I dug into my moules and took a much deeper swig of my wine than I’d been planning to. “I bet asking you about your favourite poem-slash-poet is, like, a total rookie move, isn’t it? It’d be like somebody asking me about my favourite—I dunno—way of solving crimes or something.”
“I thought your favourite way of solving crimes was to seduce information out of estate agents?”
“I have to admit, it is up there.”
“But you’re right.” She finished her wine and laid her cutlery neatly on the edge of her plate. “I don’t have a favourite poem-slash-poet. Although I am very fond of The Waste Land.”
The silence just sat there for a moment. “You’re going to make me admit I’ve never heard of it, aren’t you?”
“Oh absolutely, you’re cute when you’re embarrassed. And you’ve almost certainly heard some of it: April is the cruellest month, Fear death by water, and so on.”
None of that sounded familiar. “I mean, the death by water thing is good advice in general.”
“I don’t think it’s especially intended as a how-to guide. It’s more of a heap of broken images.”
“Can you recite it to me?”
“It’s long, I couldn’t do it from memory, but I’ve got a slim volume of Eliot back at my place if you wanted to hear it.”
I pulled a slightly perplexed face. “Couldn’t you just find it online? I figure that and porn are what the internet is for.”
“I could.” She leaned forward and made a noise that was a mixture between a sigh and a laugh. “Or we could have a look for it back at my place.”
Oh. Oh. I almost choked on my moules. “Sorry I—I didn’t think you were going to go through with the whole seduction thing.”
“You thought I was a bored straight woman looking to kill an otherwise dull evening by stringing you along for a couple of hours?” She didn’t seem angry exactly, but she had a bit of a you’ve let me down, you’ve let the school down, vibe to her.
“No. Yeah. A bit. Sorry.”
She slumped. I felt shitty that I’d made her slump. “Look. This obviously wasn’t what I was planning on doing when I woke up this morning, and I’m sure divorced estate agent isn’t anywhere near the top of your list of sexual fantasies, and if you feel—I don’t know—fetishised or taken for granted or anything like that then please forget I said anything. I’m making this up as I go along, and I probably got carried away, but when you walked through that door I thought I’d won the fucking lottery because I honestly do think you’re hot as hell and I really, really want to take you home right now.”
I … I could work with that. A little voice at the back of my mind said that this was going to be a bad idea and that we were both in way the wrong place emotionally for hooking up to make anything even resembling sense. But who the hell was I to judge her choices? And while I should probably have been more cautious about my own, given how my life was going, having a one-night stand with a forty-something divorcee from Brentford was probably the healthiest thing I’d done in about six years. Of course there was still Tara to be thinking about but we’d never quite pinned down whatever the hell it was we were doing and she’d always struck me as the sort who thought monogamy was a strictly one-sided deal. I wasn’t a fan of one-sided deals.
Twelve minutes later we were in a cab on the way to her place.
“So … what happened with your wife?” I thought it was best to get the elephants out of the room as soon as possible.
“Husband. And before you say anything, if you make me give you the bisexuals exist speech we are stopping this taxi right now and you’re walking back to Bow Street.”
That was me told. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have made assumptions.”
“Don’t worry about it. I get that you’re still worried that I’m playing tourist here, and you’re not totally wrong. It’s just that it’s the casual-sex-with-a-private-investigator part that’s new to me. Not the going-to-bed-with-a-woman part.”
“Good to know. And. Well. You don’t have to go to bed with me if you don’t want to.”
“I know. But we’ll see how it goes.”
The journey was short, and we stopped outside an almost terrifyingly normal semi-detached house. It was one of those pretty pre-war jobs with bay windows and a