by Gytha Lodge
* * *
—
HANSON SHUT HER desktop down and stretched. It was nearly nine, and she wondered whether she ought to be finding something else to do or just call it a night. Without a scheduled pub trip, she had a free evening to do other, nonwork things. She ought to feel grateful instead of slightly lost.
Well, if she had free time, she ought to do something with it. She pulled out her phone and was mulling over which of the many friends she hadn’t seen in too long she should call, when a message arrived from Ben Lightman.
I’m free now. Could we still do pub?
Hanson felt momentarily irritated. Had his date gone badly? Were she and O’Malley a backup option, or maybe expected to sit and listen to how awful it had turned out to be?
Somehow, though, she couldn’t imagine him drowning his sorrows, and with a sigh, she messaged back to say that she was around, but O’Malley had already left.
OK. See you in twenty?
* * *
—
HANSON HAD INSTALLED herself at a window table in the Marriott bar. The venue had been her choice. O’Malley’s nonattendance meant they could go somewhere with a wine list instead of what she would generally term an “old-man pub.” And sometimes a wine list was what you wanted on a Friday night.
She was still wearing her work clothes, of course. She wondered whether Lightman would be in something more casual. Or something geared toward going out.
She had her iPad out now, and was scrolling through the interview transcripts from their questioning of Aidan Poole, comparing his two accounts with each other and with what Zoe’s parents had told them. She made handwritten notes as she went, but was struggling to concentrate fully.
She wasn’t quite sure how drinking with just Lightman was going to go, and it was making her nervous. She found herself, as a result, looking frequently toward the door.
He appeared in the end, and she saw, with relief, that he was also still in his suit from earlier on. She lifted a hand. He was grinning as he came over.
“Surely you’ve done enough for one Friday?”
She gave him a wry smile. “It’s how they get to you, isn’t it? Make you feel like you have free time, but make you so curious about the case that you can’t help working on it.”
“Could I make you curious about a drink instead?” He glanced toward the bar.
“I guess so,” Hanson said. “Gin for me.”
“Anything in that…?”
“Well, tonic if I have to.”
The barman moved slowly, so Hanson finished reading O’Malley’s interview with Victor and Maeve while Ben loitered, and then turned the iPad off and shoved it in her backpack along with the notebook.
“Here you go,” Lightman said eventually, putting two highball glasses on the table.
“Thanks.” She took two good swallows of gin, and then she said breezily, “I was surprised you made it. You sounded…busy.”
“Yes,” Lightman said, and then his expression became very slightly uncomfortable. “I’ve got a lot going on, but…”
Hanson suddenly felt like she was interviewing an unwilling suspect, and looked away. “Sorry. I’m not meaning to pry.”
“You’re not,” Lightman said, and then, “I had to see my dad. He’s not well.”
Hanson hadn’t been prepared for news of that kind. It was so far removed from a rant about a date gone wrong that she felt an awkward pause arising.
“I’m sorry,” she said in the end, and briefly put a hand out to touch his arm before withdrawing it to her side of the table. “Is it…a sudden thing?”
Lightman shook his head. “No, not exactly. We thought he was all better and now it’s come back.”
“Right. That’s…shit,” she said quietly. “Your poor dad.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Anyway, what are you thinking about Zoe Swardadine’s killer? Any wagers?”
She couldn’t help feeling disappointed. She’d thought he was going to open up to her about it all. But she supposed that wasn’t really how Ben Lightman worked.
She started talking about the case anyway, quietly enough that none of the distant occupants of the bar could hear. It only took her a minute to get well and truly into the conversation. She updated him on Aidan Poole’s affair, and how he’d neatly hidden that he was married in their original interview, despite the fact that it would clearly come out.
“Which makes me think hiding things is an ingrained habit,” she said. “My experience of people like that is that they’re pretty used to living a lie. They instinctively conceal everything.”
He looked at her, a very slight smile on his face. “Was that the terrible ex’s style? Covering up everything?”
Hanson gave him a wry nod. She’d never given him the full story on Damian, but she’d outlined some of the harassment, and Lightman was smart enough to know that what she had described was an abusive relationship. “Sure was. He hid messages to girls, attempts to get in touch with old flames, any meet-ups…receipts for crazily expensive purchases…” She gave a short laugh. “Damian loved to pretend that he’d had all this stuff he was buying ‘for ages.’ Or that his mum had given it to him for his birthday, when he owed me thousands and should have been paying me back.” She shook her head. “Anyway, Aidan Poole may or may not have been a huge narcissist, but I can potentially see some parallels.”
“Agreed,” Lightman replied. “Did you read O’Malley’s summary of his chat with Victor Varos? It made me think of that Brontë novel Villette. The one where she’s clearly in love with the handsome young man and he’s totally unaware he’s hurting her when he falls for someone else.”
“Wait. You read a book?” Hanson asked.
“Shut up,” Lightman said amicably.
“I haven’t read it anyway,” Hanson admitted with a grin. “So does she kill him? In the book?”
