Julia was quite meticulous in her personal habits and, also earning considerably more than I did, lived in some style and total order in a luxury flat overlooking the River Thames near Chelsea Bridge. She was not impressed with my accommodation. I had moved into my room with a loo, which was about all it was really, when I tired of the police quarters to which I had resorted immediately after my marriage broke up. The so-called studio flat boasted a single divan and a rickety sofa which could, with some difficulty, be transformed into an equally rickety bed, and which Julia eyed with a considerable lack of enthusiasm. Her manner made it quite apparent that she rather wished she had booked herself into a nearby hotel and when I indicated that I was planning to make us pasta for supper on the rather grimy hob balanced on a metal table in what passed as the kitchen area, she could no longer conceal her horror.
‘But you can’t cook!’ she exclaimed, fully aware that throughout my married life Simon had done all the cooking and pretty well everything else in our house as well. Even I had to admit that he may have had a point in having regarded me as a thoroughly lousy wife.
‘I’m learning,’ I said. ‘I’ve had no alternative. I can’t afford to eat out all the time. You’ll be surprised, honestly.’
‘No, I won’t,’ she announced, tossing her impressive head of bouncy red hair in a way that dared me to challenge her. ‘Learn on somebody else. We’re going out. I’ve still got an expense account, just about. Remember.’
We went to a rather good little Chinese restaurant I had discovered within easy walking distance. Even Julia, who was a fearful Chinese food snob and thought there were no really good Chinese restaurants in the UK outside London or Manchester, admitted that it wasn’t bad and tucked in enthusiastically to a virtual banquet of assorted fishy starters, crispy duck with pancakes, her favourite chilli beef and my favourite chicken with cashew nuts.
We giggled our way through the evening as usual. We were an odd couple Julia and I, not least physically. She was a good six feet tall and towered over me. Our mutual friends thought that anyone seeing us together would automatically assume Julia was the cop and I was the journalist. We had definitely got things the wrong way around, they said. Julia, however, insisted that was nonsense as her extra height had been essential in order for her to see over other people’s heads during her many years of standing on doorsteps — whereas a police officer could just arrest anyone who got in her way and have them promptly despatched to jail, she said.
However we might have looked, Julia and I had a magical friendship. She was the only contemporary from my schooldays that I was still in touch with, or come to that, would even have wished to be still in touch with. Whenever we met, after not having seen each other for months sometimes, it was always as if we had parted company only the day before. We were so close that often it seemed as if we could read each other’s minds. I confided in Julia in a way I never had with anyone else in my life, really, not even Simon.
Only Julia knew how deeply affected I had been by the serial murder case I had headed around the time Simon and I were breaking up, and how, partly in a final bid to save my marriage, I had come close then to resigning from the force. So when she asked me how The Job was going, it was more than a polite enquiry and one of the few more serious moments of our evening.
‘God knows,’ I sighed. ‘Being deputy chief of the CPT no longer looks like such a great career move with Titmuss the Terrible in charge. And as for moving into Child Protection after nearly cracking up on a murder case — well I must be barking mad, mustn’t I?’
‘Probably,’ Julia remarked through a mouthful of beef and noodles. ‘You didn’t nearly crack up, though. You’d nearly had enough, that’s all, and it’s different.’
‘Maybe,’ I responded. ‘Nonetheless, Child Protection is considered the highest risk area of all for breakdowns among police officers. Did you know they only let you do the job for a maximum of five years?’
‘As long as that?’ Julia enquired, her eyes open wide in mock amazement. ‘Heavens, Rose, that’s about five times as long as I’ve known you stick at anything.’
I found myself giggling again. That was usually the way with Julia. A night out and a few drinks with her had always been better than any of the therapy sessions the force and the world in general suddenly appeared to be rife with.
After we’d finished two bottles of house white and moved on to a couple of large brandies of uncertain origin, I decided to treat her to a full account of my Abri Island adventure. Well, I really needed to tell someone, and who better than Julia. She sussed out my feelings for Robin Davey at once, the old bat.
‘When are you seeing him again?’ she asked.
‘He’s engaged to be married,’ I said sturdily.
‘So?’ she enquired, calling for more brandies.
Four
The morning after Julia returned to London I received a phone call I had been expecting but not looking forward to, from my former husband, Simon.
‘We’re ready to exchange contracts,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ve got a load of paper work for you to look at and I need your signature.’
‘Fine,’ I said, trying to sound as if selling the home in which I had shared my life with him for twelve years was really of no consequence at all.
‘I’d like to move as quickly as possible now,’ he went on very formally.
‘Fine,’ I said again.
‘So, is it all right if I come around to your place this evening?’
I started to agree to that too and stopped myself only just in time, remembering Julia’s reaction to the so-called studio flat I was renting. It was a complete tip. To be fair, it hadn’t been that bad when I moved in, and it was in a big old Victorian villa in a nice part of town, but the fact remained, whatever fancy names you gave it, it was only a bedsit, and I had not been born to live in one room. I rented on a weekly basis, at a highly inflated price, and the place had been intended merely as very temporary accommodation when I had moved in more than six months previously. I was still there and the room was now buried in clutter and junk. It also seriously needed fumigating. But you couldn’t get past the clutter to clean it, even if I had had any inclination to do so, which I didn’t.
I had yet to allow Simon near my own personal tip and I had no wish for him to see the way I was living. Whatever his emotional state, I knew that Simon would always be surrounded by order. That’s the way he was. In fact in the good old days he had been inclined to joke that he had obviously made a mistake and should have married Julia, who of course, also always lived in total order. At least I think he had been joking.
‘Uh, couldn’t we meet for a drink somewhere,’ I suggested desperately.
‘Rose,’ he replied, in the kind of voice you might use to a tiresome child. ‘We need to make the final arrangements for the sale of our home. That’s not something you do in a bar.’
‘Oh,’ I said. And I supposed he was right, really.
‘Look,’ he still sounded like someone exasperated struggling to remain patient, ‘if you don’t want me to come to you, why don’t you pop round here. It won’t take long.’
I should have said no to that as well. The ‘round here’ he referred to was the idiosyncratic 1920s bungalow on the outskirts of town which had been our home throughout our marriage, and where, by and large, and I hated admitting it to myself now, we had both been happy for so long. Well, I had anyway. Sometimes now I doubted if I had ever made Simon really happy.
I arrived just after 8 p.m., straight from work. Simon was alone. That at least was a relief. I had heard that he had a new girlfriend. I didn’t know whether she was living with him or not, but I did know that I didn’t want to meet her.