This was – or would be, assuming she turned up – an entirely unnecessary meeting, yet Sam had chosen it in preference to an afternoon at home with his family. He already knew the answers Alice would give to the questions he planned to ask her. He could have asked them over the phone, but he’d been keen to see her in the flesh, keener than he cared to admit even to himself. Few women were more legendary than Alice in the small world that was Spilling nick. Sam had heard from at least ten different sources that Simon Waterhouse had been romantically fixated on her several years ago. She’d been Alice Fancourt then.
Sam knew that her involvement with Simon (which, according to Colin Sellers, had been ‘a shagless waste of time’) had ended badly, that the two of them no longer spoke to one another. How much of the story would Alice tell him today? On the phone this morning, she had asked within seconds of Sam introducing himself if he worked with Simon. She’d suggested Chompers as the venue for this afternoon’s meeting, saying, ‘That’s where Simon and I always met.’ Sam felt guilty about that too: not only was he abandoning his family on one of his days off, he would also very probably be stirring up painful memories for a stranger, for no more noble reason than to satisfy his unwholesome curiosity.
He looked at his watch. She was ten minutes late. Should he ring her? No, he’d leave it until quarter past. Maybe he’d ask one of the waiters to turn down the music. Presumably it was intended to cover the noise from the corner of the room, where there was a fenced-off play area full of howling soggy-faced toddlers, a handful of mothers whose stiff smiles sizzled with repressed fury, tables and chairs in the shape of toadstools, and an assortment of unrecognisable plastic objects in primary colours. Sam didn’t blame the children for wailing; he might soon be doing the same if he had to sit through many more Def Leppard hits from the 1980s.
He stared out of the window at the car park. Any second now, Alice would pull into one of the empty spaces. This might be her, slamming shut the boot of a red Renault Clio. Sunglasses, strappy sandals . . . No. Simon would never fall for a face like that. Sam wondered if Alice looked anything like Charlie. So what if she does? And so what if she doesn’t? Why did he find everything to do with Simon so compelling? He wouldn’t have put himself out to meet a woman Chris Gibbs used to be in love with, or Colin Sellers. Come to think of it, he would probably travel a reasonable distance to see the rare woman that didn’t inspire longing in Colin, assuming such a person existed.
Ashamed of his own prurience, Sam tried to focus instead on Connie Bowskill. He soon found himself thinking about Simon Waterhouse again. Nothing wrong with that, he decided, not in this context. Simon was the best detective Sam knew; he was the best detective anyone knew, though most people were reluctant to admit it, and preferred to dismiss him as a rude, unpredictable troublemaker. On the first of January this year, at five past midnight, Sam had made a resolution: instead of constantly feeling inferior to Simon, and allowing more and more resentment to build, he would try to learn from him, to put aside his ego and see if he could acquire by imitation – by studying Simon’s behaviour and attitudes as if he might one day be examined on both – a small fraction of that brilliance.
Simon would not have dismissed Connie Bowskill in a hurry, Sam was certain of that. Would he have believed her, though? In Sam’s position, having met Connie and heard what she had to say, would Simon be leaning more towards thinking she was suffering from stress and seeing things that weren’t there, or would he be convinced she was lying? Maybe he’d think her story’s implausibility made it likely to be true, because few people would have the confidence to tell so outrageous a lie.
You’re not Simon – that’s the whole problem. You’ve no idea what he’d think.
No, that wasn’t true. You couldn’t work closely with someone for years and not have an inkling as to how their mind worked. Simon would think there was at least a chance that a crime had