by Louise Voss
Perhaps not this morning, though. He looked rested and relaxed after his two days off whereas I felt achy and sallow, tense with anticipation.
‘Good weekend?’ I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.
He shrugged. ‘Not bad. Took Kit swimming. Lunch with the outlaws, that kind of thing.’
That kind of family thing, I thought. The kind I know nothing about. He would have taken Kit to the same municipal pool at which he and I started our relationship eighteen months earlier. I’d already known who he was at work, of course, but seeing him thrashing up and down the fast lane in a pair of budgie smugglers effectively disguised him as well as if he’d been in a hijab. When he stopped at the shallow end to de-mist his goggles, his shoulders heaving, water streaming off his bald head, I thought he looked familiar, but I didn’t manage to place him until I bumped into him again in the foyer.
‘Oh!’ I’d been physically shocked to realise who he was, a sharp electric sizzle to my still-damp skin. ‘Hello sir.’
He was sorting out coins for a vending-machine coffee.
‘Waitsey.’ He nodded and smiled, and I blushed. I hadn’t known that he was aware of my existence let alone my nickname. ‘Saw you in there. You’re a fast swimmer.’
‘So are you, boss.’
‘You don’t need to call me that out of hours. It’s Adrian. Would you like a coffee?’
He fed a series of twenty-pence pieces into the slot and pressed the button for cappuccino – presumably for himself – but nothing happened, not even when he pushed the coin return button. I noticed with idle interest the way he pushed it so hard that the tip of his post-swimming, pruney white finger turned bright red. ‘Sod’s law. Did you say you wanted one?’
I opened my mouth but he continued: ‘Tell you what, let’s pop into that coffee shop round the corner. The coffee’s far superior and you get it in an actual mug rather than a plastic cup that burns your hands.’
That was how it started. Innocuous at first, regular swims followed by a coffee. Then the coffees turned into clandestine pints, and the peck on the cheek into full-blown snogs … and now here we were, eighteen months on, occasional sex on his dead mum’s carpet, me in love and feeling lonely as hell. The faintest whiff of chlorine would forever remind me of him.
Back in the office I looked him square in the eye. ‘This isn’t working for me anymore, sir.’
I didn’t usually call him ‘sir’ unless other people were around.
‘What isn’t, Waitsey?’ His voice was concerned but cagey. We had a tacit agreement not to discuss our relationship in the office.
‘I’d like to request a transfer.’
He looked surprised but not hurt or upset. ‘To where?’
‘I don’t have a preference. Somewhere I can have a fresh start. It shouldn’t be hard to find another force to take me, should it? I’d like to do ARG training so I’d be happy to go wherever the next course is, outside of Wiltshire of course. I don’t have any baggage, no husband or kids, not even a mortgage.’
I didn’t mean to sound bitter but it probably came out that way.
‘What about your friends?’
I shrugged. ‘It’s only Sal, really. I’m sure we’ll keep in touch.’
Adrian gazed at me and I had to swallow and look away. ‘We’d be very sorry to lose you, Waitsey.’
‘We?’
He didn’t rise to the bait, merely nodding as if he hadn’t understood the subtext, and it was at that moment that I realised it really was over, that I had no option now but to see this out. I wouldn’t miss Weller and Quint, or my narrow bed at Nicky’s. I’d miss her and Sal, and Adrian of course – but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing how much.
Adrian weaved a pencil deftly around his fingers.
‘How long have you been with us now?’
‘Almost three years, sir.’
‘Is that all? Seems much longer. You’re part of the furniture.’
I gritted my teeth.
‘In a good way, I mean. One of the team.’
We sat in silence for a moment, openly gazing at each other. I had to look away first, worried that I was going to cry. What would he do when I’d gone; move straight on to the next gullible PC?
‘Actually, there might be something…’ he said pensively. ‘Not sure it’ll be suitable though. Let me look into it and we’ll talk again tomorrow.’
At least he sounded reluctant, which made me feel a tiny bit better.
18
‘UC? I thought I was joining Armed Response!’