Lightman laughed as he picked up his gin. “No, she falls for someone else instead.”
“Questionable relevance, then,” Hanson replied.
“Hey,” Lightman argued. “This is the early stages of a new case. And as the chief says…”
“ ‘Never discount any lateral thinking,’ ” Hanson said, and then shook her head. “Not sure that’s quite what he meant, Ben.”
Lightman drained the rest of the glass. “I need another one. Maybe another three or four.”
“I’m in,” Hanson answered. “But the next couple are on me. And after that, I’m going to need a really dirty pizza. Just to warn you.”
“I’m pretty sure we can schedule it in.”
From then on, they descended quite rapidly into drunkenness. Drunk Lightman was surprisingly silly. Hanson’s joking comment about him being OCD produced a loud “Right!” and then a deliberate messing up of all the contents of their table.
Hanson started laughing at him.
“What?”
“That’s not exactly a mess, is it? Two glasses near the edge and a menu on its side.”
“You want to see a mess?” he asked. He got up and went to a recently vacated table of six. There were still a dozen or so glasses sitting on it, and he began stacking them up. The eight other people still drinking in other parts of the bar started looking over in confusion.
“What are you doing?” Hanson’s laughter had grown to the level where she was trying to stop but failing.
“I’m being messy,” Lightman said, and carried two unstable piles of assorted glasses back over to their table. “Look.” He started placing the glasses down. “A mess. See?” A few more glasses. “And it doesn’t bother me at all.”
Once she’d managed to get the laughter under control, Hanson said to him, “All right, all right. You’re not OCD. You’re just…an idiot. OK?”
Lightman gave her a triumphant smile and sat down in front of the nest of
dirty glasses. “Much better.”
Hanson shook her head at him, and he looked back at her with a strange expression. And then he let out a breath. “We’ll probably have to work tomorrow,” he said.
Hanson tried to keep smiling. “Yes. But we’ve got ages to sober up.”
He looked down at the glasses and then said, “I shouldn’t…make you stay up drinking. But thank you for the cheering-up session.”
“Anytime,” she said as he rose. She felt like everything had been turned around on her suddenly. She was left looking after him in confusion and wondering why.
April—nineteen months before
Zoe had taken Angeline home, away from Richie and whatever Angeline had been planning with him in the bar. She fed her tea and stroked her hair until she’d fallen asleep in front of a showing of The Fugitive. Zoe hadn’t mentioned Aidan. She’d told herself it was because it wouldn’t be fair when Angeline was struggling, but the truth was that the idea hurt too much. Telling Angeline that he’d lied meant that things really were over, and it made her ache to think that.
She spent the next four hours trying to work out whether Aidan had been telling the truth. She looked on his Facebook page and university pages for mention of a wife who was still a life partner, and she saw nothing. There were no recent photos, only some from a couple of years before. The lack of trace gave her a ray of hope, until it occurred to her that he might be a serial adulterer and good at hiding his tracks.
Some of his words had floated back to her in the darkness before midnight. She remembered how he’d defended his wife, who he said didn’t deserve to be robbed of money. He hadn’t blamed her. He hadn’t done what Isaac had done to Maeve, and made his wife out to be some horrible, controlling bitch.
Remembering it again, something about it chimed with her. It had sounded real, she realized. It had sounded true. And the expression in his eyes had been real, too.
With the anger gone, all she had was a yearning to hear that it was all right, and she didn’t have to let him go. She pulled a sweater on and walked slowly downstairs. At the door, she heard Maeve moving in the kitchen, and in a sudden nervous rush at being discovered and made to talk, she grabbed her coat and fled the house.
Even then, she wasn’t quite sure. She found herself walking back to his hotel, so slowly that it took her forty minutes. Her hands were numb with cold by the time she arrived.
She came and stood in the deep-red-and-cream entrance, and eventually pulled out her phone. She’d had so many things to say to him, but she didn’t have it in her anymore.
He picked up after a single ring, and she heard fear in his voice as he answered with her name.
“I’m in the lobby,” she said, and then she sat heavily on one of the chairs.
Within a minute, he was stepping out of one of the lifts and over to her. As she stood, he put his hand out to her face and stroked her cheek. It was profoundly reassuring. Not just the touch, the fact that he was happy to be seen with her. He wasn’t trying to hide her away. It was like this was all legitimate. OK. Moral.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice a broken thing. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s OK,” she said. And she followed him to the lift with her hand tucked into his.
* * *
—
“ECONOMICS?” MAEVE ASKED with a slightly disapproving note. “Come on. If you’re going to date a lecturer, you should at least choose one who marks your work.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s unfortunate,” Zoe said, and gave a short laugh.
“Maybe he could switch,” Maeve said. She was sitting cross-legged on the scuffed, sagging red sofa they shared with the rest of the house.
Zoe was in the kitchenette, pulling shopping out of Tesco bags to pack it into the fridge and her two cupboards. She wasn’t really doing it efficiently. Too much of her attention was on the conversation. She was torn between wanting to talk about Aidan, and not wanting to have to answer any questions at all.
