by Jill McGown
He was glad to be back in the centrally heated warmth of what he still thought of as his own sitting room rather than the stuffy but chilly courtroom or the wet and miserable streets or even the very pleasant room in a friend’s house in which he was currently living, having never quite given up hope of Lesley changing her mind. His friend was glad of the extra cash, and Phil didn’t want to do anything more final about finding a place to live.
“And we can’t change what’s happened,” he went on, “so I think we should all try to get on with our lives.” He took a breath and said what he had really come to say. “I’d like us to be doing it as a family. Kayleigh wants us to get back together, and so do I.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Why not? We’ve put worse than this behind us.”
He prepared himself for her reaction to that, because even allusions to what had been the worst time in either of their lives, jointly or severally, were not encouraged. But Lesley didn’t seem to have noticed.
“Because it’s over.”
He knew that, really. His problem was working out why it was over. In June, just after they had finally gone to the police about Fletcher, Lesley had told him that she wanted him to leave, and he still had no idea why. It made no sense. They were happy. All of them. He and Lesley had seen Kayleigh through the worst of this business as they had seen her through everything, always, and they had done it together. All right, there were rows, but they blew over. They were a unit. A family.
He hadn’t known how to respond. If he had done something to which Lesley had taken exception, he could have defended himself or apologized or begged forgiveness. But he hadn’t; all she had said when he had asked was that she didn’t want their relationship to go on. He had left in the hope that time and distance would heal whatever wound had been opened by their recent problems.
“But I thought you were happy.”
“I wasn’t unhappy.” She gave a short sigh. “The fact is . . . there’s someone else.”
At last, something he understood, even if he didn’t like it. It didn’t surprise him that she had met someone else; they had been apart a long time. “Who?” His voice was dull as he asked the question and he hadn’t really expected a response, but he got one.
“Ian Waring.”
Ian Waring? Was he supposed to know who Ian Waring was? He frowned, then remembered, his eyes widening slightly. “The guy who did the computers?”
“Yes.”
Waring lived in Stansfield and had been commuting to London every day while he worked on the computer system. Phil had called him the computer commuter, and Lesley had almost always jokingly referred to him as CC; for a moment, his name hadn’t meant anything to Phil. He had known she got on well with Waring, but he’d only been there a few weeks and it had never occurred to Phil that there was any more to it than that. She must have been seeing him ever since.
“I would have told you at the time, but all the business with Kayleigh blew up and I thought you might get angry and tell her. I didn’t want her to know about Ian until the case was finished, in case it upset her.”
“And you don’t think it’ll upset her now?” At last, his bewilderment was giving way to the good old-fashioned anger that Lesley had rightly assumed would have been his reaction. “This is the last thing she needs right now, Lesley!”
“I think I’m the best judge of that.”
“Well, I don’t! She’s just been through a very difficult time, and not content with whipping away the only stability she’s ever known, you’re replacing it with someone she’s never even met!”
“I’m her stability. It’s not really your concern, Phil.”
He jumped up. “Not my concern? Not my concern? She’s been my concern since she was five years old!” He tried hard to calm down, to control the temper that he lost so easily, and he sat down again. It was easier to keep the lid on things sitting down. And getting angry wouldn’t help. Lesley had made up her mind. He listened, without comment, as Lesley told him her plans. Waring would be moving in until they had decided where they wanted to go; she didn’t know, obviously, how long it would take to sell the house.
“What about visits?” Lesley had asked him not to go to the school, and now he understood why. She didn’t want Kayleigh’s new classmates getting to know him as her dad only to find him being replaced by Ian Waring. And Lesley had said that Kayleigh could spend time with Phil on the holidays, but Christmas had been a washout; she had taken Kayleigh away on holiday. Apart from the week of the court case, he hadn’t seen her since July, and letters and phone calls just weren’t the same. “I think she needs to know she’s still got me if she needs me,” he said. “That she can come to me anytime, or ask me to come to her.”
“She does know that. You told her yourself last week. And I told her, too—we can sort all that out. We can arrange something for Easter—she’s not on holiday until then anyway, and I think she needs any time she’s at home in the meantime to get to know Ian. He’s telling Theresa today, so he’ll be here quite soon.”
At least she understood that Kayleigh would have to get to know Waring; she didn’t think that it would work just by magic.
“She’ll be very disappointed. She thought we might get back together.” He got up to go. “Tell her I’ll let her know my address as soon as I’ve got somewhere permanent.”
Lesley came with him to the door, and he put his jacket back on, stepping out into the chilly air. “When are you telling her about Waring?” he asked.
“I spoke to her this morning.”
Phil frowned, looked at the clock in the hallway. “How? You couldn’t have got there and back today unless you left in the middle of the—” His mouth fell open. “You phoned her, didn’t you! You phoned and told her she’d find this man installed when she got home. Sometimes I just can’t believe how insensitive you are!”
“I thought Kayleigh would prefer it that way. And I think you’re being a little melodramatic.”
