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SEVEN

GARETH

‘Oh, Gareth, I can’t believe I let you talk me into this again,’ Cis said to me, out of breath and wiping the dense sweat off her brow.

‘I know. I’m sorry,’ I said with the biggest grin I could muster, trying to be as charming as humanly possible. I couldn’t resist going to her. Cis was the best at what she did. Everyone else just seemed to pale in comparison.

‘You know Vivian will find out about this eventually, though? She always finds out,’ she said, as I felt my heart rate begin to steadily drop.

Cis checked to see how many calories she had burned on her smart watch.

‘And then she’ll probably get us both disciplined when she does – remember, she’s still above me, too, Gareth. ’

‘Oh, I can handle Vivian. Don’t worry about her. What was your final time?’

‘Twenty-two minutes, fourteen seconds. You?’

‘Twenty-eight minutes and twenty-three seconds.’

‘You’re getting slower,’ Cis said to me with a smirk. ‘There used to be days when you’d be done in nineteen minutes flat.’

I walked over to the dewy park bench and began to smooth my hands over my thighs.

I was no longer the young upstart who could run a lean 5k in sub-twenty minutes.

When I became a detective, I had found that a perk of the job was that I didn’t need to do much running any more.

But the best time to be able to catch Cis was when she was doing her morning jog at 6 a.m. around the local park.

‘So, nothing more since Vivian green-lighted the case?’ Cis asked, regaining her breath much quicker than I did.

‘Breadcrumbs. What I really need is a full forensic sweep.’

‘So, what are you thinking? We do a double act? You as the officer in charge and investigating officer and me as the crime scene manager?’ Cis walked over to the bench, twisted herself around, and began to do dips.

I lost my words for a minute, unable to tear my eyes away from her remarkably defined arms, which were reminding me to visit the station gym the next time I had a spare hour.

‘I need a forensic team there by the end of the day, really; at least a set-up and a photographer,’ I said.

‘We’ve already cordoned it off, but I’m spread too thin with other cases, and I need someone like you to volunteer – someone who knows what they’re doing.

I can’t really ask someone like Phil, now, can I? ’

‘You know about the toilet seat story?’ she inquired, not stopping for breath in between dips.

‘Of course I know the toilet seat story. Everyone knows the toilet seat story.’

‘A whole case down the pan,’ Cis said. ‘Literally.’ She yanked her water bottle out of her bag, took a swig, and joined me in sitting on the bench overlooking the water as the sun began to creep up from the horizon.

There was a short, uneasy stretch of silence between us, which I knew meant she was working up to say something serious to me.

‘I am a little worried about you, Gareth.’

Here we go. I jolted my head back slightly. I didn’t like the way she said those words, like a teacher who’d asked a kid to stay behind after a lesson.

‘Why? What did I do?’

‘You’re Moby Dicking.’

‘What?’ This sounded like a weird German sex act.

‘Moby Dicking,’ she repeated, enunciating the words more slowly as if that would suddenly make me understand what she was saying.

‘You’ve lost me,’ I said, squinting at her and trying to follow her eyeline, but her gaze was fixed on the gently moving currents of water.

I still wasn’t sure what ‘Moby Dicking’ was, but it irritated me that Cis seemed to be singing from the same hymn sheet as everyone else in the CID.

Crazy old Gareth and the case that was blindingly obvious.

‘Cases like this, you don’t need someone like me, you don’t need a forensic team, you don’t need hundreds of case files of witnesses and alibis.

We both know that people go missing, and sometimes they just don’t come back.

There’s no foul play, no murder. He’s just an old man who walked off and didn’t come back.

He even left a poem. In a few years, someone will find a corpse washed up on some bay on the Thames or somewhere, and that’ll be that.

Are you sure you need a whole forensic team to get to the bottom of this? ’

‘He was killed, Cis. I’m certain.’

‘How can you be so sure, Gareth?’

