Page 6

THREE

GARETH

Just walked Beryl’s dog, that was a bucket load of laughs. Going to see Angus for a little bit, babe, how’s your day going?

I made a silent ‘aww’ sound to myself. I loved Tony; he had the sweetest, most adorable face I had ever seen on a dog. I switched over to the messenger app on my phone and started to text back:

Good. Say hi 2 him from me. Lyl. X.

I almost jumped out of my skin when the door in the cubicle next to me smacked open, reverberating across the flimsy wooden separator.

I could tell by the squeal of the cheap shoes that it was Carl.

Also, it was past 10 a.m.; he had just had his morning sacrament of Colombian coffee, and that man’s whole digestive system was like clockwork.

I shut out any additional jump-inducing noise by cranking up the volume on my earphones.

I rested my elbows on my knees and pressed play again on the video, performing a swift scan around my surroundings as I did so.

All my secondary school days of kids using the toilet bowl to prop themselves over the separator and take a glance into the next stall had really given me a mild case of PTSD.

And it wasn’t that I was embarrassed. It was just that, honestly, I thought I hadn’t really been performing that well recently, and I felt like maybe Fran was beginning to notice.

I just wanted to see what had worked for other men in similar situations, no harm in that.

I just preferred if my colleagues didn’t find out about it, because I’d never hear the end of it if they did.

The squeeze technique honestly sounded kind of painful, but mental distraction seemed to be the one thing the other people in the comments had said worked well for them, although thinking of my nana and her doilies the whole time seemed like a pretty disgusting thing to do.

The bathroom door slapped open again, jolting me and my heart upwards as I clasped my chest and fumbled to get a grip of my phone before it clattered onto the tiled floor.

‘Donoghue, if you’re in here, you fat bastard, the DI wants to see you,’ I heard Steve yell as he strolled over to occupy the cubicle next to mine.

I groaned silently, closed the incognito tab, and flushed the empty bowl of the toilet.

As I walked out, I saw Darren standing by the sinks, swiping his finger across his phone in a variety of directions whilst smoking a cigarette, puffing the excess smoke out of the small gap in the restricted window.

‘Did she tell you to come and get me from here?’ I asked, trying to make my voice as baritone as possible. I washed my hands using the rather sticky, pretty revolting hand soap which I suspected hadn’t been replaced – or even used – since the poll tax riots.

‘Yep, she’s onto us,’ Steve replied, as I heard the very distinctive sound of magazine pages flipping from inside his cubicle.

It made sense; she was a detective, after all.

‘Don’t rat us out, Donoghue. No one likes a tattletale,’ Darren said to me, crooking his head slightly forward and squinting his eyes.

‘Snitches get stitches,’ Carl hollered from the other cubicle.

‘I’ll pass that on to internal affairs,’ I grumbled with a smirk, turning my head to see if anyone would mirror my smile.

I couldn’t see Carl and Steve’s faces, but I imagined that, like Darren, they too were simply glaring at me threateningly.

‘Oh, come on, guys, it was just a joke,’ I said pleadingly as I began to dry my hands.

No one even managed a mild guffaw. Not even Steve, who had always been the least dickish among the officers, made an attempt at an audible smirk from his cubicle.

‘Well, wish me luck,’ I said to Darren, hoping to get some kind of positive affirmation from him. Darren simply stuck his two fingers up at me. I don’t know why I still made an effort with Darren; he was such an arse.

I slowly dawdled across the office as I walked from the toilets, past the empty break room, and into the stairwell. I decided I would take as long and meandering a route as possible and use the time to try and steel myself for the interrogation that was awaiting me.

I kept thinking about my colleagues at the station and wished their general hostility didn’t bother me as much as it did.

All I wanted was a single invitation to join them for drinks on a Wednesday.

Was that too much to ask? Now, let me get this straight, I wasn’t one of those people who had a pathological craving to be liked.

But at the same time, it felt like there wasn’t much that I wouldn’t do to be a member of their group.

There was a small, tiny part in the darkest corner of my psyche that wanted some kind of traumatic event to happen that would bond us all together.

Maybe I would be out with Steve or Carl, we’d witness something crooked and have to take an oath of silence between us all, swearing to never tell anyone what had happened.

