Chapter 6
‘You were in the paper today,’ Rachel called through.
‘I was? Shit.’
‘It’s over there on the table.’
‘Thanks.’
She was in the kitchen, preparing dinner.
I could hear her moving pans, occasionally wincing as an ache travelled through her.
Even so, I knew better than to offer to help.
This far into the pregnancy, I had a tendency to fuss – attempting to lever every possible task out of her hands as quickly as I could – and it annoyed her immensely.
I’m not an invalid, she kept telling me.
I’ll be off my feet soon enough. I kept trying though; it seemed the least I could do.
The kitchen was one area she refused to give up, though.
With my culinary skills, that was probably a good thing for both of us.
‘Smells great,’ I said.
‘Thanks.’
I picked up the copy of the Evening Post.
Vicki Gibson was front page news. There was a full-colour photograph of her smiling face on the right-hand side.
You can say what you like about reporters, but this was impressively fast work.
We hadn’t even released her identity officially yet, although I supposed it wouldn’t have been too difficult to get it from neighbours, or some officer on scene in need of keeping a press contact sweet.
I scanned through the article. There was no mention of the second victim we’d found; that had either come too late for filing or not been considered newsworthy enough for the moment.
No mention of Tom Gregory either, thank god.
It just gave the typical line that we were pursuing a number of possible leads.
I wished that were true. My name was mentioned in passing as lead officer on the investigation, along with a departmental phone number that, thankfully, wasn’t mine. Small mercies.
I put the paper back down and went through to the kitchen.
Rachel was standing with her back to me at the counter, illuminated by the overhead spot bulbs, intent on slicing and chopping vegetables. She used the edge of the knife to scrape diced peppers from the chopping board into the sizzling frying pan beside her.
For a moment, I just watched her. Her brown hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. The back of her neck, before her blouse began, was pale and slightly mottled. Occasionally the light glinted off the side of the thick black glasses she wore.
Thok thok thok
Chopping mushrooms now, either oblivious to my presence or pretending to be.
From behind, you could hardly tell she was thirty-four weeks pregnant. She hadn’t put on much weight at all in the first few months, and even now, although her belly had ballooned out in front, the gain was almost invisible from the back.
And, aside from the occasional wince of discomfort and the trouble she had sleeping, it was impossible to tell from her behaviour either.
Rachel had always been so resilient. Nothing ever seemed to faze her; she was a practical, can do person.
She’d dealt with pregnancy in the same calm way she dealt with everything else, appearing incomprehensibly matter-of-fact all along about carrying a child and, now, about the fact that he would shortly be here.
That it would then be our heady responsibility to look after him, care for him, shape him.
But then, unlike me, Rachel probably wasn’t worried about that at all.
Certainly, if she had to cope with raising the baby on her own she would do so, and she would do so very capably indeed.
This much we’d established over the last few months, as things had become increasingly difficult between us.
As we’d grown apart, separating steadily out from the tight unit we’d always been.
She said, ‘I can sense you there, you know.’
‘You can?’
‘Yes. The back of my neck is tickling.’
‘You’ve always been ticklish.’
It was a stupid thing to say, because the exact opposite was true.
I was ticklish; she was – annoyingly – totally immune.
In happier times, she’d been able to reduce me to a helpless wreck on the floor or the bed – although that level of carefree intimacy was unthinkable now.
I was just fumbling for something to say, and the reversal was something that would have brought a smile to her face in the old days, maybe even prompted her to prove me wrong, dinner on the go or not.
Tonight, it didn’t work at all. The silence that followed was flat and stiff, like I’d tried to embrace her when she didn’t want me to.
After a moment, she said, ‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking you’re beautiful.’
‘Are you?’
‘Yes. You don’t believe me?’
She was still working at the chopping board, her shoulders moving with the knife, so I barely caught the shrug. It hurt when I did. Indifference always seems much worse than outright hostility. At least hostility implies that someone still cares.
She said, ‘I don’t really know what to think anymore.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s been a rough day.’
‘Yeah, I gather. From the paper. You want to talk about it?’
‘Not so much.’
She nodded to herself, expecting the answer.
I’ve never been the kind of detective who takes his work home with him.
I don’t dwell, not normally; as sad as most crimes are, my days are so full of them that I’d go insane if I kept hold of them.
A handful stay, of course, but I’m not built to carry much more weight than that, and anyway, what is there to dwell on when it comes down to it?
The fact is that things topple and break; in my line of work, it’s people and their lives.
Most of the time, all you can do is try to sweep up afterwards and move on.
