I must say, having been denied the other day the full armoury of the Bomb Squad, I’d rather have liked the Armed Response Unit now. Despite its absence, though, there were enough police officers with Chris to make Bowen and his friends fold like a prematurely inspected soufflé. Jago was already as prone as a pancake. As for me, I did what I’d wanted to do for some time, which was to throw up. At least I made it to the sink.
‘Before you ask,’ said Chris, passing me a sheet of kitchen towel, ‘it was your pager. You didn’t respond. I got sick of the message on your answerphone. And when Peter phoned in to report that his suspects had done the exeunt, severally bit, I put two and two together.’
If I replied he wouldn’t have heard. My kitchen seethed with uniformed men and women, including a paramedic intent on dealing with Jago’s hand. I kept my head down: the last thing I wanted to do was share an ambulance with him.
Peter having officially been the arresting officer – he’d escorted my visitors to either Harborne or Smethwick, I cared not whither – Chris was now technically free. Free to mop Jago’s pee from my kitchen floor; to send me upstairs – having established that penetration hadn’t taken place – to shower; to insist that in any case my dressing gown had to be bagged as evidence; to become, in fact, so totally efficient as to lure me downstairs with the smell of fresh toast and hot chocolate. And to want to call my GP.
‘I’m fine. A bit shaken, a bit bruised. But fine.’
‘Have you any idea just how shaken and how bruised you are?’
I shook my head. I didn’t want to know about the former, and had some magic ointment to deal with the latter.
He looked at me sternly: I had a fair suspicion he wouldn’t give up so easily, that he’d keep an eye on me even if it meant sticking with me all day. However, as if resigned, he said calmly, ‘We’ll have to tie up all these loose ends later. But Peter and Harvinder can question those – those scrotes – before you have to make your statement.’
I’d never heard Chris use the term before. Police jargon it might be, and not just in Smethwick either, but it wasn’t his usual vocabulary. His anger was palpable.
‘You wouldn’t want to ask them a few questions yourself?’
He shook his head. ‘Out of practice, Sophie. I could muck things up. No, I’ve seen both of them in action and they’re as good as you get.’
‘You don’t think,’ I suggested, remembering an encounter I’d once had with Peter, ‘that Peter’s a bit … forceful?’
‘Jesus, Sophie, after all you’ve been through this morning, wouldn’t you like him to be forceful?’
It didn’t take me long to agree.
‘I’d like one of our women officers to take your statement. One trained in such cases. So I’ll take you over to Piddock Road as soon as you’re ready.’
That would mean talking about this morning. In detail. ‘There’s one loose end I’d like to tie up first,’ I said carefully. ‘A very minor one, but—’
‘My dear Sophie, the more for the DPP to get its teeth in the better.’
‘OK.’ I should have told him off about that superior tone, but I found I couldn’t be bothered. ‘You know that lemon geranium that scrapes an existence on your kitchen windowsill? I’d like to take it down to Aggie. I’ll explain why as we go to collect it. You don’t have to come down to Evesham with me,’ I said, trying to be offhand but sounding, to my ears, plaintive, ‘but it would be useful to have a reliable witness to what I’m sure she’s going to say.’
He nodded. He must have thought me off my head – I could no more have driven down the motorway than I could have flown to the moon, and I might well be talking material evidence – but he said nothing. ‘OK.’
‘And you’d better hand over that cast to whoever should be looking after these things. It’s over there somewhere.’ I gestured.
He found it. He rooted in my polythene bag store, finding a new bag and a tie. ‘It can wait till we get to Smethwick. Are you taking any bets about whose shoe made the print?’
‘Too much like taking candy from a baby,’ I said.
While he nipped into his house, emerging with a straggly specimen Aggie would no doubt see as a challenge to nurse back to health, I stayed in his car. No special reason – except my legs announced they were too wobbly to walk anywhere they didn’t have to. Occasionally I’d shake in a way that alarmed me. When I inspected it, my pulse was all over the place. God, I wasn’t about to go down with flu, was I?
