Nancy put on headphones and tuned in to her Spotify playlist. It didn’t quite drown out Lydia’s shrieks, nor the hammering noise coming from the bathroom, where Felix was trying to mend the malfunctioning shower. She picked up her phone: she had put off looking at all the WhatsApp messages and Instagram notifications that had been pinging onto her screen.
But after about ten minutes, she put the phone down again, feeling slightly sick. Friend after friend had been in touch, sending her their condolences, saying they quite understood that she needed time to recover but they were there for her, even cancelling arrangements she had made with them because they knew that it was early days. There were multiple voicemail messages, but she couldn’t bear to listen to them.
She went into the bathroom, where Felix was on the floor, squinting at a pipe.
‘I think I’ve found the source of the problem,’ he said cheerily.
‘Did you contact my friends about what I was going through?’ she said.
He twisted towards her.
‘People were worried about you. I had to say something.’
She bit her lip.
‘I thought maybe I should be the one to do that.’
‘It was no trouble,’ he said.
Nancy imagined kicking him in the face as he lay there.
‘I think you may have given the impression that I’m still sick,’ she said.
Felix sat up and regarded her.
‘I know you’re much better. I’m happy about that. But you’ve been through a huge thing. Don’t you think that you need to learn from what happened? For your sake and mine, don’t rush back into your hectic way of life, out most nights, trying to fit everything and everyone in, hardly any time for us. You risk it starting all over again.’ He adjusted the spanner, then looked her intently. ‘And you really don’t want that, do you? You don’t want to end up back in hospital.’
‘No,’ said Nancy slowly. ‘I don’t.’
Felix smiled at her and then lay back down again.
‘The trouble,’ said Maud, looking critically at the fish pie she had ordered, ‘is that the kind of men I like don’t like police officers.’
She was thinking of the way that man Stuart had visibly shrunk away from her when they had first met. She wasn’t sure why it had got under her skin so much: after all, she was used to the way people reacted to her job. Though they had never directly challenged her, Silas’s parents had been disapproving of her profession. The only time they thawed towards her was when she became briefly famous for exposing failures inside her own force.
She hadn’t seen Stuart for the past two weeks. He hadn’t come to the classes and she found herself wondering why. Perhaps he had dropped out, like several of the others, and she wouldn’t have to see him again.
She was sitting with two of her brothers in a pub in Shoreditch, and one of them, Terry, had asked her warily if she was seeing anyone. Her initial reaction had been to bat the question away with a kind of cool amusement, but she looked at his kind, weathered face and relented. Maud knew her father and her four brothers talked about her, worried about her being single, childless, contrary, unsettled, a detective and her own worst enemy. At the rowdy family get-togethers, she came alone and unattached, played with her nephew and nieces, often made an excuse to leave early.
Terry was her oldest brother, and he was a roofer like their father: Frank O’Connor & Son fixed roofs and gutters throughout East London and into Essex. Terry had a wife and three daughters. The next brother, Brian, had a son and two dogs. The younger brothers were twins; one of them was going to be a father in the spring; the other had just moved to Romford with his partner and talked about starting a family.
‘And the other trouble,’ she continued, sinking her fork deep into the potato before she found any fish, ‘is that I don’t seem to like police officers either.’
‘There must be some nice ones,’ said Brian.
‘There must,’ said Maud dubiously. ‘Somewhere. And the third trouble,’ she added, ‘is that being a detective has rather put me off men in general.’
‘That’s not good,’ said Terry.
‘I know.’
‘Do you ever see Silas? He rang me, you know.’
‘Silas and me are never going to get back together, if that’s what you’re imagining.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘Also,’ she said, ‘when would I find time for a relationship at the moment?’
‘You work too hard.’
‘I like working. I like solving things, hearing all the different contradictory stories, making connections, piecing together all the bits and finding the picture. It’s just everything around the real task I’m not keen on.’
In her head, she heard the laughter of the men in the station a few hours ago about a sex worker who’d come in with an accusation against one of her clients. Knowing, ribald laughter that had made her want to set fire to the place.
‘But do you manage to have fun?’
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling at her brothers. ‘I have fun.’