I’d never even thought about being an undercover officer before. My mind was reeling. It was only two days since I’d told him that I wanted a transfer, and here we were again in his office, him with a slightly hesitant expression on his face.
‘Bloke I know in Surrey Police just happened to mention in passing the other week that they needed someone, so when you said you wanted a change, I gave him a bell and got the intel. They’re after a woman about your age, pretty, to chat up this guy they think topped his wife. He can’t find anyone in his force to go into deep cover, because they all have families and that. But look – nobody’s forcing you. You’d have to have all the training, and it’s a major job. I didn’t think he’d take you on, as it would be your first assignment, but when I told them how bright you are he sounded keen.’
‘A honey-trap? Deep cover? Me? You’re kidding.’
‘Yeah. They can’t find anything on him any other way, but they’re sure he’s hiding something. Completely hush-hush, obviously, and even if you did uncover something, you’d have to be very smart about how you presented it in court.’
‘Sounds a bit dodgy,’ I said.
‘It is,’ he agreed. ‘But seriously, no pressure. I can arrange ARG too if you’d rather.’
‘But they can’t find anyone else to do it?’ I supposed I could always do Armed Response at a later date…
‘No. His ears pricked right up when I told him about your record, and your discretion.’
I snorted. ‘Because I’m having an affair with the boss.’
‘No! We don’t need to mention that.’
I bet we don’t, I thought. And yet I felt a thrill of anticipation at the thought of the assignment. This would be a whole lot better than sitting in Salisbury nick writing up interviews. My life was moving up a gear. Sod Adrian and his mum’s swirly carpet, sod karaoke night and my cot in the world’s smallest bedroom.
‘What training will I get?’
‘Good girl,’ he said, although I hadn’t said I’d do it. ‘If you’re certain. It’ll be your basic Level One Surveillance to start with, and then another one straight after that, I imagine. They won’t throw you in the deep end, don’t worry. I’ll put you in touch with DS Metcalfe in Guildford and he’ll sort it all out for you.’
As far as I was aware, the Level One undercover course would only teach me to be a test purchaser – in a nutshell, qualify me to pretend to buy drugs as a punter – surely they’d give me a lot more training than that?
As if he’d read my mind, Adrian added, ‘Actually, thinking about it, they’ll definitely make you do Level Two as well. That’ll get you down to brass tacks for the deep cover stuff. A lot of it’s just common sense anyway.’
I was so freaking excited I couldn’t sit still. ‘On it, sir,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the opportunity.’
‘Don’t let me down, Waitsey,’ he said, and the grin he gave me did make my heart break, just a little bit.
It all happened bewilderingly fast. I gave Nicky notice on the box room that same day, cleared my workplace at the station and entertained fantasies of me becoming a kind of less glamorous Mata Hari. Minus the firing squad though, hopefully.
The worst bit was having to lie to Sal. I wasn’t allowed to let anybody know what I’d be doing, of course, so I just told him that I was transferring to another PC role in Surrey and that I’d ring as soon as I was settled. We didn’t even get together for
a farewell drink. I never saw him again.
I moved up to temporary digs in London to go on the two six-week training courses, which I did back to back, while my new team in Surrey Police sorted out everything else.
By Christmas Eve of 2006 I was sitting on an unfamiliar black pleather sofa in a tiny studio flat in Hampton, wearing a Santa hat and wondering what the hell I was doing, apart from comfort-eating my way through an entire box of mince pies. I knew no one there and no one knew me. It was both terrifying and liberating.
There had been no great emotional farewell with Adrian either. I only saw him one more time after the meeting when he gave me the brief. A few days before Christmas I’d driven back to Wiltshire to pick up the rest of my meagre belongings and we had one last rendezvous.
I had hoped that he might express some kind of regret or apology for messing me around – I was long past the stage of anything more than that, of yearning for the ‘I’m leaving my wife because I want to be with you for ever’-type declarations – but it was so far from a great emotional farewell that it was almost laughable. He did allow us to make love between the chilly damp sheets on the spare bed instead of on his dead mother’s carpet. Perhaps that was his idea of a romantic goodbye.