‘By rights,’ said Chris, passing me the geranium and inspecting me closely, ‘you should be in A&E being treated for shock. At very least in our Rape Suite being counselled by a couple of experts.’
‘Well, I don’t want to sit watching a display telling me to hang on for four hours, and I wasn’t raped. Though I wouldn’t want to get any closer to rape. Just between you and me, Chris, I was as scared as I know how to be. And then some more. In fact, I reckon I’ve got an Ph.D. in scared.’ And now was not the time to fill him in on the event years ago which resulted in Steph.
The poor bugger wouldn’t want to pat my hand in a comforting way, lest I see it as a renewed overture. As it happens, I’d have loved to have a hand to grasp. And then I recalled how I’d grasped Jago’s and shuddered. I’d never deliberately hurt anyone as badly as that before.
‘Jago’s finger,’ I continued. ‘D’you reckon I broke it?’
‘With a bit of luck. I should be surprised if he brought a private prosecution for assault, however.’
I managed a grin, and, since Chris wasn’t the sort of driver to take his eyes off the road, a bit of a giggle to show I appreciated his efforts. ‘Any news of Peter and the reconciliation with his Sheila?’
‘His Sheila?’
‘As opposed to the Rose Road Sheila currently occupying your old room. She seems to work even longer hours than you did. Without the help of coffee.’
‘Poor woman.’ Poor Chris: I could hear the restraint in his voice. What he wanted to know was what sort of a fist she was making of his old job. At least, in his position I’d have wanted to.
‘I didn’t get a chance of a natter with any of your old team, so I’ve no gossip to purvey. Sorry.’
He grinned. ‘The grapevine says she’s doing OK.’
‘You’re a bit of an act to follow, mind, Chris. And she’s a woman.’
‘So long as she’s a good cop. That’s what the team’ll worry about. Which reminds me: there’s a new DI starting next week. African-Caribbean woman. How about that?’
‘Great.’ I bit back what I was going to say, but to my surprise he said it for me.
‘Of course, what will be great is when I don’t even need to comment on something like that. Then we will have true equal opportunities.’
I glanced at him: he sounded absolutely sincere, not as if he were parroting something he’d heard on a course somewhere. Perhaps he was embarrassed lest he’d sounded pious. ‘But to get back to your question. Peter and his Sheila. Well, I don’t hold out much hope. He won’t change, you know. Blokes like that never do.’
Blokes like Chris, too. Whoever he had a relationship with would take second place to his job. Was being in the police as addictive as teaching? I’d never seen any of Chris’s team shoot off at five o’clock on the dot, any more than my William Murdock colleagues did.
The M5 traffic was surprisingly heavy, and he concentrated on his driving for a while. Lulled by the road noise, full of comfort food, I found I was falling asleep.
And flung myself awake. That way flashbacks lay. This morning had been bad enough once.
‘You all right?’
‘Trying not to doze.’
‘A catnap would probably do you a lot of good. Sophie, if you start getting flashbacks or nightmares, you will ask for professional help. I know you and your I can cope with anything life throws at me! routine. But this morning was … exceptional. And if you won’t listen to me, listen to your stomach. I bet your gastritis will be back on the warpath any minute.’
I couldn’t argue. ‘Everything that’s been a bit strange at UWM – the missing thesis, the students coming and going, the vandalism – then the paint stripper on the car – I’ve been trying to tell myself I’ve got an oversuspicious mind, that I’m getting paranoid.’
I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist. If I couldn’t, why should he? ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. And I didn’t notice much in the way of self-doubt. I’d have said you were certain things were wrong.’
‘I didn’t want to get involved with anything.’
‘Oh yes you did. OK, you’re high on civic virtue, but you’re like a terrier – get your teeth into something and never let go.’
‘I thought all I was doing was a spot of harmless checking up,’ I said, not quite truthfully.
