Luck and Judgement

by Peter Grainger

  ‘He’s still around, then?’

  Smith paused, realizing how his last sentence had given the wrong impression.

  ‘No - he died four or five years ago - a heart attack. But that’s not the point. He should get a mention for what he did before I took over, and after.’

  She wrote it down and he felt oddly grateful.

  She said, ‘Imagine you at the Met. I was there then, ten years ago. We might have – Met!’

  ‘I’d have remembered.’

  Only after he had said it, did he think about it and see why she blushed a little. He didn’t think he had meant it that way but he could not take it back.

  ‘What did you think to it down there? Travelling around as I have since and talking to lots of people, I’ve realized that it really is a different world.’

  ‘I liked it. Very fast-moving, very busy, lots of bad boys and girls – and that was just in the force! If you’re someone who’s inclined to think too much, that can come as a relief, in a funny kind of way, the not having much chance to…’

  Such admissions rarely came from him, and he saw the surprise on her face because she had already realized that.

  ‘Would you have stayed? And would Sheila have moved down there as well?’

  ‘Yes, she would. She always liked the tough classes herself, so… That afternoon, when the Super called me in and said Norfolk had been on the line, he made it clear that there would be something for me, if I chose to apply for it when the time came.’

  ‘But it never did.’

  ‘No.’

  She looked at her watch.

  ‘Well, it’s been a really helpful couple of hours. Let me buy you dinner this evening, David.’

  How strange that sounded, the first time. Despite his jokes about the standard of the local takeaways and the dangers on the streets of Lake on a Saturday evening, she was not to be distracted from her mission to go out to dinner. Eventually he conceded that there was a good French restaurant, although it would not have a table available at such late notice – he didn’t go out that much but it had been a good French restaurant a couple of months ago. He found the number for her.

  While he was in the kitchen making a pot of tea, he could hear her on the phone. She was asking them something about the soup of the day and the specials that evening – he caught sight of himself in the mirror on the wall and performed his best well-fancy-that look. As he spooned the Assam loose-leaf into the special occasions ceramic pot, she came into the kitchen, waving her phone and smiling.

  ‘Do you believe in coincidence?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘It’s destiny, then. They had a cancellation an hour ago.’

  When she came down the stairs at six-thirty, he thought, does she always pack clothes like that for a working weekend? The slim-line, charcoal-grey pencil skirt, the white blouse with a dusting of lace at the neck, the ankle-length lace-up boots and short, black velvet jacket might have stepped out of the pages of a Sunday supplement. He left her in the lounge, looking at the bookshelves, and hoped that she had not noticed that he had already changed – then he went quickly and quietly up the stairs to find an even better pair of trousers.

  Going back into the lounge five minutes later, checking his pockets for wallet, phone and keys, he found her still in the same place, a book open in her hand. She was reading and didn’t immediately acknowledge that he had returned. Then she held it up and said, ‘‘The Good Soldier’. I haven’t read this.’

  ‘You are welcome to borrow it.’

  ‘What is it about?’

  ‘You’ve picked up one of the five books I’ve actually read from those shelves – I just want to make that clear.’

  ‘Right – got that.’

  ‘It’s about betrayal, I think. About the hollowness there can be at the heart of relationships, maybe.’

  ‘Hm… It might be my kind of book, then.’

  He watched her as she read a few more lines.

  Then she said, ‘So either you collect books that you never read, or these were your wife’s – Sheila’s?’

  ‘Pretty much all hers.’

  She studied the shelves again, and Smith realized that for a visitor, someone new to the house, the rows and rows of books made quite a statement.

  ‘It’s a compendium of modern literature. I’ve read some of these but there are lots of other names that I recognize. What did she teach – or is that a stupid question?’

  ‘English and English Literature.’

  ‘Right – stupid question. But this is top end for secondary, isn’t it? A levels? You said she liked the difficult classes.’

  ‘She could do both, but she didn’t have a lot of time for the way pupils are sorted into sheep and goats as soon as they’re out of nappies. She believed that literature can liberate anyone, not just the middle class Times reader.’

  ‘She was a socialist?’

  He gave a faint snort of amusement.

  ‘She didn’t have a lot of time for isms, either.’

  She pushed the book carefully back into its space, which had already begun to close up from the pressure of the many others on either side of it.

  ‘I don’t borrow books lightly but I’ll think about that one.’

  Sandrine’s has several intimate corners, alcoves in which there is only room for a table for two. Jo Evison took the seat that backed onto the wall, the one that Smith would himself have chosen, leaving him to sit with his own back to the comings and goings of the busy restaurant behind him. She said yes to the waitress when asked if they would like water on the table, and then she spent two, perhaps three minutes studying the menu; sometimes, he had already realized, she did things with an odd intensity, and she showed none of the tendency to fill up spaces with idle chatter before they became silences.

  She put down the menu and nodded her approval.

  ‘Good choice. I could eat just about everything on here.’

  ‘If you want to try it, I’ll happily foot the bill!’