It certainly wasn’t mine, on a lumpy mattress with such a sag in the middle that we were thrown together on it, flailing like drowning fishermen. I realised I preferred him when he had his uniform on. Naked, he reminded me of something soft and formless, a mollusc without a shell.
It was pretty clear we’d both already moved on.
Afterwards, over a cup of tea in Mrs McCloughlin’s formica and lino kitchen, Adrian did say, ‘I hope you find what you’re looking for, Waitsey.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean … I hope you meet someone you can settle down with. Have kids and that.’
And what? I thought. I hated it when people said ‘and that’. He did it a lot.
‘I really do want kids,’ I admitted.
‘I know you do. I’m sure it’ll happen for you. Probably just when you think it’s the last thing on your mind, and with the last person you thought it would be, but you’ll suddenly realise it was what you were looking for all along.’
This was a very cryptic remark. Adrian wasn’t normally given to philosophy – perhaps this was his way of expressing remorse.
‘Who knows,’ I said, making a face at him as I tucked my shirt back into my jeans. ‘Got a job to do first, though.’
Back in my studio flat in Hampton, I reminded myself that it wasn’t the first Christmas I’d spent on my own, and I didn’t mind anyway, not really. I wasn’t sure I could cope with what most people believed to be an ideal family Christmas; overexcited children running around screaming, adults bickering and drinking too much, the problematic relatives you only ever saw once a year and that was too often…
Even when I was a kid, Christmas was just Mum, Dad and me, with the occasional addition of some elderly auntie or another who had usually popped her clogs by the following year. My dearth of relatives never really bothered me until Mum and Dad died, but even then it was more of an embarrassment than a grief. If I was invited to celebrate with friends I normally declined, preferring my own company to the awkward jollity of someone else’s distant relatives.
I dropped the empty mince pie box into the bin and decided that I wouldn’t crack open the wine until I’d done a few hours’ work. Christmas or not, the new job was about to begin, and I had a lot to do.
I hadn’t been given all the details of my brief yet, but Metcalfe had provided me with the target’s name, Ed Naismith, and that of his missing wife, Shelagh, so I opened my laptop and immersed myself in all the online newspaper articles I could find about her disappearance. Then I searched Facebook – still in its infancy and therefore no help to me at all – obviously this had already been done, but I needed to keep on top of it in case of any new updates. Daylight faded and I imagined the darkness as holly and mulled wine-scented, pressing against the grimy window of my bedsit, everyone else’s festive breath fogging it up.
I studied every photograph of Ed Naismith that I could find online, stills from the press conference he’d given, and the photo he’d released of him and Shelagh sitting at a table in the bar of what looked like a country club or tennis club (lots of gilt-inscribed championship tournament boards on the wall behind them), both of them in tennis whites raising a glass to whomever was behind the camera. Shelagh was smiling but I thought there was a tenseness about her eyes – or perhaps I was just imagining it in the light of what was to happen in their lives. I scrutinised Ed’s face until I could have erased his features and drawn back in every line and curve.
He was a good-looking man; tall and broad, with a shock of greying, sandy hair and bright-blue eyes. Confident, probably arrogant, looked far younger than his fifty-one years. I suppressed an internal shudder of relief that he was fit; it would make it so much easier to flirt. I wondered how best to engineer a meeting with him. He didn’t seem to have a dog, which was a shame. I’d love to have a dog myself, and it would have been the perfect excuse for bumping into him when our dog-walking routes just happened to coincide … Perhaps I could join whatever sports club that photo was taken in? The trouble was, I was rubbish at tennis and I’d never played golf in my life. Still, where there was a will … I did a search for local sports and tennis clubs, and found a list that I printed out. I could go and visit them all, check if I recognised the background of that photo. That would be a start.
At that moment a text arrived from Nicky: HAPPY CHRISTMAS MY LOVE. I HOPE YOU HAVE A GOOD ONE WHEREVER YOU ARE. XXX. I should have got rid of that phone, but I hadn’t. I’d been hoping for more messages, Sal or Weller or Quint even, but the time for that sort of sentimentality was past – although I felt sad that not even Sal had texted.