‘Checking up is rarely harmless. Not if someone wants to hide something. In this case two someones wanting to hide something. I don’t know how Carla and Bowen are connected. If they’re connected, even. But I have a feeling they might be. This – this feeling.’
‘I’ve got the same one, then. Strange, isn’t it? Come to think of it, though I’ve seen them having coffee together, I’d say there was no love lost between them.’
‘I’m sure Peter’s well on the way to sorting it out. The SOCO people, Fraud, Immigration – there are a lot of threads to tweak. How are you feeling now?’
‘Hungry.’
‘That’s always a good sign, isn’t it? Do you want to stop off somewhere or can we rely on Aggie?’
‘I’m sure we can rely on Aggie, but why not morning coffee at a posh cake shop in Evesham too? If we can find one.’ I might be hungry but I also fancied a treat, a bit of pampering.
‘And if we can find somewhere to park. Not many shopping days left till Christmas, remember.’
I smacked the side of my head. ‘I haven’t bought a single present yet. Or any cards! Oh, my God.’
‘You have had a few other things on your mind. Anyway, you can always do what I’m going to do,’ he said crisply. ‘E-mail Christmas greetings.’
The best we managed was chocolate bars from a vending machine. But that helped with the hunger, if not the desire for coddling. We’d see what Aggie could come up with.
Lucy was out, so Aggie opened the door herself. We’d not phoned to announce we were on the way, as we probably ought to have done. So the first thing she was aware of, assuming her eyes were as bad as I feared, was the smell of the lemon geranium. Her face stiffened in panic. Chris raised an eyebrow at me. Then there was a chorus of hellos from Chris and me and her anxiety relaxed into a crinkle of beams.
‘You really had me worried there,’ she said, shuffling back so we could get in. She shut the door. ‘I thought you were that man found his way down here,’ she said. ‘Go on through. Only it was the smell, see. Not as strong as it is now.’
‘You’re sure, Aggie? I’ve still got the stomach and the throat tablets in my bag if you’d like to test the smell of them again.’
‘They weren’t right the other day, so I don’t see why they should be right now. Especially as the right one’s here.’
‘Just to please me,’ Chris said, reaching to squeeze her hand.
She squeezed it back, looking up at him as if the sun shone out of his ears. ‘Only we could sit down, couldn’t we? Come along in. Now, how about that for a telly?’ She ushered us into the living room. ‘I reckon they must sell that screen by the yard.’
‘By the metre, more like,’ Chris said. ‘Now, that must be your chair.’ He helped her down into a wing chair covered with a brightly coloured crochet blanket the sibling of the one she had at home. ‘We’ll sit over here on this sofa.’
‘Come on, then, Sophie, pop one in,’ she said. ‘Let me have me sniff.’
I obeyed. She screwed her face around in a lovely imitation of Jilly Goolden tasting wine to inhale the smell of antacid tablet. ‘Now, that’s – that’s the stomach one, isn’t it? No, not lemony enough. Go and spit it out – you know where the kitchen is, don’t you? And put the kettle on while you’re on your feet, there’s a good girl.’
I did as I was told. Spitting the antacid into the bin, and swilling my mouth out for good measure, I returned to pop the throat lozenge into my mouth.
‘Come on,’ she cackled, ‘you’re not supposed to stop breathing. Let’s have a good whiff, then. No, nothing like. Now, when you go and spit it out, you might as well make the tea. And there’s a big tin in there: there may be some mince-pies left. No, she can manage. You tell me all about the geranium, young Chris. Sit on this chair here, so I can see you. There.’
When, carrying the tray, I stood in the doorway watching, they were still hand in hand, hers with their swollen arthritic joints, his strong, well-shaped. And bruised. I turned quietly back to the kitchen and replaced the tray on the work-surface. There would be a bathroom upstairs where I could sit and have a little weep in peace. Little weep! Me? For what? Not just disappointing Aggie, surely. Not just hurting Chris, emotionally and physically. Not just for myself, scared and a long way from Mike – who didn’t even know what had been going on.