  ‘Is it one of your regular places?’

  ‘I can’t say that but I was here a couple of months ago. I don’t eat out that much. Used to but times change. I don’t mind cooking at home, you know – beans on toast, that sort of thing.’

  She gave him an odd look, a sort of puzzled half-smile as if she had found some contradiction in him – a look that lasted a second or two longer than one might have expected.

  Then she said, ‘Well, we’d better make the most of tonight, then.’

  Their dinner, the four courses followed by coffee, lasted almost two and a half hours, and the conversation lasted almost as long. He allowed her to ask a little more about himself, and it would have been difficult to draw a line between her work in the afternoon and their conversation now, as far as that was concerned, but gradually he steered away from that until he was asking most of the questions and she was giving most of the answers.

  Why the train, he had said, apropos of nothing in particular, when you have that Swedish beast of a car? It was convenient from where she lived, and she liked trains, always had since she was a little girl. She could think on trains and work on them too, if necessary. Had she been working on the way up to Kings Lake that morning, making notes for this next book? Yes and no, she had said – working but not on this book, or rather this idea for a book; she wanted him to understand that it was still only a possibility. Not every book that is begun is completed. Instead, this morning she had been making notes for a meeting. That was why she had to catch the early train tomorrow morning – she had to fly back to Germany on the same evening.

  ‘Back to Munich?’ Smith asked.

  ‘No, Berlin. But it is to see someone that I met in Munich. A professor at the Free Berlin University who runs a course in criminal psychology – there might be some teaching in it, just one term a year. I’d have to fly back and forth, though.’

  ‘He must have been very impressed by your meeting skills.’

  She had wag
ged a finger at him.

  ‘Gender stereotyping, Sergeant Smith! He’s a she.’

  ‘Guilty as charged – as usual.’

  So, where did she live? Cockfosters, in the north of London, at the very end of the Piccadily line. Smith knew it, had been there once during his time with the Met. He described what he could remember – a busy, broad high street but north of there some long, leafy roads between large, some of them very large, and substantially built houses with gates and driveways and tall trees in extensive gardens. Sounds just like my place she had said, before confessing that her own was a mere semi, though the area was nice and leafy, it was true.

  ‘You know the prices down there,’ she said. ‘I could never have afforded it if my dad hadn’t invested some money for me, for just such a thing. Now it’s ‘worth’ a ridiculous amount. One more nought and I’ll buy a small Scottish island.’

  ‘Is that what you would do?’

  And she had hesitated a little then, because it is one thing to talk about what we have done and what we do, and quite another to talk about our dreams. She had not answered him directly.

  ‘I like my work. I’ve been stupidly lucky, the way things have turned out, one thing leading to another. There are some more things that I want to do with it. So not yet. But an island is a good thing to save up for.’

  She pushed the long-handled dessert spoon into her crème brule, and took time over the first mouthful before she spoke again.

  ‘What about you? What are you saving up for?’

  He shrugged and thought – he had not been asked that sort of question for a long time.

  ‘If I didn’t already have a caravan on the coast, I might save up for one…’

  She had been intrigued. She’d been in a caravan, of course, but never to sleep, never to have holiday, never to stay. What was it like, his caravan? He had to ‘draw’ it out on the tablecloth with cutlery and place-mats, and then he described how the sea winds would make it move at night, and how the rain drummed so loudly on the roof in a thunderstorm that you had to raise your voice to be heard, but also how, early on a summer morning, the songs of a hundred birds would drift in through the open door, along with the scent of the pinewoods behind the dunes.

  After a pause, she said, ‘It sounds wonderful,’ and Smith thought that he might have got carried away, might have become a little too lyrical about it all. Then it was time to order some coffee, and he busied himself with that.

  He had not forgotten that she needed to be up early but out of politeness he offered her a drink when they got back to the house. She surprised him by accepting a small glass of malt with a little ice, and then asked him about the case he was working on, with the usual provisos – she didn’t want to know any details. Her first reaction interested him.

  ‘From what you’ve told me, he is an unlikely suicide.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The offences on the criminal record suggest he isn’t introspective, not the guilt-ridden type. And the new job, the family… Suicides, in my experience, are rarely impulsive. They are usually people who have considered it over time, who know that the inclination is there in themselves. He sounds like someone who has made an effort at least to get back on track. But if he was unhappy at the thought of going back out there, why go at all, let alone go out to climb over the safety mesh?’

  Smith poured himself a little more whisky after she had politely declined some.

  ‘Pretty much my own conclusion, as far as we’ve got. We might find some reason for it yet, but I’m not convinced. So it looks as if it was a tragic accident.’

  Her smile said, no, I’m not buying that from you, and his own in return said, no, neither am I, not yet.

  She followed him up the stairs with her overnight bag, a few minutes later. She placed it by her bed for the night, looked around and said that it was all very nice, his house. Her own was a little larger but not by much, and then she said that it was odd, the two of them having six bedrooms between them.

  ‘What’s in the end one?’

