The following afternoon, Thursday June 12th, was one of those infuriatingly unsettled sorts of days, the kind only a British summer can throw up. The sun was just strong enough to warm a man's face, lulling him for some moments into a vague sense of summer before the next grey-bellied cloud spreads its cooling shadow, has him reaching for his jacket. A listless, not-one-thing-nor-the-other sort of day.
Listless, yes... Like the weather, I was feeling a little that way myself. There was the tiredness of course, the countless recent miles beginning to catch up with me. More significant however was the lukewarm evaluation which Ray Tindall, the Durham-based merchant, had given my wine. 'Rather ordinary' was his comment; words as damning as a chef being told his food is a little on the insipid side. He'd taken a few boxes in the end, but not nearly as many as I'd hoped for and at a disappointingly knocked down price. I could only hope what Mr Bartley in Luton had said was true, that a wine producer's profits grow exponentially with the passing of the years. In the meantime, I'd have to do exactly what I'd promised myself I wouldn't do: take out a second loan to see me through until the following year. Not for the first time, I wondered if I hadn't made a huge mistake. An emotional crisis is one thing, bankruptcy quite another. Maybe I should have just seen out the remaining eighteen months of my career, bought myself a little bungalow somewhere, dedicated my retirement years to birdwatching and the cultivation of roses. Wasn't that what normal people did?
A cemetary perhaps isn't the best place for a man to try to regain lost spirits, but that was where I found myself. Beneath my feet lay twin cremation plaques, small squares of deep burgandy stone surrounded by white gravel. My mother's was the older of the two by just over a year, and hence ever so slightly more weatherbeaten. She was taken away by cancer whilst still in her sixties. As for my father, a long history of angina took the official blame; really though, we all knew that it was a broken heart which did for him in the end.
As I knelt to change the flowers, I realised that the lilies I was removing were still quite fresh. I wondered who'd put them there. Not my brother Frank, certainly - he'd said the previous evening that he hadn't been out that way for several months.
As I placed the new flowers as neatly as I could into the grills, I felt a tear sting at my eye. Maybe it was because I was feeling sorry for myself. Maybe it was the reflective silence of the cemetary, the stress and torment and sheer upheaval of the last two years suddenly crashing down on me.
I brushed the tear away, tried to get a grip: my father wouldn't have approved of such emotional nonsense. I remembered going there with him just before he died. It would have been my mother's birthday, a drizzly midweek day in April. I'd taken a couple of hours off to accompany him. Don't be so bloody daft lad, he'd chided as I'd voiced a few thoughts out loud. There's nuthin' in there but an overpriced urn full of ash. And while he was right - while it's healthier perhaps to accept the truth rather than delude oneself - I wished we could have shed a few tears together all the same. Sang her 'Happy Birthday'.
Ever the pragmatist, ever the scrimper and saver, he'd bought the side-by-side plots a full decade and a half before they were needed; the local undertaker had offered a special discount for pre-bookers still in their fifties. Rather than parsimonious, I instead liked to think that his motives had been purely romantic, that he'd simply wanted to guarantee his eternal resting place next to my mother before possible overcrowding could become an issue. Though I'd never made any concrete provisions myself, I'd always imagined that when the time came Heather and I would have a similar arrangement, that as in life we'd face death squarely in the face. Side by side, shoulder to shoulder.
Though I'm not a religious man, there was something infinitely sad about the thought that she'd now take her final repose next to him. Gordon Foster.
Even this, I thought. He'd stolen even this.
*
The Albert Park Rapist would turn out to be a forty-two year old called Adam Hubbard who lived in the leafy suburbia of Berwick Hills with his elderly widowed mother. His IQ was low enough to claim incapacity benefits, but not so low as to be careless. He would eventually go down for six separate counts of aggravated rape over a fourteen-month reign of terror, but these are just the ones who came forward. Hubbard himself claimed to have got to double figures. Boasted about it, considered it a badge of honour.
He seemed not to have had any particular preference. Teenage or mature, short or tall, blonde or brunette, it was all the same. It was sufficient just that his victims were representatives of femalekind, to be punished for a lifetime of consistently spurning and ignoring him. Made to suffer for his own inadequacies.
