CHAPTER 6
Pat stood on the steps of the police station and sighed.
That hadn’t gone as she’d hoped or expected.
She was accustomed to having a certain authority in the room, to reading situations clearly and knowing when to act.
But this time she’d misjudged it. She’d handed over the phone, potentially their most valuable piece of evidence, too soon, and more importantly, she’d let herself be swayed.
Prichard had meant well, but she should have known better than to act without clarity.
What bothered her most wasn’t the procedural outcome, it was the quiet sense that she’d betrayed her own judgement.
And now, to find that the police had already spoken to Derek and ruled him out, that stung.
She sighed again, this time more quietly.
It wasn’t disappointment in the police she felt so much as disappointment in herself.
The heavy door swung open behind her and slammed. She didn’t bother to turn around.
‘All right?’ mumbled PC Footer as he walked past her.
‘PC Footer, Barry?’ she said, venturing with the familiar. He stopped. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m on my lunch break,’ he replied.
‘Lunch? Oh, let me buy you something.’ Pat smiled. ‘Are you going out?’
‘Well, I’ve already eaten what I brought for my first lunch.’
‘Right.’
‘My mum made me some cheese and pickle sandwiches this morning, and I had those with a packet of prawn cocktail crisps and an orange KitKat, but I had that at about ten o’clock. I couldn’t wait. I can never wait, to be honest.’
‘An orange KitKat? Are they good?’
‘The best. They’re quite hard to get hold of.’
‘I bet,’ agreed Pat. She was matching him stride for stride as he walked across the car park.
‘I could buy you a cup of coffee.’ She nodded over at Costa across the road. He paused. ‘Or a hot chocolate? I hear they make the best ones in there. With that spray cream.’
‘Oh, go on then,’ he agreed, his eyes lighting up. ‘If you insist.’
Pat followed him across to the Costa. The doors swung inward with the soft hiss of hydraulics, and a warm blast came from a heater above them.
It smelt of roasted beans and steamed milk, with a sweet undercurrent of caramel and chocolate.
There were a few student types tapping on keyboards, but most of the customers were tourists, hunched over their hot chocolates and oat milk lattes; they’d be waiting for the next number 12 to Westlinke, or passing time before the train back to London.
To the left of the till, in a glass-fronted cabinet that caught the light just so, were the sweet temptations: salted caramel brownies glistening under the glow like dark treasure; golden croissants flaking at the edges; pastel-toned muffins swelling with blueberries or chocolate chips; slabs of lemon drizzle cake looking tender enough to fall apart at the touch of a fork.
Despite living near Southbourne for a decade, Pat had never set foot in the Costa. Hers was not a coffee-house generation. Pubs, yes. Pints, absolutely. But coffee? That was something you made in a mug at home, without whipped cream or a loyalty card.
‘Hello, Barry,’ smiled the young woman behind the counter. ‘The usual? There’s a table free in the corner.’ She nodded. ‘I’ll bring it over. Yes?’ She looked at Pat.
‘I’ll have the same,’ said Pat.
‘With a hot chocolate?’
‘Just a black coffee.’
‘Sit yourself down over there.’ She indicated the table with another nod.
‘Thanks, Paulina,’ replied Barry.
Pat followed Barry as he eased his way through the narrow gaps between square oak veneer tables and leatherette chairs. In the far corner, he sat down to face the room, leaving Pat to sit opposite, with her back to the door and Barry’s face as her only view.
‘Thank you for this,’ she said. ‘For agreeing to have a chat.’ He hadn’t specifically. He’d agreed to a hot chocolate, but now he was trapped here with no escape, and she was going to make the most of it. ‘How long have you been on the force?’
Out came Barry’s tongue. It appeared that his brain and his tongue were connected. ‘Umm …’ He paused for thought. ‘Twenty-two months.’
‘And you enjoy it?’
‘It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, really. My dad’s a copper in Brighton, due to retire next year.’
‘Here you go,’ said Paulina, plonking down two plates. ‘Triple chocolate double muffins.’
Pat looked down at her plate. The idea of eating such a cake before she’d had any lunch didn’t appeal. She glanced up to see that PC Barry Footer was already halfway through his. He’d inhaled one mouthful and was working vigorously on the next, melted chocolate bubbling in the corner of his mouth.
‘And what is DS Stevens like to work for?’ Pat was transfixed by his soft, shiny lips as they opened and shut, making short shrift of his ‘usual’.
‘DS Stevens? She’s nice enough. She’s very efficient, she likes to tick things off, solve things quickly. She’s got one of the highest clear-up rates on the force. The big bosses like that. It’s good for statistics. High clear-up rates make them look good. They make us all look good.’
