Page 8

I heard the distinct, archaic mumble of Fran’s car engine pull up outside as I crouched down to set the oven to 180 degrees.

Mep dawdled over, slinking around my knee as I scratched the back of his neck with my index finger.

For the first time in weeks, Fran was starting to feel at home here.

But how would she react if I told her something shady had gone on next door with our creepy neighbour?

Would she want us to move back to the flat?

The thing is, even though we were only a thirty-minute drive away from where we had been, our old shoebox apartment wouldn’t work with a baby, and I couldn’t face that awful motorway commute any more.

Deep down, I knew she would love to go back. While she was trying desperately to make the move work, I was terrified that this would be the thing that would tip her over the edge and have her bundling our things into suitcases.

‘I cooked!’ I shouted as I heard the key turn in the door. ‘Curry!’

‘You cooked?’ Fran yelled back as she jogged through the corridor and gave me a peck on the cheek. Mep greeted Fran in the usual way by making his signature meowing sound of an antique tank breaking down on a cobbled road.

‘Well, I wanted to cook, but then went out and bought a curry, but I did pop it in the oven, and I’m not using the microwavable rice this time. So, I did cook ; I just missed quite a few of the steps along the way.’

Come on, I know what you were thinking: did this idiot really use ingredients from a missing person’s house, in the middle of an active case, to make his and his wife’s dinner? No, I did not. However, did it give me a hankering for masala? Yes, it did.

‘So, go on, update me. Tell me about your day: sixty seconds counting down,’ I said as I turned to grab the bowls out of one of the moving boxes.

‘Walked that asshole dog in the morning, he – in due course – pooped on the car seat.’

‘No, he didn’t,’ I softly moaned, tilting my head back to curse the heavens. I had spent hours cleaning Fran’s car the other day in the pouring rain.

‘I had to spend a small fortune to clean that up, saw Angus, visited a few families, including pick ‘n’ mix kid, and then went into the office to do some paperwork and say hello. I have a new family to work with starting next week, and Beryl is pregnant.’

‘Beryl is pregnant?’ I exclaimed.

‘No, not neighbour Beryl. Co-worker Beryl, the one who’s about twenty-five.’

Gosh, who knew the name Beryl was so ubiquitous in this day and age?

‘Honestly, a very boring, but a very fine and normal day. How about you? Solve any murders?’ Fran asked, as per standard.

‘The usual. Had to chase up some people about forensics and go over some interview reports, and then I…’

I hesitated. I knew it was deeply dishonest of me, but I had already had a month of Fran walking around the house looking miserable. She finally seemed quite happy for the first time in a while. Did I really want to ruin that?

‘Come on, update me!’ Fran pestered, smacking me on the arm while I silently hesitated. ‘I want to know about your day!’

Instead of telling her, I recounted my ‘Judas moment’ in the office, which she found hilarious.

I knew keeping Mr O’Neill from her was a lie by omission, and in a court of law, it wouldn’t stand as a moral act from me.

Yet I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about our neighbour.

Vivian was probably right; his body would surface at some point in the next few days, and that would be a simple case closed. For now, Fran didn’t need to know.

‘Well, being a good, honest copper is your ikiagi ,’ she told me reassuringly.

‘ Ikiagi ?’ I asked. ‘What on earth is that?’

She explained to me that ikiagi meant ‘reason for being’ in Japanese, your life’s purpose. She later told me she couldn’t tell me what her own ikiagi was.

We went to bed and had sex, hoping that was the one that did it, but admittedly, my performance was – in my personal opinion– still shockingly poor. I felt like I put my hip out during standard missionary, which then, subsequently, led to the sail dropping to half-mast.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved sex, especially with my wife, but when it was every single day in the exact same positioning, it had become a little monotonous.

Foreplay was something which I distantly reminisced about.

I’d always thought that as soon as Fran got pregnant, we could go back to our normal sex lives.

But then I remembered that, once that happened, in less than a year, we would have a slightly bigger problem – I mean – blessing, on our hands.

It was exciting, right? Trying for a baby, having even more sex than we did on our honeymoon.

I was thankful for the fact that Fran and I had always been on the same page about kids: four of them, two girls and two boys, if we could choose.

We’d said we’d start trying when we moved into a house big enough to begin raising our family, so it had all come together nicely when the promotion had allowed us to move somewhere bigger.

We had started… attempted procreation a few months before, to get a head start on things, but there had been no real return on investment yet.

I wouldn’t say I was nervous about becoming a dad, but I wasn’t confident.

My dad had been something of a legend to me, so the fear of not living up to his example had made me feel a little intimidated at the idea of having a mini-me.

It was hard to find a dad who could be both the stern, decisive voice of reason, and the gentle, kind mentor that you could tell anything to, but my father had somehow managed to be both.

He had gone through my entire childhood and adulthood without ever disappointing me. That was a tough act to follow.

Fran drifted off to sleep before I did, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Mr O’Neill. Had he been taken? Had he collapsed in his garden? Being so close to a crime scene didn’t exactly help me have some boundaries from my work.

Of course, it had occurred to me that there was a possibility Mr O’Neill might still be alive.

But all my training as a detective had honed a nauseating gut feeling, telling me when that was no longer a possibility.

Every bone in my body was telling me something wasn’t right, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to leave it alone. Call it my ikigai .

I knew I was looking for a killer.