There was a brief pause. Then when he spoke again Cooper was no longer apologetic verging on servile. Instead he sounded cold and determined.
“Where are you, boss?” he asked.
The question took her so much by surprise that she answered it.
“I’ve just arrived home. Why?” she asked, adding almost as an afterthought: “And what the fuck’s it got to do with you where I am, anyway?”
“Because I’ve bloody well had enough of this,” Cooper snapped. “I’ve driven back and I’ve just got to Torquay. I’m coming around to see you right now, whether you like it or not. I’m ten minutes behind you.”
And with that the line went dead.
“Oh, fuck,” muttered Karen. She was too weary for this, she really was. She knew somehow that Phil Cooper did not really want to see her to talk about the case, in spite of how important it was to both of them. No, Cooper had another agenda. And, just like before in the pub, when he had said he was sorry, she had not been at all sure what he was apologizing for. His professional or his personal conduct. It was all so confused, somehow.
Karen went into the kitchen, rummaged in the fridge for an open tin of cat food and fed a loudly meowing Sophie who had been demanding sustenance ever since her mistress had come through the front door. Then she switched on the kettle and put a tea bag in a mug. A cup of tea would have to do. She badly wanted an extremely strong drink, but didn’t dare have one. Her brain was in too much of a whirl.
The doorbell rang little more than five minutes later. Either Cooper had been a lot closer than he’d let on, she thought, or he’d driven like a madman.
She was still holding her mug of tea in one hand when she opened the front door to him. He looked flushed and angry. He didn’t wait for her to ask him in. Instead he pushed his way past her.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s get a few things straight here, shall we? I’m as thoroughly pissed off as anybody is about this case going pear-shaped — but there’s no way I carry the whole fucking can. And you don’t think that either, otherwise you’d have me on a report.”
He was pacing the room, shouting at her. In spite of herself she was almost amused. He was so angry and so determined. Very macho, she thought obliquely. She’d never seen him like this before. It was a bit of a revelation. Nonetheless, she kept the act up.
“Would I?” she enquired laconically.
“Yes, you fucking well would, and you know it. You also know that the reason you keep blowing me out all the time and doing your best to make my life a fucking misery has nothing whatsoever to do with this case.”
“Do I?”
“Will you stop being such a fucking smart-ass?” he almost screamed at her. “Of course you fucking do. And so does half the bloody nick by now, I shouldn’t wonder, with the way their minds work and the way you’ve been fucking well behaving.”
He sat down abruptly. Again without being asked.
Karen was taken aback. Cooper was a mild-mannered man. His language was usually nothing like as colourful as hers. She had rarely even heard him swear before. As ever, though, she did not intend to let her true feelings show.
“Have you been drinking?” she asked, realizing as she did so that she was continuing to handle this every bit as badly as she had done ever since the night she and Cooper had gone to bed together.
Cooper looked up at her, the anger still flashing.
“No, I fucking well haven’t,” he stormed. “I’ve just driven back from London, for Christ’s sake. Do you think I’m barking mad? We don’t all have to be pissed out of our fucking minds in order to show a hint of genuine emotion, you know.”
To her astonishment she saw that there were tears in his eyes. She sat down opposite him. Something about the rawness of him made her want to be honest for once. To tell the truth rather than to cover it up with that act she had so perfected.
“I’m sorry,” she said, running her hands through her hair, trying to make sense of it all. “You’re right, of course. I didn’t know how to handle what happened between us, and how you were with me afterwards. I guess...”
She hesitated. What she was about to admit was quite monumental for her.
“I guess I was hurt.”
His eyes opened wide.
“You were hurt?” he queried.
She managed a wry smile. “Don’t sound so surprised. Women don’t particularly like being fucked stupid and then ignored. Not even policewomen. It doesn’t make us feel very good.”
“Is that what you thought?”
“Yes. Except it isn’t ‘what I thought.’ It’s how it was.”
He shook his head vigorously. “No, no, honestly no, I just didn’t know how to deal with it, either,” he stumbled. “It wasn’t that way. It really wasn’t. And I intended to explain, eventually, I really did. But when you kept turning on me, when you kept bawling me out in front of everybody, well, I just thought you didn’t want to know. Honestly I did.”
He paused. She said nothing. She didn’t know what to say.
“So I decided tonight, that I’d had enough. That I couldn’t take it anymore. That I was going to tell you...”
His voice trailed off. She was curious.
“Tell me what?” she prompted.
He didn’t respond for a while. She stared at him, genuinely puzzled. Her first thought was that he was going to tell her that he’d applied for a transfer or something similar — that he no longer wanted to work with her or be with her in any way. And she realized that she wouldn’t like that at all. Even baiting him the way that she knew she had over the last three months had given her a certain twisted satisfaction, had scratched the itch that was inside her. She didn’t like the idea of losing him for good, even though he had never been hers. Except for one brief night. And only part of a night at that.
She felt the tears welling. This would never do. As ever she fought to show nothing, to keep her expression blank. Her mind was still intent on exerting control — over her tear glands as well as her body language — when he spoke again.
“To tell you, to tell you... that I’m in love with you,” he said.
Karen was dumbfounded. She had not expected this. In fact, it was the last thing she had expected. She was not a woman with a high opinion of herself when it came to men and their feelings for her, or the effect that she had on them. Indeed, she was not a woman with a high opinion of herself in any area. Even when it came to the career in which she had been extremely successful, Karen did not consider herself a success. She was always plagued with doubts. Her whole persona, the way she was when she went out in the world, was so much based on pretending. It really had not occurred to her, given his behaviour towards her following their one-night stand, that Cooper cared about her one jot, except maybe as a senior officer who could affect his future prospects in the job.
She stared at him in amazement.
“I thought it was you who didn’t want to know,” she stumbled. “I thought I was just a quick lay, and that you regretted it the next day. That’s how you behaved, or that’s how it seemed to me, anyway. Indeed, that’s how you’ve been behaving ever since.”
He shook his head. She thought he looked a bit like an overgrown puppy dog that knew it had misbehaved badly and was craving affection, wanting to be stroked and made a fuss of.
“I knew I was in love with you the moment I touched you,” he said. “I guess I was in love with you before, actually, but I didn’t realize it. The night I kissed you after that Indian meal, for a moment I thought you were going to ask me in then. I wanted you to so much. But I just didn’t dare do anything about it. And then when you did, well, it was beyond anything I could have expected, beyond anything I’d ever known.”