Not that I’d ever want anything that bad to happen, but it would be great to have a little something to bond with them over.

I wished I could be like Fran, so self-assuredly introverted and inwards that everyone desperately wanted to be friends with her.

I had thought about messaging Cis and seeing what advice she would have.

She was a colleague-turned-friend of mine who I had gone through police training with, but she’d shot up the ranks way faster than anyone else, and she never let anyone forget it – while pretending to be remarkably modest, of course.

The woman had somehow managed to command a level of authority and respect amongst everyone she worked with at the station, but I wasn’t quite ready to ask for help yet, plus I didn’t want Cis’s ego to get any bigger.

She had been one of the youngest in our station to become a senior, and rumour had it she was already gunning for another promotion.

I knocked twice on Vivian’s open door. Without looking up from her work or uttering a word, the detective inspector gestured for me to come in, which actually meant, ‘come in and stand until I decide you may sit’. I’d had that rather rude awakening on my first day.

So, I stood there, gazing out of the window whilst waiting for her to finish writing, thinking about how much I disliked Darren and wondering how on earth some of our female colleagues could find the man attractive.

He drove a Renault Vel Satis. What kind of girl could truly ever love a man with a Renault Vel Satis?

‘Sit down,’ Vivian ordered, snapping me out of my trance. I complied, carefully taking a seat to avoid wrinkling my shirt.

‘Did you get anything back from forensics on the Paul Lock case?’ she asked, her tone blunt.

‘Nothing yet,’ I replied, mentally bracing myself for the backlash.

‘Well, you should probably chase that up. The family and their lawyer have left me several distressing voicemails.’ She paused, sizing me up as if she were a snake about to pounce.

‘Maybe I’ll forward them onto you. Might make you pick up the pace on finding some sort of conclusion as to how their son died. ’

I tried to force myself into a place of empathy, to remember that this was a lady going through a divorce, a very emotional and turbulent time for even the most patient and kindest of people. But my gosh, at that moment – and it pains me to admit this – I did sort of hope she wouldn’t get the cat.

‘I’ll tell them to get right on it,’ I said, nodding, trying to remove any hint or trace of venom from my words as I spoke.

‘Oh, and some woman rung up 101 today. One of the people she cares for didn’t answer the door today. She rang his landline, and there was no answer either. I’d like you to do the welfare check; it’s on Campion View.’

Campion View? That was our new address.

‘Of course,’ I replied, wondering why I had been chosen for this.

Out of everyone, I had taken on the most work in an effort to try to show myself as a committed, passionate part of the team, but, in reality, it had seemed that I had more just thrown a ‘pin the case on the dumbass detective’ sign on myself.

‘Number 22. I don’t want to waste resources getting one of the uniforms, and I think it’s not too far away from your neck of the woods. Go and take a look later after work, so it’s off my plate. Break down the door if you must.’

Number 22? Wait a sec, wasn’t that the house of the creepy neighbour next door?

‘We’re going with Sec. 17 of PACE if anyone gives you any bother about it,’ Vivian continued. ‘I imagine he’s probably just popped his clogs in his sleep. Once you’re done, call the paramedics, and then you hop home for dinner.’

‘Okey dokey. I’ll get right on it,’ I said. I placed my palms on the edge of the chair to begin pushing myself up, but the dominatrix of doom clicked her fingers and then pressed one finger down against the desk, which I followed the direction of back into the seat.

‘Gareth. Is everyone retreating to the gentlemen’s bathroom to avoid me? It seems every day when I walk past the breakroom, it has been suspiciously empty. I want to know why.’

Oh, gosh.

‘Gareth,’ Vivian said, still writing down notes on her pad of paper, still not having the courtesy to actually make any eye contact with her prey. ‘I am going to need you to answer the question for me, please.’

I knew that she knew that she couldn’t go into the men’s bathroom to check if this was the case, and of course, she knew that I knew the answer to her question.

If I told her, she could then act on that information without having HR ringing her up and slapping a bunch of disciplinaries on her wrist.

‘I’m not really sure…’ I murmured as unintelligibly as I could.

‘Don’t bullshit me, Gareth,’ she snapped, finally glancing up from her notes to lock eyes with me, but her hand was still darting and dancing across the page.