  The door to it was half open, and she had seen into it with her professional eye. He had meant to close it earlier and forgotten.

  ‘It’s a sort of music room – sounds a bit pretentious but I don’t know what else to call it.’

  ‘May I see?’

  The four guitars were on their stands in a line across the narrower side of the room. Three amplifiers faced them from the other end, and in between was all the paraphernalia that goes with the need to make music – songbooks and sheets of notes and bars, two music stands, three guitar cases, dusty now since their days, or rather evenings, on the road, foot-pedal controls, and shelves with assorted capos, jars of plectrums, a harmonica or two, tuning forks, little boxes of coiled strings…

  ‘I’m not going to ask if you play. I can see this is yours.’

  He wondered how.

  ‘Please? You cannot show someone this and not pick one of those up.’

  He went to the Taylor acoustic, took it to the stool and played about a minute of Classical Gas – that was what people usually wanted to hear, something catchy that sounds difficult. It can go on for as long as you like, of course, but he slowed it down and finished it as she walked over to the music stand that had a closed book on it.

  She said, ‘Eric Clapton,’ and opened the book.

  After replacing the acoustic, he picked up the Stratocaster, plugged it in, re-tuned it by ear and began to play a medley of classic, Claptonesque riffs with no particular song in mind. She listened and watched, one hand still resting on the open book. He brought it to an end with a long continuing A that he bent and then edged into feedback from the Marshall amp.

  This time she said, ‘I see.’

  She pointed into the book and said, ‘Do you know Layla? I suppose that’s another silly question, really.’

  ‘I’ve got the backing disc for the instrumental,’ he said, getting up and finding it in its proper place on one of the shelves. The player fed it into the amp, and this time he stood as he began to play the lead.

  It took him away a little as it always did, even after all these years, and when, after some two or three minutes of that last, heart-rending solo, he looked at Jo Evison, he saw that she had turned from him, that she was looking down and was hunched a little into herself. He stopped playing and then only the bass and drums sounded in the small bedroom.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  She straightened up and sniffed once. When she turned to face him, her eyes were shining.

  ‘Blimey. I’m sorry. I know I’m a bit out of practice but…’

  She managed a short laugh and a half-smile.

  ‘It was beautiful, really it was. My fault – I shouldn’t have asked you to play that.’

  He had to ask, of course.

  ‘My sister’s name was Layla – they named her after that song, so, whenever I hear it, I think about her. I’d no idea you would play it like that. So it was your fault, in a way.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Sometimes the best way around something is straight through it.

  ‘She was my oldest sister – there were three of us. She died when I was seven.’

  ‘How – if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘A hit-and-run, in the road outside our home. They never caught him.’

  Smith unplugged the guitar. Some women would welcome an arm around their shoulder now but he didn’t think that she was one of those.

  ‘I’m sorry for that. Did they have anything to go on?’

  She smiled again at his default, investigative approach.

  ‘It was definitely a man. A couple of her friends witnessed it from a distance. They were close to the exact make of car, and the inquiry was thorough, as far as I could make out when I looked at it again years later.’

  ‘When you had joined the force?’

  She nodded and looked at him directly again.

  ‘In some ways I know it’s why I joined.’

&nbs
p; ‘We all have our reasons.’

  ‘Yours? Why did you join?’

  He switched everything off and they were heading out onto the landing.

  ‘Lack of imagination.’

  She stopped and looked at him; without her shoes, and with his, their eyes were level.

  ‘No-one can play like that and lack imagination. But I have to say, you are a most unlikely-looking guitar hero.’

  He slept only lightly, and something woke him at half past one. At first he thought it must be the thing that he had forgotten to do. He got out of the bed and made his way without a light to the dressing table. The padlocks and their keys were still in the brown paper bag from Ramptons. He took the keys out of the locks, returned them to the bag, and put the bag and its remaining lock into one of the dressing table drawers. Then he went across to the window and opened it carefully, wanting to make no sound. The wind was dropping at last, and there was a suggestion of rain in the air. Reaching out, he placed the lock on the window ledge, checked that it would not slide down the slight angle and then closed the window.

  Back in the bed, he could hear somewhere an unfamiliar sound. Was it in the street or the house? His neighbours were elderly, and he rarely heard them. These days they were often away, visiting their numerous children and their grand-offspring. The sound was in the house, and then he remembered that he had a guest.

  Opening his bedroom door, he stood and listened. It was a little louder, and it was a voice talking, in low tones. He hesitated but curiosity got the better of him in the end. He stopped a few feet from her door and listened again, noticing that a dim light showed underneath it – one of the bedside lamps was on. There were pauses but he could make out no words. Perhaps she was talking in her sleep; the emotional upset of an hour or two ago, sleeping in a strange bed… Then she laughed and he realized that she was on the phone to someone at getting on for two o’clock in the morning. She was keeping her voice down so that she did not wake him.

  For a moment he felt an odd sense of intrusion. Then he turned and went back to his own bed. Sleep was a long time in coming.