tell him what had happened. ‘Look, Sue, I realize you were in a difficult situation – if you saw Ashley you had to tell them, no one’s saying you shouldn’t have done. But you should have let us know. I would have hoped you’d have come to us before you went to the police. It’s part of the commitment you make—’
‘Wait a minute!’ Suzanne was caught completely off balance. ‘What exactly do you think happened? What do you think I said?’
‘I can understand when there’s been a crime like that, if you saw Ashley near the scene you’d naturally—’
‘I didn’t.’ Suzanne felt a cold push of anger.
‘What do you mean?’ He looked confused.
‘I didn’t see Ashley and I didn’t tell them I’d seen Ashley. I didn’t volunteer to talk to them, I had to …’
‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying …’ He tried to pick up the initiative again but she overrode him.
‘It’s all a stupid misunderstanding. I specifically told them, specifically told DI fucking McCarthy that I didn’t see Ashley.’
He looked at her in silence for a minute. He obviously didn’t believe her. ‘There are some issues with Ashley at the moment. This couldn’t come at a worse time for him.’
‘What do you mean?’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t say.’
Their endless confidentiality! Maybe if she’d been given the information that Richard was referring to … ‘Why don’t you ask Ashley? He’ll tell you where he was.’
Richard looked uneasy. ‘It’s almost certainly because of these other issues … He hasn’t been to the centre since Thursday evening. We need to find him, get him to tell his story to the police before this gets out of hand.’
Suzanne found that her anger was being taken over by a sense of insecurity – had she done something wrong, something stupid? ‘I think you’d better go,’ she said.
‘Yes. I’m … OK, right.’ He turned in the doorway. ‘Keith is very unhappy about it,’ he warned.
She went to the pub by herself in the end, but left early. She talked to a few people: some of Dave’s friends who’d been her friends as well when she and Dave were married; one or two people she knew from the university. It could have been a pleasant evening, but she found that she didn’t really want to talk to anyone. The comedy evening was a let-down as well, though the rest of the audience seemed to enjoy it well enough. To her, the comedian’s laddish jokes were pointless and unfunny. She left early. He heckled her as she was leaving. ‘There’s another one off for her pension!’ It seemed that being over twenty-five was funny in itself now.
She walked back past the park gates and paused, looking down the path towards the woods. It was dark. She could see a small group of people hanging around in the shelter near the entrance. Teenagers, she assumed, though it was too dark to tell. Further in, the shadows were black under the trees. She could see a light flickering in the darkness, but otherwise it was quiet and still. The group by the shelter watched her as she stood under the street light. She could walk through the gate, follow the path to the third bridge, go out the gate there and be on Dave’s doorstep, be where Michael was. She couldn’t think of anything that would induce her to walk into that black silence.
Steve McCarthy had been home for an hour. He’d got home after eight-thirty and gone straight to his computer to log on to the network. His evenings would be like this now, until this case was over. There was always more information pouring in, more details often burying important details, and he intended staying on top of it all.
McCarthy was ambitious. He’d joined the police after leaving school, choosing to go straight in rather than going on to do a degree. He still wasn’t sure if that had been the wisest decision. He’d done well, promotions had come in good time, sometimes sooner than his best expectations, and he knew he was seen as a team player with a good future ahead of him. He was thirty-two, and the next hike up the promotions ladder was the important one.
He was working on their current database now, getting it to look for patterns in relation to other offences in the Sheffield area over recent months. He typed another command into the computer, getting it to sort the information in relation to drug offences. While he was waiting, he dug his fork into the takeaway he’d picked up from the Chinese on the way back. Cold. He looked down at the polystyrene tray. His chicken chow mein had somehow transformed itself into a grey, glutinous mass. He pushed it away impatiently. He could get something out of the freezer later, stick it in the microwave. He picked up his mug of coffee with little optimism. Cold as well. He couldn’t work without coffee. He went through to the kitchen and pushed the switch on the coffee machine.
The flat was modern, two-bedroomed. McCarthy had bought it because it was fitted out, convenient and he could move straight in. He’d heard someone say once, or he’d read somewhere, that a house should be a machine for living. McCarthy understood that. He wanted the place he lived in to service him. He wanted to go in and find it warm when the weather was cold, cool when it was hot. He wanted to be able to cook at the push of a button, wash at the flick of a switch. He wanted to have any disorder that living created reordered before he returned.
‘Christ, McCarthy,’ Lynne, his last girlfriend, had said, ‘why don’t you just lock yourself away in a cupboard at the end of the day?’ Another time she’d said, ‘What you need, McCarthy, is a wife. An automatic, rechargeable, super-turbo, fuel-injection wife.’ He’d laughed and started massaging her back, running his hands over her neck and shoulders in the way he knew she liked, because he hadn’t wanted to have another of their vicious, cutting rows, and she’d pulled him into the chair and they’d had a quick wham bam thank you, ma’am – or thank you, sir, and then they’d gone into the bedroom and spent longer, spent most of the evening, exploring each other and drinking wine. But he and Lynne only had that: they had sex and they had the job. They couldn’t spend all their time screwing and working – though to McCarthy it had sometimes seemed as though that was exactly what they did – and the relationship had ended when Lynne got the job that he had aimed at, got his promotion in fact, and the whole flimsy edifice had fallen apart in the volcanic aftermath. He still felt angry and bitter about that, and he determinedly shut it out of his mind.
He took the coffee back into his workroom and looked at the screen. There was very little there that he didn’t already know. He noted the fact that Ashley Reid had a drugs caution – hardly surprising he’d missed it, McCarthy thought, in the long list attached to that young thug’s name. And, now, this could be interesting: Paul Lynman, one of the tenants at 14, Carleton Road, the student house, had a conviction for possession. McCarthy pulled up the details. OK, it looked like a my-round deal – he’d been caught with almost enough speed to pull down a dealing charge – but not quite. He’d insisted, wisely, that it was for his own use, but he’d probably been buying for a friend as well as for himself. Worth chasing up, though. There was nothing conclusive, no real links. McCarthy rubbed the skin between his eyebrows in an effort to concentrate. He’d heard something about a problem at the Alpha Centre, something about Es and speed. And had there been some kind of action round the university? He needed to talk to someone from drugs.
He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. He wondered what to do with the rest of the evening. Listen to music? Watch the telly? He felt a sense of things closing around him, as though his life was shrinking to the walls of this flat, the route to and from the office, the office itself. Maybe Lynne had been right. Maybe he should start looking for that cupboard.
Sunday morning, Suzanne got up early, was showered, dressed and at her desk by eight o’clock. She planned to put in a solid day’s work, to forget everything that had happened since Friday. For an hour, she tried to read and make notes from a research paper that she’d had on her desk