Page 17 of Watching You

Brodie Baarda walked a little behind Connie Woolwine as she strode through the hospital corridors, leaving a wake of some perfume he couldn’t name and a slipstream of purposefulness.

She had legs long enough to catch the attention of most men and plenty of women, hair that she most often wore in a ponytail, swinging in rhythm with her footsteps, and a smile that could disarm pretty much anyone. But all of that was just window-dressing.

Beneath her favourite jeans, worn so often they were thinning and faded, and the suede jacket that really wasn’t fit for Scotland’s changeable weather and propensity to rain even when the sky appeared cloudless and blue, was a person so intuitive and intelligent that she took his breath away not just daily but sometimes hourly. Connie was a force of nature.

‘If you walk behind me like that, people are gonna think you’re my bodyguard. Something on your mind?’ she called over her shoulder.

‘Just thinking about the cases,’ Baarda lied.

In truth, the cases they were in Edinburgh to help with were relatively straightforward compared to their usual projects, and he was grateful for that.

Connie and he had been living life at rollercoaster pace for the two years since she’d asked him to take retirement from the Met and partner with him.

They’d seen their fair share of trouble in that time, and more than once Baarda had believed that he was going to lose her.

More than that, far more worrying in fact, was his bubbling subterranean stream of belief that Connie Woolwine did not fear death.

She’d stared it down often enough that he had begun to think she relished the fight, and what he knew (and she refused to be told) was the fact that it was a battle you could join only so many times without taking a mortal blow.

Connie, he believed, was someone who needed to stare death down perhaps to persuade herself that being alive was the better option.

So a slowdown was good. Taking a breath was good.

The opportunity to see his children other than through a video call from an airport or on dodgy hotel Wi-Fi was amazing.

He’d had a whole week with them immediately before heading up to Edinburgh while his ex-wife was on honeymoon with her new husband, a former Met police colleague of his.

He hadn’t imparted that gem to Connie yet.

She had an unnerving way of taking one look at him and telling him how he felt about things, before he’d even started to admit such feelings to himself.

Sometimes that was therapeutic, sometimes it was necessary, and occasionally it was just plain annoying.

If Baarda had to choose a single phrase to sum up Connie’s USP it would be her ability to cut to the chase.

He just preferred her not to do it to him – not that his feelings on the matter would ever stop her.

‘You wanna take point on this one? Lively might respond better to some good old-fashioned male banter than to my method of communicating.’

‘Because I’m so good at engaging in “over-a-pint”-style machismo?

’ he replied. Connie laughed and paused so they were walking in step.

‘I’ve met officers like Lively too often to play tactically with them.

He only gives people grief if he thinks they’re up to the challenge.

If he doesn’t bother with you, that’s when there’s a problem.

The detective sergeant really rather likes you, but you knew that already. ’

‘You’re awfully serious today, Brodie. Tell me what’s going on in that Old Etonian head of yours.’ She slipped one arm through his to walk closer by him.

Baarda stole a glance at her profile as they walked.

It wasn’t like Connie to initiate physical closeness.

She kept her distance most of the time, reaching out psychologically rather than bodily whenever she could manage it.

There were dark circles beneath her eyes he was unused to, and her smile seemed fixed rather than organic.

His stomach turned to a hard knot in his abdomen.

She wasn’t herself and he didn’t like it.

‘My wife remarried. She’s encouraging the children to call him Dad. I’ve always been Daddy, and apparently that’s enough of a distinction for her.’

He hadn’t meant to tell her, but his concern for her, and his need to hide that from her, had forced the revelation from his mouth unguarded.

‘Wow. She finally did something that made you genuinely angry instead of feeling like you should be angry even when you didn’t really care.’

‘Connie, now’s not the time,’ he said as she tightened her grip on his arm.

‘Now’s exactly the time. Want me to help you process that? You know you didn’t really care all that much when she cheated on you. The love was already dying. Your children, on the other hand, are strictly off-limits.’

Baarda let her do it. When they’d first met he’d mistaken Connie’s therapy sessions for either precociousness or over-intensity.

It had taken a while for him to understand that part of it was Connie’s method for self-soothing.

She had found her identity in psychology – in being able to read and decipher other people’s innermost thoughts and channelling them into the open where she could transform them into something that could be handled or come to terms with.

He had long since suspected that it was the way Connie had coped when she herself had been committed to a psychiatric ward aged eighteen, when she’d found herself unable to communicate courtesy of a misdiagnosed brain injury.

How terrifying it must have been for her, locked inside a fully functioning brain.

She rarely talked about it, and when she did, it was usually by way of an aside or a joke.

The price she’d paid for recovery via neurosurgery was the loss of her colour vision.

Her post-hospitalisation life was entirely lived in black and white, both literally and metaphorically, Baarda thought.

She had dedicated herself to trying to rid the world of the mad and the bad, and it was as though if she ever stopped, she might end up back on that ward again.

‘Things really must be serious if you’re not going to tell me to mind my own business,’ she nudged him.

‘Okay then, mind your own business,’ Baarda murmured, not even attempting to suppress his smile as they approached a door. ‘Lively should be in here.’

‘Saved by the grumpy detective with glass in his neck,’ Connie raised her eyebrows. ‘You know this conversation isn’t over, don’t you?’

‘I’d be disappointed if I thought it was,’ he said. ‘After you.’

He held the door as she went ahead, catching himself once more in the grey zone between being gentlemanly and being patronising.

They were worlds apart. Connie was a hummingbird, perpetually in motion, flitting this way and that, sharp and purposeful, beautiful and elusive. He, on the other hand, was a Labrador. Loyal, trustworthy, constant, with the possibility of fierceness only when called for. He belonged to her now.

The sudden realisation was disconcerting.

He would take a bullet for Connie Woolwine.

Any number of bullets, in fact. Part of that was his job.

Part of it though – the larger part – was something more primal and undefined.

Baarda took a deep breath and followed her in.

Had he been able to take his eyes from the figure of Connie disappearing behind a curtain, he might have seen the man who had been following them down the corridor.

The opportunity slipped past unrealised, and a chance to protect Beth Waterfall went unclaimed.