He'd spent a large percentage of his state hand outs gathering together a nauseatingly vast collection of illegal rape-fantasy porn. So often viewed in simulated form, he'd gradually come to view the crime as a sort of game, one in which the victim was willing and complicit. With no job or family with which to occupy himself, he'd spent his evenings watching and waiting. At six feet and sixteen stone, he was as strong as a bull. He'd crouch there in the bushes or behind a wall, the items of what he'd referred to as his 'kit' to hand in coat pockets: balaclava, gloves, duct-tape, retractable knife...
The irony was that he'd lived just around the corner from Diane. She'd been on nodding terms with both he and his mother for years.
She had nothing to feel guilty about, absolutely not. I don't think she'd ever been quite able to forgive herself, all the same.
Her house wasn't difficult to spot - the one with the lawnless and flowerless front garden. Her first husband Ian had been something of a green-fingered type, she absolutely not. When he'd walked out she'd had the whole thing paved ruthlessly over, an act of neighbourhood violence which had seen her excluded from school-run rosters and reciprocal summer barbeque invitations. Those grey concrete slabs in the midst of all that lower middle class suburbia, they represented twin fingers raised defiantly upright at the world. It was for this, I could only suppose, that she'd never moved.
I arrived at the agreed time, unloaded a box of wine from the van. There was an unanswered ring of the doorbell. Then a second, a third. Finally the door juddered open before me, Diane flushed and aproned.
"Don't ask, okay. Just don't ask."
"Well hello to you too." Following her along the corridor, the odour coming from the kitchen was less than encouraging.
"Thirty minutes the recipe said, two hundred degrees. Put it on two-twenty for thirty-five just to make sure."
The object visible through the lowered oven door might at some point have been a shepherd's pie. Beneath all the burnt char, it was difficult to tell for sure.
"Always was your favourite, right?"
Though the result had perhaps been inevitable, I was touched by the attempt all the same.
Taking the box of wine from me, she steered me through into the living room, ordered me to sit down. A drawer was opened, a slew of takeaway leaflets sent skidding onto the coffee table before me.
"You choose."
*
A couple of hours later, I was feeling half a stone heavier. The table space between us was scattered with the congealing remants of a Chinese set menu for two. Diane's two boys had at different points popped their heads through the doorway to say hi on their way out somewhere. Kevin was a foot taller than I remembered, his former all-consuming passion for Middlesbrough Football Club now seemingly transposed on some poor girl from Year 11, one he was off to take out bowling. Johnny was meanwhile two feet taller than I remembered, an overnight bag slung over one shoulder: Thursday was dad night.
"Thursday mummy get a bit tipsy night," Diane had smirked at the sound of the closing front door. "All the more so when the plonk's free."
Her verdict had been the same as my brother Frank the night before: the wine was perfectly all right as far as she could tell, but give her a bottle of beer any day of the week. Die-hard philestines, both.
It hadn't stopped her gulping at the stuff like water from an oasis well however. Only a third of a second bottle now remained.
"So, this little detour of yours to Nottingham," she asked, changing the subject from CID room gossip and Hutchinson from Fraud's latest failed attempts at flirtation. "Throw up anything interesting?"
Spearing myself one final sweet and sour prawn, I chewed reflectively for a moment. "Think so. I just haven't worked out what exactly."
This provoked one of her lopsided smiles. "Sure you will eventually. Always did."
She'd made herself up a little for the occasion. Eyeliner framed her chocolate brown irises, these of such rare intensity that you barely noted the wrinkles now beginning to delta out from their corners. The soft lighting caught crystal dangly earrings, the pendant of a matching necklace. Her black dress was simple, unfussy; the bared shoulders smooth, of a peach-like quality. Oh yes, Diane was a fine looking woman, without question; a fineness undiminished by the passing years. No, it wasn't difficult to see how Hutchinson from Fraud had become so smitten.