‘I don’t know,’ I muttered, somewhat defeated, as Cis reached out and began to rub my shoulder tenderly. ‘I just am.’

‘Everyone gets burnt out. Look, give yourself a few hours. Sit in the office and mull it over. If you still feel as strongly about this then as you do now, I’ll get stuff in order and be right there to set up forensics. Who does Vivian have lined up to be crime scene manager now? Don’t say Phil.’

‘Phil,’ I confirmed in a groan. ‘Why do you think I came to you?’

‘Oh, my darling,’ she said, gently placing her hand against my temple and pulling my head against her shoulder. Laying my head on her deltoid felt like I was resting against one of the rocks at Stonehenge.

‘This isn’t very comfortable,’ I said, realising I was, in fact, in the world’s most tender headlock.

‘Aren’t you relaxing?’ she replied.

I paused.

‘Yeah, I guess so,’ I said, watching a few joggers shoot us the oddest of looks as they ran by.

I realised that I still wasn’t particularly liked in the station.

As I came into the room after popping my lasagne – lovingly prepared by Fran – in the fridge, I felt all the eyes of the office stop, fix, and glare at me, analysing and scrutinising every single move I made.

Men’s-toilets-gate had clearly not yet been forgiven.

I sat down at my desk, ignoring the stares as best I could, and went over some of the other cases I had been working on.

While I might have wished life was like a police procedural drama, in which murderers were considerate enough to take turns on a week-by-week basis (starting in September and ending around May), real life lacked such security.

It seemed that murderers, burglars, and the rest were not a very thoughtful bunch when considering the time management of the people trying to arrest them.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that maybe Cis was right.

Maybe I had overblown this whole case in my mind as some kind of proxy obsession.

It wasn’t even like there was a missing person’s family begging me to bring their loved one home.

My attempts to track down Mr O’Neill’s daughter had been in vain, so I imagined some estrangement must have taken place.

It was like Gordon O’Neill had vanished into thin air, and no one other than me really cared.

As the hours passed, arduously and slowly, I felt like I was beginning to come to my senses.

As Darren and Steve made frequent jokes about how I was wasting police time with this case, I had to accept that if there was something concrete and substantial to the disappearance of O’Neill, they would have found it by now.

Maybe Cis was right. Maybe the move, the new job and all of the baby-making stress had finally got to me, and some mental cracks were beginning to form.

I had been trying so hard to stay calm and relaxed, and to not ask myself constant questions about why Fran getting pregnant was taking so long, or why sex now seemed like a chore, or, really, why had it been so long since I had had a blowjob?

Just once, I wanted some kind of sexual gratification without it having to result in a chance of conception.

While I really wanted that blowjob, Fran’s lasagne was waiting for me in the fridge, and that seemed like the next best thing.

I went to the breakroom and pulled open the fridge, ready to have some Italian commiseration food.

Strangely, however, after a quick scan, I realised my lasagne wasn’t there.

Had someone moved it? I asked some of the other detectives if they had seen it, but they all shrugged their shoulders with genuine ignorance.

I checked my car, I checked my desk, I retraced all my footsteps, and even went to the front desk to ask Judith if she had seen anyone eating it.

She said no, and that she would recognise the smells of Fran’s cooking anywhere.

I was still dead certain I had put the lasagne in the fridge.

I came back into the office and checked it over one more time.

As I scanned the various desks, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Darren and Steve sharing what looked like self-satisfied smiles and muffled chuckles.

Trusting my gut, I headed straight for the notorious bad-smelling bin in the breakroom and pressed down on the pedal.

As the lid flipped open, glistening Tupperware caught my eye, and the unmistakable fragrance of my favourite of Fran’s dishes wafted up, mingled with the less pleasant odours of rubbish.

I sighed, feeling that a few eyes were looking at me right now, waiting eagerly to see my reaction.

