She dragged herself to her feet. She opened the fridge. She stared into its cold and heartless depths. There was sticky toffee sponge, she discovered, so she could check pudding off her menu list. And far in the back was an old minced beef and onion roll. This could do as a main course. Now for the starter…? Perhaps Pot Noodle? In the veg department, there had to be a tin of something…Chickpeas? Carrots and turnips? Bea wondered what she’d been thinking when she’d last done the shopping. Probably nothing, she decided. She’d likely been pushing the trolley along the aisles without an idea in her head as to what she might cook. The thought of proper nutrition for Pete had probably prompted a spontaneous visit to the market, but once there, she’d got distracted by something like a call on her mobile and the end result was…this.
She took out the sticky toffee sponge and decided to skip the starter, the entrée, and the veg altogether, getting right down to the pudding, which, after all, everyone knew was the best part of the meal and why should she deny herself that when she wanted cheering up and this had the best potential to do the job?
She was about to tuck into it when bim bim BIM boom BOOM sounded on her front door, followed by the scrape of Ray’s key in the lock. He came in talking. He was saying, “…spirit of compromise, mate,” to which Pete replied, “Pizza is a compromise, Dad, when one’s set on McDonald’s.”
“Don’t you dare buy him a Big Mac,” Bea called.
“You see?” Ray said. “Mum quite agrees.”
They came into the kitchen. They were wearing matching baseball caps, and Pete had his Arsenal sweatshirt on. Ray was in jeans and a paint-stained windcheater. Pete’s jeans had a great hole in the knee.
“Where’re the dogs?” Bea asked them.
“Back at home,” Ray said. “We’ve been-”
“Mum, Dad found this wicked paintball place,” Pete announced. “It was fantastic. Kapowee!” He mimicked shooting his father. “Blim! Blam! Bash! You put on these boiler suits and they load you up and off you go. I got him so good, didn’t I, Dad? I snuck round-”
“Sneaked,” Bea corrected patiently. She watched their son, and she didn’t resist the smile that came to her as he demonstrated the stealth whereby he’d managed to obliterate his father with paint. It was just the sort of game she’d always sworn to herself that her son wouldn’t play: a mimicry of war. And yet, in the end, wouldn’t boys always be just that?
“You didn’t think I’d be that good, did you?” Pete asked his father, playfully punching him in the arm.
Ray reached out, hooked his arm round Pete’s neck, and pulled him over. He planted a loud kiss on his son’s head and rubbed his knuckles through Pete’s thick hair. “Go get what you came for, Paintball Wizard,” he told him. “We’ve got dinner to attend to.”
“Pizza!”
“Curry or Chinese. That’s the best I’ll offer. Or we can have calves’ liver and onions at home. Served with sprouts and broad beans on the side.”
Pete laughed. He darted out of the room and they heard him dash up the stairs.
“He wanted his CD player,” Ray told Bea. He smiled as they listened to Pete crashing about his room. “Truth is, he wants an iPod and he thinks if he demonstrates how many CDs he’s got to carry round with him when he could be carrying this device the size of…what size are they? I can’t keep up with technology.”
“These days that’s what kids are for. When it comes to technology, I’m utterly out of the loop without Pete.”
Ray watched her for a moment as she spooned up a portion of sticky toffee sponge. She saluted him with it. He said, “Why do I think that’s your dinner, Beatrice?”
“Because you’re a cop.”
“So it is?”
“Hmm.”
“Are you on the fly?”
“Wish,” she said. “But that’s not the word I’d choose to describe where I am or where the case is.”
She decided to tell him. He was going to learn it all sooner or later, so it might as well be sooner and from her. She gave him all the details and waited for his reaction. “Damn,” he said. “That’s a real…” He seemed to look for a word.
“Cock-up?” she offered. “Generated by yours truly?”
“I wasn’t going to say that, exactly.”
“But you were thinking it.”
“The cock-up part, yes. Not the part about you.”
Bea turned away from the expression of friendly compassion on his face. She stared at the window that in daylight would have looked upon a bit of her garden, or what went for her garden, which, she knew, should have been mulched by this time of the year but was instead offering itself to whatever stray seeds were dropped by skylarks and linnets in flight. Those seeds were germinating into weeds, and in another month or two she’d have a right royal mess of work on her hands. Good thing all she saw in the window was her reflection and Ray’s behind her, she thought. They provided a bit of distraction from the work she’d created for herself through lack of attention to her garden.
She said, “I was set to blame you.”
“For?”
“The cock-up. Inadequate incident room. No MCIT blokes for love or money. There I am, hanging out to dry with Constable McNulty and Sergeant Collins and whomever you deign to send me-”
“That’s not how it was.”
“Oh, I know that.” Her voice was weary because she was weary. She felt as if she’d been swimming upstream for far too long. “And I’m the one who sent Constable McNulty to tell the Kernes the death was murder. I thought he’d use sense but of course I was wrong. And then when I’d learned what he’d told them, I thought we’d surely uncover something more, some scrap, some detail…It didn’t matter what it was. Just something useful as a trip wire for the moment the killer came sauntering by. But we didn’t.”
“You may still.”
“I doubt it. Unless you count a remark made about a surfing poster, which isn’t likely to amount to anything in the eyes of the CPS.” She set down the container of sponge. “I’ve told myself for years there’s no perfect murder. Forensic science is too advanced. As long as there’s a body to be found, there are too many tests, too many experts. No one can kill and leave not a single trace of himself behind. It’s impossible. Simply can’t be done.”
“There’s truth in that, Beatrice.”
“But what I failed to see is the loopholes. All the ways a killer could plan and organise and commit this…this ultimate crime…and do it in such a way that every bit of it could be explained. Even the most minute forensic bits could be deemed a rational part of one’s daily life. I didn’t see that. Why didn’t I see that?”
“Perhaps you had other things on your mind. Distractions.”
“Such as?”
“Other parts of your own life. You do have other parts to your life, no matter your attempts to deny that.”
She wanted to avoid. “Ray…”
Clearly, he didn’t intend to let her. “You’re not a cop to the exclusion of everything else,” he said. “Good God, Beatrice, you’re not a machine.”
“I wonder about that sometimes.”
“Well, I don’t.”
A blast of music came from upstairs: Pete deciding among his CDs. They listened for a moment to the shriek of an electric guitar. Pete liked his music historical. Jimi Hendrix was his favourite, although in a pinch Duane Allman and his medicine bottle would do just fine.
“God,” Ray said. “Get that lad an iPod.”
She smiled, then chuckled. “He’s something, that child.”
“Our child, Beatrice,” Ray declared quietly.
She didn’t reply. Instead, she took the sticky toffee sponge and tossed it in the rubbish. She washed the spoon she’d been using and set it on the draining board.
Ray said, “Can we talk about it now?”
“You do choose your moments, don’t you?”
“Beatrice, I’ve wanted to talk about it for ages. You know that.”
“I do. But at the present time…You’re a cop and a good one. You can see how I am. Get the suspect in a weak moment. Create the weak moment if you can. It’s elementary stuff, Ray.”