“You phoned her, and then just left her in that godforsaken place to brood about it on her own!”
Lesley sighed. “It’s not Dotheboys Hall. And she’s a lot more resilient than you think. She understands the situation.”
“Does she? Well, if you’re not going to see her, I am!”
“No, you’re not. You’d only upset her.”
“And how are you going to stop me?”
“By ringing the school and telling them that I don’t want them to let you see her. So it would be a wasted journey.”
She would do it. And the school wouldn’t go against whatever she decreed. He had no rights, no comeback. If he wasn’t careful, she could cut him out of Kayleigh’s life altogether. He shook his head and turned to go.
“I’ve still got a lot of your things here. What do you want me to do with them?”
He turned back and looked at her—sweetly reasonable, shivering slightly in the sleety wind, as unmoved as if she were replacing a faulty washing machine rather than the man Kayleigh thought of as her father—and told her what she could do with them.
“I don’t think there’s any need to be crude. And I do want to know what you want done with them.”
He looked at the fountain and the pebbles. She had let him do that, knowing all the time that she was going to do this to him. Let him make plans with Kayleigh for the summerhouse, knowing that she was going to move him out to make room for Ian.
Oh, Lesley would give anyone her money and her time; she was generous in every respect except the one that mattered. She was blithely ripping apart his world, Kayleigh’s world, some other woman’s world, and she didn’t care, as long as she got what she wanted. She really didn’t care. He put down the suitcase and scooped up some of the bigger pebbles. “Sell them to pay for a glazier!” he roared.
Lesley ran next door for help while he was venting his anger; he had never hit anyone in his life, but a lot of ornaments and dinner plates had gone west when Lesley had caused his tempe
r to snap. He had never done it quite so spectacularly before, and he had smashed almost all of the windows before two of his neighbors manhandled him out of the driveway and onto the pavement, whereupon Lesley locked the gate and went back inside.
He shook the two men off and walked away, no less angry for his bit of vandalism but grimly satisfied that she had, if only temporarily, lost her bloody serenity.
“It’s been confirmed that it’s a World War Two unexploded bomb, sir. The army want us to evacuate these three streets.”
Tom Finch looked at the map and groaned. All residential streets. “How soon?” he asked.
“Within the hour.”
“And how long do they think it’s going to take to make the bomb safe?”
“Impossible to say.”
So he had to assume that these people might need overnight accommodation. And it was cold—they’d need somewhere with heating, and hot food and drinks would have to be available. The media would have to know what was going on. And the other emergency services should be put on standby in case of accident or injury. But first things first. They had to know who they were evacuating and if they had special needs. Babies, pets, old people, disabled people, pregnant women. Some of them might have to have medical assistance.
Tom ran a hand over hair that was once again springing into tight blond curls now that he was letting what his wife called his SS cut grow out. He blew out his cheeks and plunged in. “OK. Get the troops to do a door-to-door, warning the householders—”
“Can I just stop you there, Tom?”
Now what? It seemed to Tom that every time he opened his mouth, the instructor found something to criticize.
“You don’t have troops, Tom. The army has troops. You have officers.”
Tom sighed. “I know it’s sexist to call women girls, and I know it’s sexist even to call them women in the police force—”
“Service.”
“Service,” Tom repeated, through his teeth. “But what’s wrong with troops? It’s what everyone says—it’s more natural.”
“You’re not trying to win an Oscar, Tom. You’re trying to pass your inspector’s exam. The army’s involved in this exercise—using the word troops could be confusing.”
“I’m talking to another copper!”
“You’re talking to a colleague. In these scenarios, if at no other time in your career, you call senior officers sir—not guv or boss—you call junior officers by their rank and surname, and when you are talking about them, they are all officers or colleagues. Not lads, girls, mates, WPCs, cops, coppers, troops, or anything else.”
“Right.” Tom sighed deeply. In September, for the second time, he had passed Part I, but that was a written exam, just to find out if you knew the law, basically, and he did. But Part II tested your managerial skills, and that had been his downfall last time. His managerial skills were all right as far as they went, but they didn’t, apparently, go far enough. He wasn’t smooth enough for them. If you asked him, this exam was designed to turn out homogenized middle managers who went by the book, rather than real men and women who could instinctively perform in a real, unpredictable job.
“That’s as may be,” Judy had said when he’d been sounding off about it. “But it’s the only way you’re going to become an inspector—then you can be as real as you like, so long as you get the job done and don’t tread on too many toes.”
And he really did want to be an inspector. So now, on his rest day, every week, he was doing the training that Judy had advised him to take. But he wasn’t convinced that he was cut out for inspectordom. Every other scenario seemed to be someone complaining about something. PCs miffed because they hadn’t got a job they were after, women complaining that they weren’t being given a fair crack of the whip by their sergeants, members of the public complaining that someone had given them cheek. If that was what being an inspector was all about, they could keep it.
The instructor smiled. “It’s part of the job. In real life you probably wouldn’t get fourteen situations like that to deal with in the space of two and a half hours. But you might in the exam. And if you handle them well, you’ll pass. It’s as simple as that.”