I rolled up the shirt sleeve on my right arm, slowly popped my hand in the bin, pulled out the Tupperware, emptied it and walked over to the sink.

I could have sworn I heard two men doing a terrible job to stifle their laughter behind me as I washed up, scrubbing off the pieces of stuck pasta sheets.

Steve’s eyelid swelled red as the fleshy purple began to creep across his face.

Blood gushed from Darren’s nose as he tried to grimace through shattered teeth.

My fist slammed into him again and again, his face becoming more and more unrecognisable.

Now, it turned a fluorescent shade of red as my boxing glove slammed into the bag again.

The images of physically assaulting my colleagues stuck on replay in my mind offered a strange sense of comfort, even as the other officers in the station gym watched uneasily while the crazed, newly promoted sergeant flailed exhausted punches at the boxing bag.

I knew that in a few days, the anger would subside and wash away, and I would go back to being friendly, charming, and offering them my biscuits during the unofficial mid-morning break, because I knew deep down, I couldn’t hold a grudge for more than a week.

But right now, I didn’t want to be the guy in the office that everyone liked.

I wanted to be the guy that they didn’t mess with.

I wanted to be one of those people who oozed natural authority, with a certain charming charisma to match.

Someone for whom, when I walked into a room, everyone would instantly sit up, straighten their chairs, and actually say nice stuff behind my back.

I felt like I had been that guy in my last place; why couldn’t I be here?

I shifted my feet slightly, bracing myself to deliver another right hook into the bag.

‘You know, it’s way past your lunch break, and I am sure you have cases that need your attention.’

Ugh, I thought. Who drew a pentagram and summoned her?

I pivoted my body to face Vivian and, without a word, began to yank at the Velcro on my boxing gloves. She raised a hand to stop me.

‘You’re still frustrated?’ she asked, stepping forward.

‘You know what they did?’

‘Yes. But they threw your lasagne in the bin; they didn’t shag your wife. You need to stop being so dramatic, Gareth.’

I thought about explaining that this was more of a straw breaking the camel’s back situation, but I didn’t think Vivian would care that much for an explanation of my internal feelings.

She pulled off her blazer, hung it on one of the coat racks in the gym, walked over to me, and then wrapped her arms around the bag.

I stood there, slightly bemused. I was a six-foot man – or 182 cm, but who’s counting – and she was a relatively petite five-foot-nothing woman, presumably wanting to be my bag holder.

‘Go on,’ she said, slapping her hand against the bag, gesturing for me to start punching.

I hesitated; this was the prelude to one of those scenes that go viral on the internet. I could see it now: ‘Punching Bag Fail, Man Sends Boss FLYING’.

‘What’s stopping you?’ Vivian asked.

‘With all due respect, Vivian, I don’t want to be taking you to A she said that she’s happy to act as CSM on the O’Neill case going forward. Says it came across her desk, and she wants to nominate herself,’ Vivian said as I hurled a left hook to the bag.

So, Cis had clearly got my text from an hour ago, the one where I’d rather ungraciously begged her to be my CSM on the case.

Maybe this was in fact some weird psycho-overcompensation from me, but I couldn’t just let it go, so I thought I may as well lean into it.

I knew there had to be a killer hiding somewhere in my neighbourhood, and I was going to be the one to catch him.

And all I could think about was the look that would be on Steve and Darren’s faces when I did.

Maybe then I’d be invited for after-work drinks. Maybe then they’d respect me.

‘Ah, right,’ I said, trying to moderate my strength as I landed another jab into the bag. ‘And you’ll let her? Shouldn’t it be Phil?’

‘I had no reason to reject the request, and Phil is currently in Essex, helping on a case there. But I’ll go with you on this one, Gareth: do you still think this case is worth investigating?’

I hesitated. I wish I could say it was a powerful sense of moral justice that motivated me, but in truth, it was a red-hot furious desire to prove Darren and Steve wrong.

‘Let’s do it.’