In truth, she was afraid of Maeve’s disapproval. She was afraid that Maeve would say all the things to her that Zoe had once said to Maeve about Isaac, and would make her feel that what she was doing was wrong. Which might have been all right if part of Zoe hadn’t been thinking exactly the same.
She’d talked about it at great length with Aidan the night before. Everything he’d said had been reasonable. Persuasive. Reassuring. He’d talked about the coldness that had arisen between him and his wife, but he’d also kept up his defense of her. He’d said it was just a very sad thing, and not her fault. And he’d looked at her with eyes that were clear and open and honest. She felt as though she could see right into him as she held his gaze.
Perhaps if he’d painted Greta as some kind of awful person, Zoe would have broken it off. She wasn’t young and naïve enough to fall for that, and she wasn’t going to let herself become one of those women who blamed her rival. Not when her rival had all the rights. However much their marriage might be a sham, Greta was being wronged with every touch or kiss between them. She had a right to know.
Aidan had told her, though, that he was sure Greta had cheated on him in the past, and that had helped her feel better, too.
“There were seven months where she barely seemed to notice me,” he said with a slightly bitter smile. “She only seemed to have any energy when she was going out to meetings, and she put…she put all this effort into how she looked. Which wasn’t happening at home.”
“Did you confront her about it?” Zoe had asked him.
“I felt…torn,” he’d answered thoughtfully. “It made me feel wretched, but I almost wanted it to carry on and come to a head, so we could end things in a way that wasn’t my fault.”
It had been hard not to feel for him. She couldn’t imagine no longer loving the person you’d married, but not being hard-hearted enough to just leave them.
“So if he’s forty,” Maeve said, “has he been married before? Any kids?”
“He’s thirty-nine,” Zoe said, feeling a horrible nervous twist in her stomach. “And no kids.” She picked up a can and turned toward the cupboard before she added, “He has one almost-ex-wife, though.”
“Almost-ex?” Maeve’s tone was whip-sharp. “What does that mean?”
“That he hasn’t managed to divorce her yet,” Zoe replied, keeping her back to Maeve. The usually awful prospect of organizing her cupboards was suddenly appealing. She needed to keep her hands busy.
“Is he in the process of it?”
Zoe started pulling tins out and stacking them on the counter. “He will be,” she said. “In two months, once his inheritance from his mum is in their account. He doesn’t want to do her out of that by starting things now.”
There was a pause, punctuated by the solid clunk of each can on the worktop.
“Do you think that’s true?” Maeve asked in the end.
Zoe gave a slight outbreath and turned to face her friend. She didn’t like the expression in Maeve’s pale eyes. The concern and the slight satisfaction she thought she saw.
Zoe could read quite a lot into that expression. That Maeve felt rather exultant at this turning of the tables, and maybe a little superior now that she’d told Isaac she was never going to see him again. Which was spectacularly unfair, Zoe thought. Isaac, unlike Aidan, had been a happily married man before Maeve had come along.
“I think so, yes,” she said at last. “I think he’s a decent man. He doesn’t tell me how awful she is. He says a lot of their unhappiness is his fault, too, and it’s desperately sad how they’ve fallen out of love. He says they both know it.”
“So he’s talked to her about it?”
There was another pause, this one because Zoe was thinking back for what was probably the fiftieth time over what Aidan had said. She’d certainly had the impression that the two of them had at some point agree
d that things weren’t working, but when she tried to remember him actually saying it, she came up with nothing.
“I’m not sure how open they’ve been,” she said finally. “As far as I can tell, it’s very much out in the open that things are over. But then…I can see how you’d get to a point where nobody can bear to bring it up.”
Maeve watched her for a little while longer and then sighed and looked away. “I can see that, but…I can also see a situation where he’s decided it’s over, and she still thinks things are OK.”
“I’m sure it’s not like that,” Zoe said firmly. “And she cheated on him a while ago, which he never confronted her about.”
“OK,” Maeve said, lifting her tea. She was still looking off into the distance somewhere, her expression thoughtful. “So…she doesn’t know about you, then?”
Zoe felt a momentary drop in her stomach. It was partly having to admit the truth, and partly the knowledge that Maeve was going to give her a lecture. Maeve, who always asked for advice and never took it, and would come back asking the same questions next time, stuck in the same loop, perpetually. Maeve, who always made the wrong decision. Maeve, who had pursued a married man for a year.
“No,” Zoe admitted. “No. She doesn’t. But she will.”
Maeve nodded very slowly, and then fixed her gaze on her. There was less judgment this time, and more sympathy. “Be careful, Zo,” she said. “Just be careful.”
Hanson peered out at the outside world as she made herself porridge. It was gray and dull-looking, but at the moment, dry. She weighed her options and decided on a run. She’d invested in a light running backpack a couple of months before, and it had meant the freedom to run to work a few mornings a week. Having deposited a towel and wash kit at work, she could get away with stuffing her suit and shirt into her backpack and changing at the station.
