“Domnall?” Lightman replied, and shook his head. “You don’t have to worry about impressing him. He doesn’t drink. It’s tonic water.”
“Do we have any early wagers on the killer?” O’Malley called from the bar. It made Hanson wince slightly, but the bartender didn’t seem to care.
“I might want to spread my bet,” Lightman replied. “I’d go evenly between the four males.”
“That’s no way to gamble,” O’Malley said. “Have some balls and back your instincts.”
He paid up, and hefted the drinks in a triangle.
“What about you, Juliette?” asked O’Malley.
“Ah, I don’t know. I’d want to know more.”
Her phone buzzed, and she pulled it out to check it. She felt an unpleasant twist as she saw that it was from Damian again.
She hated the effect it had on her, his name on a message. Every time she thought she’d closed things down, another message arrived.
She could see the first line of the message in the preview on her home screen. It began with, “I’m sorry…” but she’d had messages like that before. She’d also had a lot that raged at her. That told her she was a fucking idiot, and that she’d been wrong about everything. That she’d left based on a stupid assumption. That she should have helped him through a difficult time and not walked out.
And then there had been the other kind, where he’d accused her of cheating on him, and tried to pretend that was why she’d left. Which was the kind of warped logic that he seemed to function on.
She felt the same draining away of energy that she did every time he messaged. The same drop of her positivity, and the same anxiety in her chest.
“All OK?” O’Malley asked, and she glanced up at him, and then at Lightman, who was watching her with another unreadable expression.
“Yes,” she said, looking down at the phone and then putting the screen to sleep. “All fine. Just a pain-in-the-arse ex-boyfriend.”
She no longer felt like staying with them and talking. She finished up the rest of her lager and rose.
“I’d better get going,” she said. “I’ve got a few calls to make….”
“I’ll walk back with you,” Lightman said, and stood to drain his pint.
“Good thing I don’t mind drinking alone,” O’Malley said wryly.
“Oh. Sorry.” Hanson felt a stab of real guilt. She hadn’t bothered to think about O’Malley, and the fact that he might need company. “I’m sure I can…”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said with a laugh. “I ought to get back to work, anyway. People to see. Drug dealers to find. I’ll head back to the station soon.”
Lightman held the door open for her as she left, and then, instead of trying to talk, walked along next to her in equable silence. Her thoughts went quite quickly back to Damian and the girl whose two passionate messages she’d found on his phone.
Hanson hadn’t even known her. The girl had turned out to be in a relationship with one of Damian’s colleagues. It hadn’t been the first time she’d suspected him, but he had so often attacked her, and made her feel guilty for so much as smiling at a man, that the focus had never been on him. She’d always been on the back foot.
She’d come to realize that he’d been hiding an awful lot behind his jealous attacks on her. She had no idea how long that particular thing had gone on, and he had denied and denied that there had been anything besides the girl being unhappy in her relationship, until she’d found a picture of them together on his computer from weeks before.
There was part of her that still wanted to interrogate him to the point where he admitted the truth. But she had had to accept that she wasn’t going to get the truth, and that the only thing to do was to walk away.
“We should do the pub thing again,” Lightman said suddenly, “when we’re not in the frantic stages of a case, and when there aren’t other distractions.”
She expected him to smile at her, but his expression was quite serious.
“Yeah,” she said, not really meaning it. “We should.”
Lightman gave a half smile. “All right, so you probably have better things to do. But Domnall and I don’t. So as long as you humor us once in a while…”
For some reason, she found herself trying to make him feel better.
“No, I really don’t,” she said. “It’s nice to see you two outside work. Sorry I’m being miserable and useless. I’m not normally. I promise, Sarge.”
“You’re all right,” Lightman said, and then, after a pause, added, “Comparatively.”
It made her smile in spite of herself.
* * *
—
JONAH BEGAN THE walk to the station slowly in spite of the rain. He tried to bring his mind back to the case, and not to let the unsettling memory of the figure watching him from the shadows take over.
If he had to attach himself to a theory, he thought it most likely that Aurora had been persuaded to go down to the stash with someone, and then murdered there. Whether that had been by strangling or by overdose—or by some other method—wasn’t yet clear. If Coralie and Jojo were both right in what they’d said, then Aurora and Connor had both been back up. A suspicious couple of events.
He thought about everything else Jojo had said, and found himself running over his memories of her as a girl. She’d had that same taunting, competitive, wild expression. He was trying to work out the limits to that wildness, and to her willingness to try anything.
The thoughts became circular, though. There were so many things to think about; he couldn’t afford to get stuck on anything. So he did what he always did, and put the thoughts aside, somewhere in the background, ready for later.
Hanson was still at her desk when Jonah arrived. He shook his head at her, and then came and sat in a neighboring chair.
“I’m pretty sure I told you lot to sod off. Didn’t you get the memo?”
“Sorry, sir,” Hanson said with a ghost of a smile. “Ben started it. And I felt like I should compete, and then by the time he was ready to go I’d got a little bit stuck in….”
“What are you looking at?”
“A few things,” she said. And then she added, “There’s something that is really bothering me. Actually, there are two things, but one more than the other.”
Jonah was absolutely ready to go home. He was wet and tired and feeling grumpy. But he’d been where Hanson was. Working on a first homicide case with feverish enthusiasm. Finding heart-racing excitement in discrepancies. “Let’s hear it.”