Roxanne, p.3
Roxanne, page 3
Waters said, ‘But that’s not the whole story either, is it, DC?’
‘Quite right, it isn’t. I said to her, he’s only interested in your CV but she didn’t take it well. This chap has shown her a vacancy. You know they’re staffed by volunteers on the phones but there are some paid positions. They’re looking for a Head of Safeguarding, for the national organisation. It sounds like a big job to me, and she’d take a pay-cut, but I think she was going to apply. If she does, I can’t imagine there will be too many better qualified candidates.’
Alison Reeve had been at Kings Lake Central since Waters’ first day. His own career had thrived under her watch, and, strangely, he had been the first person she’d told about her lymphoma diagnosis. She was, in his view, an excellent manager of people.
Smith had concluded with, ‘… making a difference. Once we thought that’s what we were doing as coppers, that’s how it used to feel. Now? Not so much. But you don’t want to hear me banging on about it anymore. When do we get to meet this new girlfriend?’
Waters was heading for the not-so-new girlfriend’s house as the evening traffic began to thin out. He knew all the shortcuts through Fairhills now, and the parking space in front of her house which certain neighbours had been using habitually for the past couple of years was now usually empty. As far as he knew, Miriam hadn’t told anyone there what he did as a job but word has a way of getting around. There was an unfamiliar vehicle parked in her off-road space but he guessed why that might be.
The front door was unlocked. Usually he would call out to alert her and Ben that he was in the building, but chose not to do so because he could hear the piano and that meant Ben would be shut in his own room for an hour or so. Hanging up in the hallway were two coats he didn’t recognise.
The woman in the lounge had a book on her lap but it was closed. She looked up at Waters and smiled a friendly enough smile, and he nodded back to her. He hadn’t taken off his coat and still had his shoulder bag at his side.
She pointed to her watch and said, ‘Sorry! We run over but I think they nearly finished. I didn’t know she have another lesson after Aaden’s. Perhaps she loses track of time. Must be difficult for her. Maybe I should…’
‘No,’ Waters said, ‘she’ll know the time,’ and then he explained he wasn’t another student, just a friend calling in. Would she like something to drink while she finished waiting?
The woman thanked him but said no, she was sure her son would be out in a moment or two. Waters put his bag on the low table and something in that must have made him seem at home here. She said, ‘She make a difference with these lessons. He practise on his keyboard all the time, I never have to tell him to… And he talk about music. He know about notes and things. It go over my head to be honest, but it’s doin’ him good.’
Waters asked whether her son had been a beginner, and she said he had, just a few weeks ago. The music teacher at school had said Aaden might have ability, which was why they’d tried this. School wasn’t a good place for him just now, and… The woman’s voice tailed away, and the detective’s brain filled in the gaps automatically. Challenging behaviour, disruptive in the classroom, work below expectations, failure. Waters’ sister Gail was a secondary school teacher, and she had recently offered to provide him with a list of names, the twelve-year-olds he’d be dealing with in a few years’ time.
There was a musical phrase repeated twice and then the sound of Miriam’s voice, raised in congratulation. Aaden had just played a little Beethoven. The woman looked at Waters and said, ‘See what I mean?’
Moments later, the student appeared, followed by the teacher. The boy was about nine or ten years old, younger than expected, and when he saw Waters the look on his face darkened a little as if he already associated tall, official-looking white men with trouble.
Miriam said, ‘I’m sure you heard that, Mrs Mahad. We’ve decided we’re going to learn notation, after all. Once Aaden can read music, there’ll be no stopping him!’
Mrs Mahad was on her feet. She said, ‘Thank you. Thank you so much. I was telling your friend here how pleased we are, all of us. The whole family… Do we need to buy books for the music reading? We will get them for next week.’
Waters had already guessed the Mahads were part of Lake’s small Somali community. He nodded some encouragement to the boy but received a blank stare in return. Then he looked at Miriam and realised she still wasn’t certain who the invisible friend might be, so he said, ‘It’s only me.’
When she came back from escorting the Mahads to the front door, she said, ‘I’m surprised Ben didn’t make a fuss. He knows he doesn’t have to be shut in his room when you’re here.’
She was waiting for him to answer so she would know where he was in the room. He drew the moment out a little longer because he hadn’t grown tired of just looking at her, and he liked the expression she had when she was listening intently.
She said, ‘And he knows you’re going to make too much fuss of him, for a working dog.’
Still Waters didn’t answer. It was ironic but as they had grown closer he’d realised that he was one of the very few people allowed to tease her about her disability. To the wider world, Miriam Josephs was a militant campaigner for the blind having equal rights in everything, but with her closest friends she would make jokes about her blindness and she expected them to do the same. When we are truly intimate with someone, there are no boundaries, and that was what she seemed to want with him.
Standing very still, with her face half in profile to him, she said, ‘You can stop it now.’
He didn’t answer. Instead, as quietly as he could he stepped towards her, but before he reached her, she had her face upturned towards his.