What else is there to say? Somebody did something ugly for very dull and mundane reasons.
We’ll punish them for it if we can, and for all it will ultimately be worth.
The end.
‘It is what it is,’ I said. ‘It is what it always is.’
‘It’s not really that anyway – how you’ve been tonight, I mean. It’s not like you’ve been markedly different from any other night.’
That took a moment to settle, and when it did, it hurt even more than the shrug.
In my head, I still saw the decline in our relationship over the last year as a blip – a rocky patch we’d weather, coming out stronger together on the far side – and I’d been imagining Rachel felt the same.
But there it was: the truth. To her, this had become normal.
It wasn’t a dip in our life together; it was our life together. The way I was every night.
‘And how is that?’
‘Like you’re not really here.’
I didn’t reply. It suddenly felt so cold and empty in the kitchen that it seemed a miracle the pan on the hob was still sizzling. As Rachel stirred it, I said:
‘I’m sorry.’
She shrugged again and then, after a moment’s silence, she sighed. When she spoke, she threw my own words back at me, but so half-heartedly that they barely reached.
‘It is what it is.’
After we’d eaten, Rachel went to bed early.
She tended to have trouble sleeping for useful lengths of time, even lying on her side with the maternity pillow curled around under the bump and then between her legs to support her hips, so she grabbed as much as she could.
She was on maternity leave from the laboratory now so could catch up during the day.
In lighter moments, she said her body was just getting in practice for what it would be like when the baby arrived.
I wasn’t ready to sleep, so I took a beer onto the small patio out front of our house and listened to the neighbourhood.
Tonight, it was quiet. No cars along our road at all, and I couldn’t hear any human voices.
In the distance somewhere, a dog barked, the noise echoing slightly between the low buildings.
It was grey and flat here: a spread of architectural convenience illuminated only by the streetlights and the occasional bright yellow windows of the occupied houses.
The roads were wide; the grass verges neat and buzz-cut.
Our house was a police issue residence on what had formerly been a barracks.
Although it hadn’t been in use by the military for more than twenty years now, it still retained its bearing.
But then, everywhere does. I remember, as a boy, seeing the huge trucks moving the rockets and aircraft constructed in the steel factories north of the river.
The steelworks are still there, but now they put the same smelted pipes and hinges and computer chips into other things instead.
Borders, technology, politics, behaviour small and large – looking back through history, all of it’s shaped by violence of some kind.
In our region it’s even more obvious because military supplies form the basis of the economy, and half of the men you meet over fifty will have seen military service of some kind.
My father was in the army, until he was invalided out.
Everyone lives under the shadow of the last war; it presses us all from behind, nudges at us.
Even though we’re not at war now, it sometimes still feels like guerilla country – as though the arms are all just pushed under bushes, and everyone’s ready to down tools at a moment’s notice, pick up their weapons again, return to fighting.
Just looking for an excuse.
A reason.
I took a swig of beer.
I should have been thinking about Rachel, and working out some way to bridge the distance that had opened up between us.
Before going to bed, she’d reminded me I had material to prepare for the next counselling session.
We had to list what we’d loved about each other originally, and the things we loved now.
I said I was on top of it, although right now I had no idea what to write, or how it was supposed to help. As if a list could achieve anything.
So I was thinking about the day instead: about Vicki Gibson and the as yet unidentified homeless man we’d found. And I couldn’t shake what Laura had said.
It doesn’t always make sense, Hicks.
It would though. It had to – because here’s the thing: crimes are always totally explicable. I refuse to believe in evil. The act of murder, however apparently heinous, always turns out to be squalid and small and human. There’s always a reason.
In this case, Vicki Gibson’s murder had all the hallmarks of a bedroom crime.
It does help to think of it like a building.
You have the boardroom, the bedroom, the bar and the basement.
Murder always originates in one of those rooms. Always.
People kill each other for money; they do it out of jealousy or desire; they get angry and lose control.
Every once in a while, a killer has something wrong with him underneath it all – down in the basement – and grows up malformed.
But it’s always explicable. It comes from somewhere in the building, and buildings are human constructs.
That’s my architecture, anyway, and I’m clinging to it.
No evil. Nothing weird.
Glancing across the road, I thought I saw someone standing beside the streetlight. I made out a woman’s face, framed by black hair, with skin that was fish white and bruised, one eye swollen to a slit.
But then a breeze took the figure away again, changing the way the light had been falling on the bushes behind, which was all it had been.
I took another sip of beer.
Tomorrow, I thought.
Tomorrow we’d nail it.