My God, I’d forgotten Steph! He was supposed to be bringing his new motorbike to show me today. And I wasn’t there. Any more than I had been for the best part of twenty years. Much as I’d have liked to cry in good earnest, I’d better pull myself together and get on the phone to him.
The tea-tray had mysteriously found its way into the living room, and Chris and Aggie were notably tactful about my absence – Chris because he could see I’d been crying and Aggie because she couldn’t. Excusing myself again – I felt de trop anyway! – I returned to the kitchen with my mobile phone and tapped in Steph’s number.
I’d never called him at home, like a mistress not risking upsetting the wife. But if his mother wanted me to eat with the family, then presumably it was all right to go ahead.
A woman answered the phone third ring.
‘You must be Steph’s mum,’ I said, all brightly sure of my welcome. ‘This is Sophie here …’
‘Sophie? I’m sorry?’ She wasn’t apologising for mishearing; she was apologising for not recognising the name.
‘Sophie,’ I repeated, just in case.
‘Sophie who?’
When we’d first started to meet, he’d said I should pretend I was someone he knew from college, didn’t he?
‘Just a friend,’ I said. ‘He said he might pop over to see me today. Show off his new bike. And I wanted him to know I wouldn’t be in, after all. Could you tell him, please?’ And I cut the connection.
It could have been worse. She could have told me he’d smashed the bike into a brick wall. She could have told me he was in intensive care, fighting for his life. She could have told me anything, I reminded myself. Pulling my shoulders back, I slipped back into the living room and started on the tea.
‘Sophie, what on earth’s the matter?’ Chris said, cutting across whatever Aggie was saying.
‘It’s Steph,’ I said. ‘It’s Steph. He told me he’d told his parents – and he hasn’t.’
And I threw myself on to my knees by Aggie, and cried my eyes out.
I could hear them arguing over my head. Aggie wanted to pop me in bed with a shot of brandy and a hot-water bottle. Chris favoured popping me into hospital with whatever shots the medics thought appropriate. I favoured neither.
‘I just want to go and sort all this mess out,’ I said, kneeling up straight and letting Chris haul me to my feet. ‘Then I shall sleep until it’s time to catch that plane.’
‘Plane?’ Aggie repeated.
Adopting an apologetic undertone, as if I were a child and couldn’t explain for myself, Chris said, ‘To Australia. To spend Christmas with Mike.’
‘What? But I told Luce I’d be spending Christmas in me own home. I said as I’d be spending it with you two.’
Never apologise, never explain: that was what the man said. I’d take his advice, whoever he was. ‘What did Lucy say, when you told her that?’ I asked, trying to get my voice under some semblance of control.
‘Well, she seemed mightily put out. But I said—’
‘I should just think she would be,’ I replied. ‘Her own gran not wanting to spend Christmas with her. You always spend Christmas with her. You have a meal waiting for when she finishes at the hospital. Always. She says no one can cook a turkey like you do.’
Shit! I’d said the wrong thing – again. What Aggie wasn’t prepared to tell Lucy was that she couldn’t see to cook the turkey – or maybe she couldn’t trust those arthritic hands to lift it out of the oven.
‘Actually,’ Chris said, ‘I was hoping to come down myself. I’ve got to go into work on Christmas morning, but I shall be free later. And I knew you always left it to the evening to eat. I thought—’
‘You’ve got family,’ she interrupted, shocked.
‘Long way to Scotland from Smethwick,’ he said. ‘So I thought—’
‘I don’t care what you thought—’
‘I do. And you thought quite right,’ came a voice from the hall. Lucy. Dea ex machina if ever there was one. ‘I can think of nothing nicer,’ she continued, surging into the living room with two bags of shopping which Chris immediately took from her, ‘than your joining us, Chris. I’ll air the Put-u-up bed so you can drink yourself silly and not have to worry about your licence. Pity you can’t join us, Sophie, but you be where you should be. With your man. Now, what’s the state of that tea?’