“And are you saying I’d fail because I’d used the word troops?”
“No. I’m saying you’ll lose points. You have to get seventy-five percent to pass—that’s a high target. So everything that can lose you points should be ironed out now, so that you’re giving yourself the best chance you can.”
So they began again until, at last, it was time to leave the fictional Sandford and the terminally politically correct Westshire police service and return to reality. Tom got into his car and checked his mobile phone, where he found a text message from Lloyd, which read: “Girl, as promised. Mother and baby both gorgeous.” Then another one that just read: “Charlotte Frances.”
He smiled. He’d had a call first thing saying that Saturday’s wedding was off, the birth was on, and Lloyd was going to be there for the main event, despite his belief that he would pass out cold. He tapped out his reply:
Gr8 2 no CF & J OK. R U OK?
A few moments later he got a reply that confirmed that Lloyd was his usual self.
1st r8, m8, ta—& is it NE 1der U can’t spell?
“I’ll clear out now, if you like.”
Theresa shrugged. Ian’s revelation hadn’t come as a surprise; she had known for months that there must be someone else, someone he’d met when he was working in London, because he went back there every chance he got. Or invented reasons to go; today he’d said he was meeting Jerry, but the last she’d heard, Jerry was in Australia, setting up a branch of his company down there. At first, it hadn’t occurred to her that it was anything but work, but then, unlikely though it seemed, she had had to conclude that Ian was seeing someone else. She was surprised that he had taken this long to tell her; she had thought he would be more straightforward than that.
“And you can stay here as long as you like. I mean . . . I expect we should sell it eventually, but there’s absolutely no hurry from my point of view.”
In the sixties, Ian’s father had been a woodsman employed by Stansfield Development Corporation, the body that oversaw the rapidly expanding industrial new town and was hanging on to as much of its natural forest as it could. The secluded woodland cottage had come with the job; Ian had taken over the tenancy on his father’s retirement, and he and Theresa had bought it at a considerable discount in the late eighties when home ownership had been the government’s flagship policy. They had paid off the mortgage, and the house was worth a great deal more than they had paid for it; even with her joint ownership, he would get a reasonable profit, and Ian never had any spare money. Whenever he made it, he managed to spend it, so why was there no hurry?
“Oh, yes,” she said, remembering, smiling a little. “She’s rich, isn’t she?”
“Her husband left her very well off.”
“She’s rich.”
He smiled a little, too. “All right. Yes. She’s rich.”
They had both known that their relationship had run its course; Theresa wasn’t going to pretend indignation or hurt that she didn’t feel. But though she knew Lesley Newton only as a name that Ian had mentioned, she was puzzled. Lesley didn’t really seem Ian’s type. He was a fish-and-chips man, and she organized and attended high-powered charity functions where every other face was famous. And the secretiveness just wasn’t Ian’s style. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” Theresa asked.
“Before what?”
“Before you started sleeping with her. Or at least once you had. Why meet in secret for months and months?”
Ian looked a little sheepish. “She had some sort of problem with her daughter. She wanted me to wait until it was resolved, and I—well, I preferred waiting here to living in some London flat.”
Theresa smiled again. “She’s got a problem daughter?”
“No! No—I don’t think so. Just the usual teenage angst thing, I imagine
. And whatever it was, it’s all sorted out now.”
Trusting Ian. “But you don’t know what it was?”
“No—well, it’s none of my business, really.”
“Have you met the daughter?”
“No, not yet.”
Theresa shook her head. “Oh, Ian.”
“What does that mean?”
“Are you sure you know what you’re letting yourself in for?”
“Look—other women would be screaming at me and throwing my clothes out of the window. Not telling me to watch my step.”
“I’m the discarded lover, and I should act like it?”
“Instead of like my mother, yes!”
She felt like his mother. Ian was jumping feetfirst into something he knew nothing about. “Why would I do that? I’m very fond of you, and I do think you should watch your step. I don’t like the sound of unspecified crises with teenage daughters who haven’t even met you yet.”
An electronic rendition of the “William Tell Overture” broke the silence that followed her statement, and Ian spoke briefly and cryptically to someone on his mobile, then looked at her.
“That was Lesley. She—she’s in a bit of a state. Her ex threw a bit of a wobbly when he found out about me. She wants me to go there tonight.”
“Does she? And is that what you’re going to do?”
Ian looked distinctly uncomfortable. “I suppose so.”
“How are you going to get there? The last train’s in five minutes.”
“I’ll drive, of course.”
She smiled. “Make the most of it. Driving it in London won’t be much fun.” The Alfa Romeo Spider had been Ian’s present to himself when his business had finally made some real money; it had cost twice as much as her van. “What about the postcrisis teenage daughter? Won’t your arrival precipitate another crisis?”
“I wondered about that, but Lesley says she’s away at school.”
“And she knows, does she, that you’ll be there when she comes home again?”