Christmas was my cut-off period. I replied to Nicky, then I took out the SIM card and snipped it into tiny neat slivers with my nail scissors. I did a factory reset on the phone, deleting all the data remaining, and popped in my new SIM. New number, new life, new goal. The realisation that I myself could be someone new too was thrilling and heady.
19
January 2007
In the end, I didn’t need to recce any country clubs or take up tennis lessons. My new boss, DS Metcalfe, had already decided exactly how Ed Naismith and I were going to meet.
‘Ever done any acting, Waites?’
I thought that Metcalfe was referring to going undercover – what was that, if not acting? I was about to reassure him of my poker face when he continued, ‘Am-dram, I mean. Tits and teeth. The smell of greasepaint, musical theatre, Romeo oh Romeo, is this a dagger I see before me? Et cetera, et cetera.’
‘Oh – actual acting, on a stage? Not since I was in school, no.’
Metcalfe laughed. ‘Better brush up on your Stanislavsky techniques then. You’re going to audition for a play.’
‘What?’
It wasn’t that I couldn’t – or even that I didn’t want to – but this was a bit of a curveball. Ed Naismith wasn’t, unless I’d missed that part of the briefing, a treader of the boards.
‘But he was a GP, not an actor!’
Metcalfe nodded. ‘He was. He’s also a keen amateur actor and director and, helpfully for you, he’s about to direct a play for his local luvvies, the Molesey Amateur Dramatic Group, known locally as MADS. Perfect opportunity for you to get to know him, so it would be ideal if you got a part, don’t you think? I suggest you suddenly get very interested indeed in am-dram…’
This conversation was taking place in a small windowless interview room at Woking police station.
‘Sounds fun,’ I said, doubtfully. I supposed it was preferable to me joining a tennis club when I barely knew which end of the racket to hold.
DS Metcalfe handed me a thick manila folder. ‘This is your bible,’ he said ponderously, doing a strange sort of fluttery thing with his eyelids that seemed to be his indication of
how serious an issue was. He’d done it a lot since I met him an hour ago. ‘Notes on Shelagh Naismith’s disappearance, transcripts of all the interviews we did with her family and friends. Ed Naismith doesn’t have an alibi for the night she disappeared and as you know, we’ve never found a body.’
‘So why do you think he did it then?’
Metcalfe pursed his lips. He was a large man with very fleshy lips, dark and shiny-looking, like offal, and he was balding, a domed head emerging out of the tonsure, just a little island of hair stranded on the top of his head. You need to shave that right off, mate, I thought, trying not to stare at it. He was unappealing, physically, but seemed kind and polite. I thought we’d probably get on fine – which was fortunate, because he was going to be my still centre of the new turning world in which I’d found myself. My handler, only contact point, sole confidante.
‘Just something about him,’ he said. ‘Slippery bastard, too smug for his own good. Doesn’t seem half as upset as he should about his wife going missing. That, and the fact that her sister’s convinced he’s done her in. Hysterical, she was. You’ll see, it’s all in there.’ He tapped the folder. ‘I’ll show you the videos of his interviews, too, see what you think. He fancies himself as an actor and it all just felt very rehearsed. We’ve got him in three times, searched his house, but we’ve never had anything we can pin on him. He just keeps insisting that she suffered from depression and might have harmed herself.’
‘And did she? Have depression, I mean?’
He nodded. ‘GP report’s in there.’
‘Not a GP from the same practice Naismith was attached to, I take it?’
‘No. And her doctor claims not to know him – I know, that’s what I thought, too, but it’s another dead end. You’re our last shot, Waites. If you don’t uncover anything, we’ll have to write her off as another misper, and leave it at that. Maybe some poor dog-walking bastard will stumble over her body in the woods at some point, then at least we’ll be able to figure out what happened, but if not, we’re counting on you to see if you can dig up anything we could use to nail him. Any questions?’
