They glowered at each other, the friendship of half a lifetime on the line. “I won’t do it,” Fiona said.
Steve’s lips compressed in a thin line. He felt the high hopes he’d arrived with sliding out of reach, but he wouldn’t let go. Not yet. He refused to release her eyes, willing himself to be the last one standing.
“I really won’t do it, Steve,” Fiona repeated.
He recognized it for a tiny crack of weakness and leaned forward. “I need this.”
She nodded wearily. “I know you do. So here’s the deal. I have a PhD student who’s working on crime linkage and geographical profiling. What’s going to happen is that the Met is going to pay my student to analyse the material. On a consultancy basis.”
“I don’t know if I can find leeway in the budget for that.”
“You better had, Steve. At least this way somebody gets some benefit from this.”
“But you’ll supervise?”
Fiona shook her head. “Terry Fowler is perfectly capable of a straightforward analysis like this. I don’t insult my students by looking over their shoulders. I’m out of it, Steve. I keep telling you this and you’re not hearing me.”
He ran a hand through his hair in a gesture of frustration. “I suppose I’ll have to make do with second best, then.”
“I’m not fobbing you off. Terry will do a good job for you. Steve, you’ve got to stop punishing yourself over this case. I know you care about what you do, but you can’t let it put our friendship at risk.” Fiona reached across the table and took his hand. “I suppose it’s too late to tell you to get a life?”
Steve managed half a smile. “Well past too late.”
“It’s what saved me,” she said simply.
Steve’s eyes clouded over. “He did, didn’t he?” He wanted to say that he’d wished they could have been each other’s saviours, but he never would now. Either she already knew and had made her own accommodation with his feelings; or else the fresh knowledge would swirl through their lives as a disruptive current, threatening the balance that had evolved between them. Whatever, it would be pointless.
As if on cue, the front door opened. “Hi, Fiona, I’m home,” echoed down the hall. They heard the thump of Kit’s satchel hitting the floor as he tossed it into his office in passing. Then he was in the doorway, grinning at the sight of them, oblivious to the tension in the room. “Hey, Stevie, I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight.”
“I came to see just how overdrawn I was at the bank,” Steve said wryly.
Kit crossed to Fiona and gave her a hug. “Steve wants more work done on the Susan Blanchard case,” she said.
Kit looked over the top of her head at Steve, his eyebrows raised in mild interrogation. “She blew you out, then.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Steve said.
“The Met are going to pay Terry Fowler to do the job,” Fiona said firmly.
“I hope,” said Steve. He got to his feet. “I’ll call you in the morning about the arrangements.”
“Don’t go, Steve,” Fiona urged. “Stay for dinner. We could have a Scrabble challenge match afterwards.”
It was an olive branch, he knew. The part of him that had hated to beg wanted to carry on walking, but he was uncertain what that would mean for the future of their relationship. His pride was a small sacrifice for the healing of the breach that had opened between them. Steve looked at Kit. “Depends what’s for dinner,” he said.
Kit frowned. “Lemme see.” He opened the fridge and stared into it. “I’ve got chicken breasts, shallots, fresh tarragon, fennel…What about chicken and tarragon pilaff?” He looked round.
Steve pretended to consider for a moment. “Pudding?”
“You don’t ask much, do you?” Kit complained. “There’s some homemade chocolate ice-cream in the freezer, a few strawberries and half a jar of mango could is in the fridge. That do you?”
“OK, you talked me into it.”
Kit shrugged off his jacket and tossed it over a chair then set to work. “How was your day?” Fiona asked as she watched him chopping and dicing.
“Very productive,” Kit said. “I went to see a contact. But I better not go into details in front of the law,” he added, grinning over his shoulder at Steve. “Tell you what, though. Georgia’s kicking up a storm in the papers. You seen the tabloids today? The Mail did a big piece comparing her disappearance with Agatha Christie’s vanishing act back in the twenties.”
“She’s still not shown up, then?” Fiona asked. She turned to Steve. “Georgia Lester, the crime writer? Have you been following the story?”
“I’ve seen it in the papers, yes. Didn’t you say she’d had a letter like yours, Kit? What do you think? Has she gone underground out of pique or out of fear?”
“The letter didn’t really scare her until she found out I’d had one too. She was edgy about it, definitely. I know she was pitching her publisher to send her out on the tour with a pair of minders, but I reckoned that was just Georgia trying it on. She can be a bit of a grandstander,” he added affectionately, reaching for a heavy cast-iron skillet hanging beside the cooker.
“One thing’s for sure,” Fiona said dryly. “The suicide option is a nonstarter with Georgia.”
“Why do you say that?” Steve asked.
“Suicides have low self-esteem. Georgia, on the other hand, is a woman entirely devoid of the slightest shred of self-doubt. On a scale of one to ten, the health of her ego would be somewhere around eleven.”
“She’s right,” Kit confirmed. “Most of us, we get a bad review, we kick the cat, we swear at the computer screen, we hurt. Even if we pretend we’re far too manly for that. But Georgia, she gets a bad review, she sends the reviewer flowers and a note saying she hopes they’ll be better soon.”
Steve snorted with laughter. “You’re making that up.”
“Swear to God, it’s a true story. Georgia could no more top herself than wear a shell suit.”
“So there’s only one alternative, is that what you’re saying? If she hasn’t staged this disappearance as a publicity stunt, then she’s been abducted?” Steve put into words what Kit and Fiona had been avoiding.
There was a long moment of silence. Then Kit tipped the diced chicken into the pan with the shallots. Steam rose in the air, carrying the cooking smells across the room. “I suppose that’s what we’re carefully not saying,” Fiona said.
“Which doesn’t mean you’re not thinking it. I would be, in your shoes. After Drew Shand and Jane Elias, it’s got to be in the front of your mind,” Steve said.
“But there’s no connection between those two murders,” Kit protested. “The Garda have arrested a local man for Jane. And you told me they haven’t found any threatening letters among her papers, which put the damper on my nerves a bit.”
“It doesn’t matter that there’s no connection,” Fiona said. “Psychologically speaking, that is. What we know is that two thriller writers have been murdered. So when a third goes missing, it’s inevitable that we start wondering if the same thing has happened to her. It’s the mind playing tricks, Kit. Subconsciously we always look for sequences. Even when they’re not there. So although your conscious mind is denying that Drew and Jane’s deaths could have any connection to Georgia, at a lower level, you can’t help picturing it as a sequence and worrying about it.”
“Nevertheless,” Steve interrupted, “and speaking purely as a copper, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that Georgia has been abducted.”