"She didn't have any photos of him," I heard myself say. Musing out loud, the way it always was. Thoughts, reflections, random observations. With Diane there didn't necessarily have to be a conclusion.
"Who of who?"
"Sarah of Sean. I even had a nose around upstairs. The bedroom. Not a single photograph of him anywhere."
Diane poured herself a little more wine, seemed to reflect on something. From the stereo came a soft, female croon, some singer-songwriter I was a decade too old to have ever heard of.
"You know, after my mum died a few years ago, I went around the house taking down all the photos of her. The pain was still too..." Her forehead wrinkled a little as she searched for the right word. "Too raw. I didn't want the reminder. Couple of years must've passed before I had the courage to put them up again" The corner of her mouth then twisted into a smirk. "The same thing with both marraige break ups." Her eyes met mine. "Dare say you've done the same with Heather. Packed her into a little box somewhere till your heart glues itself back together."
Not only that, I thought. I'd gone gallavanting off to the other end of Europe. Tried to put two thousand miles between me and my memories. Tried to outrun them.
Her hand slid across the table, cut a path through the oriental culinary debris. Rested gently on mine. Discharged its electricity.
"Everybody gets over everything Jim. It just takes some people longer than others, that's all. You men, particularly. You rare, sensitive men."
The hand remained on mine. Likewise those deep, chocolate-brown eyes. These seemed somehow misted however, and not just from the lion's share of two bottles of Negramaro.
An image, a memory never quite forgotten...
I wondered if it were the same at that moment playing before my own eyes...
It hadn't been quite true, had it? Three nights earlier, when Ellie had said that her mother had always been jealous of mine and Diane's rapport. And I'd blurted out that we'd never... That nothing had ever...
No, not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. There'd been that one time, yes. A soaking wet Christmas Eve night.
Calculating back now, it must have been sixteen years earlier. I'd not long taken my inspector's exam; Diane had earlier that year been transferred over from uniform. Those detectives fortunate enough not to be rostered on that night or the following morning had gone out for a bit of pub crawl - a crawl at certain point curtailed by a violent and prolonged downpour. I can't even remember which boozer it was we'd got stuck in; somewhere along Linthorpe Road I think. Some place with what passed for a beer garden out back, that's all I can say with certainty. At the time it wasn't a facility in great demand with the assembled clientele of course. But there we found ourselves, Diane and I. God knows how - that mysterious non-verbal communication of the decidely tipsy I suppose. Glances exchanged across the bar, chanced through the forest of our colleagues' shoulders. The culmination of months of mild flirtation.
I just remember pressing her tightly against the back wall, my lips colliding with hers. The overhang of the roof above us provided some measure of shelter but the rain was slanted the wrong way, saturating the back of my trousers. From inside the pub came the clamour of raised voices. Laughter, Christmas songs on the stereo. To my right was the on-off flash of fairy lights through a window, the leftside contours of Diane's face washed now red, now yellow, now blue...
But then my eyes were closed, our movements less clumsy, more urgent. My hand had worked its way inside her jacket. Inside her blouse. Beneath my palm I could feel the caress of lace. The soft, doughy promise which lay beneath.
Inside my head - inside our heads - the thought was growing, the initial cautious whisper turning to a heart-pumping roar. Nobody could hear us, would ever know. We could do it. Do it right there, right then...
I don't know what happened though. Whether it was me or whether it was her. Whether it was both of us together at the same time. But somehow, suddenly, our train went skidding off the tracks...
Have to think about Ian.
To think about Heather.
Untangling ourselves, we began buttoning ourselves back up. There was a final lingering glance as we threw ourselves back into the terrible squirm of festive cheer...
Though we'd never once mentioned it, it had always been there. Our sad, delicious secret. One we'd kept even from ourselves it seemed.
But there was no Heather now. No Ian. Not even Steve, her second husband.
Just the two of us, that was all. A pair of consenting adults, an empty house...
Her hand coiled away, slithered back through the sweet and sour sauce stains on the tablecloth.
Pulled back from the brink.
Rising now to her feet, she nodded towards the sofa. Exhaled a wistful sigh.
"Best get you a pillow and a blanket eh."