Later, he told her that Neville Murfitt had received some sort of justice that afternoon. She was mixing a salad to eat with pasta, and her fingers stopped for a moment. Miriam asked fewer questions about his work than previous girlfriends, and Waters knew this was deliberate on her part – early on he had said to her that it was difficult to have relationships with police officers. When she asked why, he told her some of the reasons, including that often there are times when the last thing you want to talk about is what you did today, which is fortunate in a way, because it’s also the last thing you’re supposed to be doing. Her answer had been that it was a little arrogant to think that his life was going to be so much more interesting than hers, but beyond the joke, she had understood and she had honoured the decision she’d taken to keep her distance from his work.
She had known Neville Murfitt, though. She had spoken a number of times to the vagrant who sometimes begged outside her shop in Eden Street, and she had been one of the few people who hadn’t tried to have him moved on. She said to Waters now, ‘And this Ryan Shepherd didn’t know him? They’d never met?’
‘No. It was literally mistaken identity. They thought they were killing someone else.’
‘The real Michael Wortley.’
‘Yes.’
She put the last of the salad into a bowl and felt for the little jug of dressing she had made. He saw it begin to tip and was moving with one arm outstretched to catch it, but her practised finger looped through the handle in time. He hoped she hadn’t realised what he’d just done.
Miriam said, ‘What a waste. People dead, people locked up, people hiding from other people for the rest of their lives…’
He still didn’t know what she thought of the work he did – they had never discussed it directly. He said now, ‘And other people spending their lives clearing up the mess.’
She didn’t respond, seemingly busy with the final preparations for the meal, but he knew she was thinking it over. Miriam did a lot of thinking, and that was another of the things he liked to watch her doing. She held a palm over the saucepan to check the heat from the water and then asked Alexa to set a timer for five minutes. Without being told, Waters laid their regular places at the table, found two glasses and took the bottle of Chablis from the fridge.
They had begun to eat before she said, ‘Do you think firemen sometimes sit in the fire-station hoping there’ll soon be a fire?’
He knew immediately where this was going, and said, ‘Probably. A small one with no loss of life and insignificant damage to property.’
She nodded and looked down at her plate for all the world as if she could see it. Then she pushed her fork into a tortellini and managed to secure some of the baby-leaf salad at the same time. When she raised it, though, a single leaf fell away and landed on the table by her plate. After that forkful, she went on, ‘What about paramedics and ambulance drivers. Same question. Do they get bored and hope there’ll be some action soon?’
Waters said, ‘I doubt it with the cuts to services. But if they did, I suppose it would be for a minor RTA or an unplanned home birth. And before you ask, no, we don’t pace up and down the office saying hurry up with the next body.’
Miriam smiled because she liked to argue, and because she liked the fact that he could read her sometimes. She liked being challenged and forced to raise her game.
She said, ‘But if there were no murders, you’d be out of a job.’
‘If everyone grew their own flowers, so would you.’
She ate again, but she would always leave a little on her plate, and she never started with as much as she put on his. Waters didn’t think she ate enough. The leaf on the table was bothering him.
She said, ‘But what’s your motivation? I mean you personally. You see awful things and have to deal with some dreadful people. I get the impression you’re quite good at it, or at least that other people think you are, but isn’t it depressing? It must take something out of you.’
Neither Clare nor Janey Cole had ever asked him questions like these. These are the questions one must ask oneself periodically, and at the worst moments – if you’ve stopped asking them, the job has already taken too much. His silence encouraged Miriam to go on.
‘I mean, are you a sort of Batman figure taking on the dark forces of Gotham City? Or Kings Lake – I know it’s not quite the same thing but… Or is it all a sort of grown up game of cowboys and Indians? Am I being annoying? Do you have your serious face on?’
When they were first getting to know each other properly, she had asked him to make various expressions while she felt the contours of his face. It was fun but he understood what she was doing, trying to construct mental images of how his face might change when she heard different emotions and moods in his voice and his words.
He said, ‘I don’t think I ever owned the cape and the mask. And I’d rather you didn’t try to picture my legs in tights.’
She laughed and leaned back in her chair. Ben took this as the sign she had finished eating and crossed the room to sit by her side.
Waters said, ‘The first case I was involved in when I came to Lake was a manslaughter. The boy who died was a teenager. Wayne Fletcher. DC took me to the funeral. We were in the church and then we went to the burial. I’d say a lot of my motivation comes from that.’
‘Explain.’
Ben’s brown eyes were just above the edge of the table, and they were watching him. There had been times when the guest had passed some small item in his direction after a meal was over.
Waters said, ‘We can’t let selfishness win. People have to believe there will be some sort of justice. If they lose that belief, we’ll have anarchy and misery. Civilisation is fragile.’
Miriam waved a hand and said airily, ‘Oh, that’s your motivation when you get up in the morning and drive to the station. You’re defending Western civilisation!’
