Tony stepped away from the screen with barely a pang of regret and pressed the door-release button. By the time Carol joined him, he’d replaced the game controllers on their charger and poured a couple of glasses of sparkling water. Carol took hers, looking sceptical. ‘Is this the best you can do?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I need to maintain my fluid balance.’ He walked past her, back towards the living room, his move calculated to make resistance easier.
‘I don’t. And I’ve had the kind of day that deserves a treat.’ Carol stood her ground.
Tony kept on walking. ‘And yet you came here, knowing I’m trying to help you move away from drinking so much. Your actions are saying the opposite of your words.’ He looked over his shoulder and grinned at her, trying to take the sting out of thwarting her. ‘Come on, sit down and talk to me.’
‘You’re wrong.’ Clearly grumpy now, Carol followed him and plonked herself down on the sofa opposite his chair. ‘I’m here because I have something important to talk to you about. Not because deep down I want to not have a drink.’
‘You could have asked me to come down to your flat. Or to meet you somewhere that serves alcohol,’ Tony pointed out. Finding the arguments was tedious, but helping her back to a point where she genuinely didn’t need a drink was the best way he knew of demonstrating how much he cared for her.
Carol threw her hands in the air. ‘Give me a break, Tony. I really do have something important to discuss.’ It sounded like she meant it.
Another good reason why he wanted her to stop leaning on alcohol. Her need for a drink masked so many other things - something genuinely important to share with him, a truly difficult day - and that made it hard to read her. And not being able to read her was something he found very hard to bear. Tony leaned back in his chair and smiled, his blue eyes twinkling in the pool of light cast by a nearby reading lamp. ‘Go on then. I’ll stop being your nagging friend and revert to interested colleague. Has this got anything to do with your meeting with your new boss, by any chance?’
Carol’s answering smile was sardonic. ‘Got it in one.’ She swiftly laid out the ultimatum James Blake had given her team. ‘It’s so unrealistic,’ she said, frustration obviously gnawing at her composure. ‘We’re entirely at the mercy of what comes up over the next three months. Am I supposed to be wishing for some tasty murders, just so that I can show off how good my team is? Or fake evidence to clear up a few high-profile cold cases? You can’t apply some time-and-motion study to a specialist investigative unit.’
‘No, you can’t. But that’s not what’s going on here. He’s already made his mind up. This trial period’s bogus, for precisely the reasons you’ve laid out.’ Tony scratched his head. ‘I think you’re screwed. So you might as well just do things exactly as you would anyway.’
He saw her shoulders slump. But she knew better than to come to him for anything less than honesty. If they started down that road, the trust they’d spent years building would crumble faster than overcooked meringue. And since neither of them had anyone else in their life as close as the other, they couldn’t afford that. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ she sighed. She took a long drink from her water glass. ‘But that’s not all.’ She stared down into her glass, the thick tumble of her hair hiding her face.
Tony closed his eyes momentarily, rubbing the bridge of his nose. ‘He’s told you to stop using me.’
Galvanised by his acuity, Carol’s neck straightened and her startled eyes met his. ‘How did you know that? Has Blake spoken to you?’
Tony shook his head. ‘It’s the dog that didn’t bark in the night.’
Carol nodded, getting it. ‘He didn’t speak to you. I introduced you, he didn’t engage.’
‘Which I took to mean that I’m not part of his budget or his plans.’ He smiled. ‘Don’t worry about me, there’s plenty of other chief constables that still think I’m money well spent.’
‘I’m not worried about you, I’m worried about me. And my team.’
He spread his hands in the equivalent of a shrug. ‘It’s hard to fight a man who reduces everything to the maximum bangs for his buck. The truth is, I’m not the cheapest option, Carol. You’re turning out your own profilers these days. Your bosses think it’s better to go down the American route - train cops in psychology - rather than rely on specialists like me who know nothing about the realities of policing the streets.’ Only someone who knew him as well as Carol could have detected the subtle edge of irony in his tone.
‘Yeah, well, you get what you pay for.’
‘Some of them are pretty good, you know.’
‘How do you know?’
He chuckled. ‘I’m one of the people who’s been training them.’
Carol looked shocked. ‘You never said.’
‘It was supposed to be confidential.’
‘So why are you telling me now?’
‘Because if you have to work with them, you should know they’ve had the benefit of input from some of the most experienced profilers around. Not just me, other people in the same field that I’ve got a lot of time for. And these bright young officers have not had their knowledge cluttered up by having to decide on treatment regimes. They’re very focused on one aspect of psychology, and they’re not stupid. Give them a chance. Don’t dismiss them because they’re not me.’ There was another layer of meaning to his words which they both understood. Unfortunately for Tony, it wasn’t a good time to remind Carol of the bond between them that underpinned all their professional ventures.
She covered her eyes with her hand, like a woman shielding herself from the sun. ‘Blake was really snide, Tony. He implied that my reasons for choosing to consult you are grubby and corrupt. He knows that I’m your tenant, and he made it sound like there was more to it than that, that we had something sordid to hide.’ She turned her head away and drank more water.
It was hard to understand why a man in Blake’s position would choose to undermine one of his most effective officers before he’d even seen for himself what she was capable of. But undermine her he had, and he couldn’t have chosen a more effective pressure point if he’d consulted Tony himself. With any other pair of people who shared their history, the assumption that they were lovers would probably have been right on the money. But the emotional bond they’d shared from the earliest days of their professional connection had never spilled over into the physical. Right from the start, he’d levelled with her about the impotence that had consistently blighted his relationships with women. She’d had the good sense not to decide she was the woman who could redeem him. But in spite of their unspoken agreement to keep their feelings on a limited leash, there had been times when the forces pulling them together had seemed strong enough to overcome his fear of humiliation and her anxiety that she wouldn’t be able to hide her disappointment. But each time, the world had thrown obstacles in their path. And given the atrocities that were commonplace in their world, those were not obstacles that could be overcome lightly. He’d never forget the one time she’d let her guard slip because of him, and the darkness it had unleashed. For a while, it had looked as if she could never make her way back from that particular abyss. That she had was, he believed, no thanks to him and everything to do with the power the job had over her. Tony doubted whether Blake knew anything real about their history, but the gossip factory had provided him with enough information to use him against her. He hated that that was possible. ‘Stupid bastard,’ Tony said. ‘He should be making alliances, not alienating the likes of you.’ He gave a thin smile. ‘Not that there are many like you.’