And yet, and yet. In spite of the physical delight, he couldn’t shake off the knowledge that his solution was cosmetic rather than remedial. He hadn’t even treated the symptoms; he’d simply disguised them. All he’d done was find a new and better mask to cover his human inadequacy.
It might have been different if sex with Frances had been charged with an emotional resonance. But love was for other people. Love was for people who had something to offer in return, something more than damage and need. He’d schooled himself not to consider love an option. No point in yearning for the impossible. The grammar of love was a language beyond him, and no amount of pining would ever change that. So he buried his angst along with his functional impotence and found a kind of peace with Frances.
He’d even learned to take it for granted. Moments like this, where he stood back and analysed the situation, had become increasingly rare in the circumspect life they had built together. He was, he thought, like a toddler taking his first clumsy steps. Initially, it required enormous concentration and carried its own burden of bruises and unexpected knocks. But gradually the body forgets that each time it steps forward successfully it is an aborted tumble. It becomes possible to walk without considering it a small miracle.
So it was in his relationship with Frances. She had kept her own modern semi-detached house on the outskirts of St Andrews. Most weeks, they would spend a couple of nights at her place, a couple of nights at his and the remainder apart. It was a rhythm that suited them both in a life with remarkably little friction. When he thought about it, he considered that calm was probably a direct result of the absence of the sort of passion that burns as consuming as it does fierce.
Now, she looked up from the peppers her small hands were neatly dicing. ‘Had a good day?’ she asked.
He shrugged, moving across the room and giving her a friendly hug. ‘Not bad. You?’
She pulled a face. ‘It’s always horrible at this time of year. Spring sets their teenage hormones raging and the prospect of exams fills the air with the smell of neurosis. It’s like trying to teach a barrel of broody monkeys. I made the mistake of setting my Higher Spanish class an essay on “My Perfect Sunday”. Half the girls turned in the sort of soppy romantic fiction that makes Barbara Cartland sound hard-boiled. And the lads all wrote about football.’
Tony laughed. ‘It’s a miracle the species ever manages to reproduce, given how little teenagers have in common with the opposite sex.’
‘I don’t know who was more intent on counting the minutes till the bell at the end of the last period, them or me. I sometimes think this is no way for an intelligent adult to earn a living. You knock your pan in trying to open up the wonders of a foreign language to them, then someone translates coup de grâce as a lawnmower.’
‘You’re making that up,’ he said, picking up half a mushroom and chewing it.
‘I wish I was. By the way, the phone rang just as I came in, but I had a couple of bags of shopping so I let the machine pick it up.’
‘I’ll see who it is. What’s for dinner?’ he added, as he walked towards his office, a tiny room at the front of the cottage.
‘Maiale con latte with roast vegetables,’ Frances called after him. ‘That’s pork cooked in milk to you.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ he shouted back, pressing the play button on the answering machine. There was a long bleep. Then he heard her voice.
‘Hi, Tony.’ A long moment of uncertainty. Two years of literal silence, their only communication irregular flurries of e-mail. But three short syllables were all it took to penetrate the shell that he’d grown round his emotions.
‘It’s Carol.’ Three more syllables, these ones entirely unnecessary. He’d know her voice through a sea of static. She must have heard the news about Vance.
‘I need to talk to you,’ she continued, sounding more confident. Professional, then, not personal after all. ‘I’ve got an assignment that I really need your help with.’ His stomach felt leaden. Why was she doing this to him? She knew the reasons he’d drawn a line under profiling. She of all people should grant him more grace than this.
‘It’s nothing to do with profiling,’ she added, the words falling over each other in her haste to correct the false assumption she’d feared, the one he’d so readily made.
‘It’s for me. It’s something I’ve got to do and I don’t know how to do it. And I thought you would be able to help me. I’d have e-mailed, but it just seemed easier to talk. Can you call me, please? Thanks.’
Tony stood motionless, staring out of the window at the blank faces of the houses that opened straight on to the pavement on the other side of the street. He’d never really believed Carol was consigned to his past.
‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ Frances’s voice from the kitchen cut across his reverie.
He walked back into the kitchen. ‘I’ll get them,’ he said, squeezing past her to get to the fridge.
‘Who was it?’ Frances asked casually, more polite than curious.
‘Someone I used to work with.’ Tony hid his face in the process of pulling the cork and pouring wine into a couple of glasses. He cleared his throat. ‘Carol Jordan. A cop.’
Frances frowned in concern. ‘Isn’t she the one … ?’
‘She’s the one I worked with on the two serial killer cases, yes.’ His tone told Frances it wasn’t a subject for discussion. She knew the bare bones of his history, had always sensed there was something unspoken between him and his former colleague. Now at last this might be the chance to turn over the stone and see what crept out.
‘You were really close, weren’t you?’ she probed.
‘Working on cases like that always brings colleagues close together for the duration. You’ve got a common purpose. Then afterwards you can’t bear their company because it reminds you of things you want to wipe off the face of your memory.’ It was an answer that gave nothing away.
‘Was she calling about that bastard Vance?’ Frances asked, conscious that she’d been headed off at the pass.
Tony placed her glass by the side of the chopping board. ‘You heard about that?’
‘It was on the news.’
‘You didn’t mention it.’
Frances took a sip of the cool, crisp wine. ‘It’s your business, Tony. I thought you’d get round to it in your own good time if you wanted to talk about it. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t.’
His smile was wry. ‘I think you’re the only woman I’ve ever known who didn’t have the nosy gene.’
‘Oh, I can be as nosy as the next person. But I’ve learned the hard way that poking my nose in where it’s not wanted is a great recipe for screwing up a relationship.’ The allusion to her failed marriage was as oblique as Tony’s occasional reference to his profiling experiences, but he picked it up loud and clear.
‘I’ll give her a quick ring back while you’re finishing off in here,’ he said.
Frances stopped what she was doing and watched him walk away. She had a feeling tonight would be one of those nights when she was wakened in the chill hours before dawn by Tony shouting in his sleep and thrashing around beneath the bedclothes. She’d never complained to him; she’d read enough about serial killers to have an idea what terrors were lodged in his consciousness. She enjoyed what they shared, but that didn’t mean she wanted to partake of his demons.
She couldn’t have known