’ve been told to lay off, for a start.”
“Mm. I could drop in on my way home—nothing official, of course—if you think that might help?”
Would it? “I think so.” He flashed her a rueful smile and added frankly, “At least if word gets back to her father, he’s not going to arrange for his mates to take you down a dark alley.”
“How gallant,” she said in that lightly husky voice that was a hair’s breadth from laughing at him. And then her eyes shifted to a point just over his right shoulder and went blank.
Before Nick could turn, a voice behind him said, “Not interrupting anything, am I?”
“Lisa!” Even as he said her name, Nick knew there was guilty surprise on his face. Damn! He stood up sharply. “Listen, I—”
“Spare me,” Lisa snapped. “I can see you’re busy.” Her eyes raked Grace up and down. “Bit old for you, isn’t she?”
He groaned inwardly, but Grace didn’t react to the barb.
“That entirely depends,” she said calmly, “on what it is you think he’s been doing with me?”
Nick saw Lisa gather herself. He grabbed her arm, aware of the staring eyes surrounding them. “Let’s talk about this later, yeah?”
Lisa yanked her arm free. “What’s to talk about?”
Nick recognised that simmering look. He took a deep breath.
“Look, all I’m doing is having lunch with a colleague,” he said, aware his voice was weary with defeat. “We’ve been dealing with a break-in. So, say what you came to say without embarrassing yourself, hey?” And, even though he knew it wouldn’t help matters: “You’re the one who lives round here now, love, not me.”
Her pretty face flushed, from anger or shame he wasn’t sure which. She flicked her eyes to the rapt faces at the nearby tables, most of whom hastily shifted their gaze.
Mind you, Lisa was the type to turn heads anywhere. Small and blonde and petite, with an impossibly tiny waist and a heart-shaped face, she and Nick had met when someone had tried to rob the hairdressers where she was working in Manchester. Still in uniform then, he’d been first on scene, to find this diminutive figure furiously threatening to castrate the cornered would-be thief with a pair of heated curling tongs.
He couldn’t claim he wasn’t forewarned about her temper.
Today she was wearing a flowered summer dress that made her look impossibly dainty compared to Grace, but somehow not nearly so attractive…
“I recognised your car,” she said then, stiff-necked. “I wanted to tell you I’ll be popping round to the flat at the weekend, to pick up some of Sophie’s toys.”
Sophie’s toys. That sliced, right enough. Nick turned away so she wouldn’t see it. “Yeah, sure. If I’m not working I’ll give you a hand.”
“There’s no need,” she said, quickly enough to make him wince. “Our Karl’s said he’ll run me down to Kendal in the van so we can fetch her Wendy house.”
Karl was Lisa’s morose, lumbering brother. He and Nick had never got on at the best of times. Nick couldn’t imagine things improving now there was no need for a pretended amnesty between them.
He resisted the urge to shove his hands into his pockets like a naughty schoolboy and asked awkwardly, “I…how are you? How’s Sophie? Is she—?”
“She’s with my mum. We’re both fine.” Lisa sniffed. “And so are you, by the looks of things.”
She cast a last venomous look in Grace’s direction, who bore it with polite disinterest, and flounced away.
The silence following Lisa’s departure was deafening. Nick sat down again slowly, unable to meet Grace’s steady gaze. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
“I’ll make it easy for you,” Grace said. “Lisa is your girlfriend, I take it, and Sophie is—”
“—our daughter,” Nick finished for her. He tried to raise a smile that failed miserably. “She’s four. Lisa took her when she walked out on me a couple of weeks ago.”
“I see.”
He saw her mentally put together the timings and his own temper threatened to make a reappearance. “Look, I’d rather you didn’t mention this at work. You know how bad the station is for gossip.”
“Yes, I do.” There was a faint snap in her voice. Nick realised, somewhat belatedly, that she was probably the last person who’d spread rumours.
“I’m sorry, Grace, that was—”
“Tactless? Offensive? Yes,” she said, more lightly now, “it was. But don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.” She got to her feet, suddenly seeming very tall and self-assured. She gathered her bag and slipped a folded banknote onto the table, under her glass. “That should take care of my half of lunch. I’ll let you know as soon as I have any results back.”
But as she moved past him, she paused with her hand on his shoulder and looked straight down into his eyes. “You didn’t see Lisa’s face when she first saw the two of us,” she murmured. “She was angry, certainly, but there was more to it than that.” Those hazel eyes flicked over his face, as if searching for duplicity. “If she walked out on you, as you say, I think she might be having second thoughts. So, don’t blow your chances, will you? If only for your daughter’s sake.”
She gave his shoulder a single pat and, with a dazzling smile to the waitress, she left.
Nick slumped back into his seat. Was Lisa really having doubts about leaving him?
The thought of getting little Sophie back made him ecstatic, but as for Lisa herself…? Why didn’t the prospect of resuming that part of the relationship fill him with the same kind of joy?
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Grace walk across the car park to the van. And he was honest enough with himself to admit that all he felt was disappointment that he wouldn’t be getting to know the red-haired CSI outside of work.
He leaned his elbows on the table and stared into what remained of his drink to mutter under his breath: “Damn.”