‘Yes, and I expect that’s what it’s all about these days, statistics, clearing up.’ Pat nodded in hearty agreement, or what she hoped looked like it. ‘So I suppose it’s not a surprise that she thinks Henry’s death is a suicide.’
‘It’s much less paperwork,’ agreed Barry. ‘That’s for sure.’ His voice trailed off. He appeared not to be concentrating on Pat’s questions. She followed his gaze. It was obvious what had captured his full attention. The muffin on her plate.
‘Much easier for everyone, for all concerned, if he jumped,’ she ventured.
‘Much.’
Such was the sugary siren call coming from the muffin, Pat sensed he was losing his hearing.
‘Would you like it?’ she asked, pushing her plate towards him.
‘Oh no, no, no,’ he nodded, his mouth saying the opposite of his body language.
‘Really,’ insisted Pat. ‘I don’t like them.’
‘Don’t like chocolate muffins!’ Barry’s face crumpled with incomprehension.
‘They’ll only throw it away otherwise.’
He didn’t need asking twice. Out went the dimpled hand, and picking up the cake, he took a large bite before placing it down on his own plate. It sat there for no more than fifteen seconds before he took another chunk out of it.
Pat soaked up the atmosphere of Barry Footer, catching something of the sadness under his chocolate muffin enthusiasm. She’d seen a lot of people in their early to mid-twenties with that sadness. She recognised it.
‘Was your parents’ divorce devastating for you?’ she asked. It was either that or one of his parents was no longer alive, which she could already rule out.
‘I was six years old.’ Barry paused as he took in her question. His eyes were round with astonishment, his open mouth frosted with granules of sugar. ‘My life was never the same again.’
‘Was it just you?’ she asked, already feeling she knew his answer.
‘Yes.’ He sighed and put down the remainder of the muffin, then played with his plate, spinning it back and forth as he stared at the half-eaten ‘usual’. ‘My mum left my dad.’ His lips pouted.
‘She remarried and had other children?’
‘How did you know that?’ He sat back a little and looked at her. Was she a witch? A mind-reader?
‘It’s quite common.’ Pat smiled.
‘They both started new families, but mine, me, Mum and Dad, that family just stopped existing. Like we’d never been one at all. Like it never counted.’
Poor Barry, trying to feed a hunger that would not be satiated with food no matter how many times he sat at his corner table in the Southbourne Costa.
Some chose alcohol to fill that void, some drugs.
Sometimes people distracted themselves from an inner emptiness with dangerous sex in car parks with unsuitable, violent men.
Or stealing. Pat used to have a client who was obsessed with shoplifting smoked salmon from Waitrose and was once found pleasuring himself in the bus lane outside the shop covered in hand-sliced slivers of fish.
Barry’s chocolate was tame in comparison.
But the feeling was the same. The same sensation always: a hollow inside that demanded to be filled.
‘I can help you with that if you’d like,’ she suggested.
‘With what?’
‘The comfort eating. Only if you want. You might find it useful.’ She smiled. ‘Well, you know where I am if you do want to follow up.’
‘Thanks,’ he said quietly, pushing his plate distractedly away. ‘You’re the first person to ever ask that. To offer that.’
‘Therapy?’
‘Help.’
He turned and stared out of the plate-glass window, his gaze blank.
There was a silence between them. In fact, the café was remarkably quiet for somewhere so busy, and Pat realised that most of the customers were sipping their drinks while scrolling on their phones.
The only real noise was the clatter of mugs as Paulina stacked them on the coffee machine.
Pat was being quiet on purpose; silence, she knew, could encourage people to talk.
‘There’s a suicide note, if you’d like to see it,’ suggested Barry suddenly, his cheeks flushing pink. The silent tactic had worked.
‘There is?’ That didn’t prove anything, Pat had to remind herself. Nothing. Unless … ‘Does it have Henry’s fingerprints on it?’
‘It was quite hard to take his fingerprints, to be honest,’ declared Barry.
He leant across the table, his voice low, his eye contact indirect.
‘He’d been in the water. It’s not good for the skin, if you know what I mean.
But anyway, the note has no prints on it. We’ve dusted for them, and nothing.’
‘That’s odd. If you’re writing a note, in haste, in emotional distress, I would think it would have prints on it where you’ve touched the paper.’
‘I agree. But Amanda – DS Stevens – is ambitious about targets and didn’t think it was worth wasting any more time and money on that.’
‘Right. And where was the note found?’