FIFTY-ONE

One of the few benefits of Elias’s Nissan Leaf was that he had to recharge it at least twice a week. And seeing as his nearest charger was in the local McDonald’s car park, it gave him the perfect excuse to dine guilt-free on a burger, fries and a milkshake. He sat at the window to keep an eye on it, just in case, because there’d been a spate of thefts around here recently, and though he could do with some new wheels, he didn’t need the hassle. It badly needed a wash too, spattered with mud from all those rural lanes, but he couldn’t face it tonight. Maybe in the morning, before collecting Anna.

He chomped down the last of his burger a little too hurriedly and paid for it with that unpleasant stretched feeling in his throat and chest all the way home. Parking near his bedsit was a nightmare. He normally didn’t even bother trying, but rather used a cul-de-sac some fifteen minutes walk away, which was well lit and always had a few free places. But he’d promised to get to Anna quickly should she need him, so he circled round and round his block until finally a spot opened up.

He collected his post on his way in. The usual mix of bills and junk mail. The lift was still out of order so he trudged upstairs to his top-floor bedsit. Its shabbiness depressed him even on good days, but he hated it more than ever right now, after his earlier visit to Merchant’s plush coach-house conversion, the sour memories it had inevitably provoked.

You learned to think a certain way when you became a detective. Everything had meaning. This wasn’t always helpful. Another man, to take one example, would have been glad to see his wife emerging from the desperate misery of Marcus’s death, taking trouble over her appearance again, buying new outfits, trying out different hairstyles, visiting the gym. Another man would have thought himself forgiven when she’d started being kind to him again, and tolerant of his flaws.

Elias wasn’t that man, however. Suspicion was his default state. He’d taken to ringing home at odd hours, or going there unannounced, catching her that way in a series of flat-out lies. And, rather than subtly letting her know, or giving her more time and space to work through her anger and her grief, he’d bought himself a surveillance device instead. It was barely the size of a book of matches, yet it came equipped with GPS and a 4G SIM, all powered by a coin battery, enabling him to track her in her car and listen in to any phone calls she made from it. That was how he’d found out about her affair – and with Merchant, of all people. It had made him so furious that he’d followed her to his place one afternoon to confront the pair of them, managing to lose his dignity, his wife and his family in the space of five incandescent minutes.

Yes. Sometimes it was better not to know. Yet turning a blind eye wasn’t in his nature.

Anna Warne had washed and brushed her hair, then had put on perfume, eyeliner and lip-gloss. She’d been wearing a pair of gold hoop earrings and a silver bracelet, neither of which he’d seen before, and she’d tightened her belt a notch too. All for Merchant’s benefit as well, seeing as she’d be spending the night with him, for all her talk of spare bedrooms.

Observation was only one aspect of detective work. Another was deduction. It was hardly a mystery that an attractive young woman like Anna would seek to make the most of herself. The puzzle was why she hadn’t done so until now; why, indeed, she’d almost gone out of her way to make herself appear shapeless and plain. Elias had come across the phenomenon before, and there was usually a good reason for it, so that he couldn’t help but wonder whether that applied here too.

He felt bad about googling her. It felt like stalking. Yet he did it anyway, only to be defeated by the commonness of her name. He added Dunstan and then Lincolnshire to his search, but without success. Then he remembered how frosty she’d turned when he’d asked about her switch to York for her PhD, so he added Nottingham to his search, and there it was. He even remembered the incident now. Her abduction had been major news for a while. What he hadn’t realised was that Harry Kidd had stalked her for months beforehand, or that she’d gone to the police about him on three separate occasions – only to be called up by one of the officers she’d spoken to, and asked out on a date.

That glance he’d given her ring finger that first day. No wonder she’d looked so sickened. He felt nauseous about it himself now, not least because he’d been toying with the idea of asking her for a coffee himself once this was all over. He had no great romantic aspirations. She was out of his weight class, and that was fine, though it would pain him grievously if she ended up with Merchant. But the simple truth was that he was lonely and that he longed for the companionship of a smart, attractive woman. The simple truth was that there was something about Anna that called out to him. He’d have liked her for a friend.

No chance of that now. He’d rather burn. And look at this place anyway. It was a pit. It was humiliating enough having to bring the twins here. And not just because it was awful in itself, although it was. It was because he no longer even tried to make the best of it. He’d let himself go, that was the fact of it. He’d let himself go because he was the kind of man who needed someone in his life to make an effort for. And he had no one like that left.

But that stopped now.

He filled a black bag with old takeaway cartons, beer cans and the rest, then cleared his sink of dirty plates and mugs. He fetched his hoover from the closet and ran it over his threadbare old carpet, for all the good it did. Then he pulled on rubber gloves and filled a bucket with soapy hot water and set about scrubbing every surface he could find, until they were as clean as he could get them.