Waters had discovered things about himself since he’d got to know her better. His study of history had, he thought, taught him to be objective politically but he had now realised, to his surprise, that if he had leanings, they were possibly a little to the right of centre. Miriam was not that way inclined but rather the opposite. When they listened to the news or discussed social questions, it was plain that she took the view society was to blame for many of its own ills and that therefore society was responsible for fixing them. He had once reminded her that a certain British Prime Minister had said there is no such thing as society, and Miriam’s response had been brief and contemptuous. They had talked about Neville Murfitt. Waters took the view that whatever society did to help, there would always be individuals who struggled, who lived on the streets; Miriam said that if even one person was living such an awful existence, then society had failed and society had a duty to fix it. There is, she argued, more than enough wealth for everyone to live a decent life and it’s simply a matter of how that wealth is shared out. That’s what politics should be about.
In answer to her light-hearted mockery just now, he said, ‘If you want to put it that way. But for Wayne Fletcher, I think DC wanted to give his family and his friends an explanation and a sense of closure. It’s a part of the grieving process, understanding exactly how and why someone we love has lost their life. So is the feeling that some sort of justice has been done.’
She was still in the mood to tease him. She said, ‘So he was Batman and you were the Boy Wonder…’
Waters had to smile – Smith had called him that more than once in the early days. He said, ‘What about you? Made up your mind about the shop?’
They had been dating for three months before she played the piano for him. In the first stunned silence, he had realised two things: first, that she was extraordinarily talented, and second, that the world ought to be made aware of it, one way or another. The matter had become a regular topic of conversation. He suggested she could play at The Blue Note, and so far she had refused. Then he asked whether she had ever considered teaching, giving paid private tuition. He found out for her how much good teachers can charge, and they did some simple sums. Four hours of tuition a week would cover the small wage she currently paid herself from Flower Power. She could leave that money in the business, let Patsy manage the shop full-time and use her musical abilities to develop something more rewarding in every way.
Two months ago, over a weekend, they had rearranged her downstairs rooms so the second reception space would become the place where she taught. Such changes can be mildly traumatic for many of us – for a blind person, it can feel like wandering around after an earthquake. They had taken it slowly, counting steps and talking it through but there were still some bruised shins and egos. To shift the piano, they needed help, and Waters was introduced to Jake, a nearby neighbour and one of Miriam’s extended support network. Jake came on the Sunday morning and shook hands reluctantly. It wasn’t difficult to see why. A single, middle-aged and lonely man, Miriam had become something of a light in his life and now Waters had stepped in between and cast a shadow. But they moved the piano and the sofa, and if Miriam could hear in the man’s voice what Waters could see in his face, she never let on.
An online advertisement, meticulously set up and monitored by Waters, had produced the first inquiry in less than a week. He made sure he was present when the father arrived with a precocious six-year-old girl, and he made sure that all the adults understood the arrangement – they were to remain in the house during the one-hour lessons unless a second person was present to support Miriam. Currently she had three pupils, and the advertisement had been suspended while she worked with them and made a decision about this second business.
Ben had rested his head on her knee but his eyes were still fixed on Waters. She said, ‘I like the teaching, more than I thought. Having strangers in the house still feels odd. Patsy’s keen on me being the part-timer instead of her, which I should probably be offended by, but I know she’d do a good job…’
‘But?’
‘It’s a big change.’
Waters felt responsible, felt guilty.
‘Are you sorry I suggested it? We said it would just be a trial. Everything can go back to where it was. Just say the word.’
She shook her head.
‘No, I’m not saying that. I’d already miss the children – I look forward to them coming. But thirty-five pounds an hour seems a lot. The Mahads aren’t wealthy people. The shop won’t make anyone rich but it’s doing better than anyone expected when I first got into it. I could charge less and take on a few more.’
She hadn’t seen Mrs Mahad’s face, of course – Miriam couldn’t know she was doing more than giving the woman’s child a music lesson. She was giving her hope. Waters said thirty-five pounds was the market rate but the decision was entirely hers.
She said, ‘And I’m not badly off. There’s still a lot of compensation money tied up in bonds. I did think about having a full financial statement prepared for your mother.’
He closed his eyes momentarily. Three weeks ago, he had taken Miriam to meet his parents for the first time, the full Sunday lunch experience. It had been a successful day but afterwards Miriam had told him that during the game of snooker he’d played with his father, when the two women had been alone in the lounge, Mrs Waters had politely but unashamedly turned the conversation onto the subject of money. ‘She thinks,’ Miriam had said, ‘that I might be after your salary.’
He had apologised and she had laughed.
‘I respect her! She’s looking after her little boy! In her position, I wouldn’t trust me either.’
Waters wasn’t surprised his mother had reserved judgement on the new girlfriend, in contrast to his father, who had been delighted with her. He said now, ‘I think a meeting with your accountant would be better.’
Miriam found her glass and drank some of the wine before she said, ‘And talking about meeting people, are we still going to see your Mr Smith this weekend?’
‘If you call him that to his face, I’ll never hear the last of it.’
She reached a hand across the table towards him and he took it in his own.
She said, ‘I’m more nervous about meeting him than I was your parents.’
