‘Watch it. You’ll upset Oliver.’
Oliver was the rubber lobster that sat on Murfin’s desk. At a push of a button, it sang extracts from old pop songs with a vaguely nautical theme. ‘Sailing’, ‘Octopus’s Garden’, ‘Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay’. One day, Fry was going to make it into lobster paste and feed it to Murfin in a sandwich.
‘Look at that weather,’ said Hitchens. ‘Just what we need.’
Fry stared out of the window again. The wind was blowing little flurries of snow off the neighbouring roofs. They hit the panes with wet splatters, then slid down the glass, smearing the grime on the outside. She couldn’t remember it ever snowing back home in Birmingham, not really. At least, it never seemed to have stuck when it landed; it certainly hadn’t built up in knee-high drifts. Maybe it had been something to do with the heat rising from the great sprawl of dual carriageways and high-rise flats she had worked in, the comforting warmth of civilization. Her previous service in the West Midlands was a memory that she almost cherished now, whenever she looked out at the primitive arctic waste she had condemned herself to. She had left Birmingham without a farewell to her colleagues. She might as well have said: ‘I’m going out now. I may be some time.’
‘Well, there’s one thing to be said in its favour,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘At least the snow will keep the crime rate down.’
And somewhere under the mountains of paper, Diane Fry’s telephone rang.
Inside Grace Lukasz’s bungalow on the outskirts of Edendale, the central heating was turned up full in every room. Ever since the accident, Grace had been unable to bear the cold. Now, even in summer, she insisted on keeping the windows and doors closed, in case there was a draught. These days, her immobility meant that she felt the chill more than most, and she could not tolerate discomfort. She saw no reason why she should.
This morning Grace had been up and about early, as usual. She had gone immediately to adjust the thermostat in the cupboard in the hallway, and had spent her time gazing with some satisfaction at the outside world beyond her windows, where her neighbours in Woodland Crescent were turning white with cold as they scraped the ice from their cars or slid and stumbled on the slippery pavements. Once, a woman from across the road had fallen flat on her back on her driveway, her handbag and her shopping flying everywhere. It had made Grace laugh, for a while.
But now the stuffy heat in the bungalow caused her husband to frown and turn pink in the face the moment he arrived home from his night duty at the hospital, and it had spoiled Grace’s mood. Peter stamped his feet on the mat and threw his overcoat on the stand. Grace wanted to ask him her question straight away, right there by the door, but he wouldn’t meet her eye, and he brushed past her chair to get to the lounge door. With sharp tugs of her wrists, she backed and turned in the hallway, her left-hand wheel leaving one more scuff mark on the skirting board. Peter had left the door open for her from habit and she followed right behind him, glaring at his back, angry with him for walking away from her. He should know, after all this time, how much it infuriated her.
‘Did you phone the police?’ she said, more sharply now than she had intended to speak to him.
‘No, I didn’t.’
Grace glowered at her husband. But she said nothing, making the effort to keep her thoughts to herself. She knew him well enough to see that no purpose would be served by pressing him too hard. He would only say she was nagging him, and he would set his face in the opposite direction, just to demonstrate that he was his own man, that he could not be bullied by his wife. Sometimes he could be so stubborn. He was like an obstinate old dog that had to be coaxed with a bone.
‘Well, I don’t suppose it would make any difference,’ she said.
‘No.’
Grace watched him wander off towards the sofa, tugging his tie loose. Within a few minutes he would have the TV remote control in his hand and his mind would be distracted by some inane quiz show. Peter always claimed that he needed to turn off his mind when he got home from a night at the hospital, that his brain was exhausted by the stress of his work. But it was never acknowledged that she might need to turn off from the things that had plagued her mind all day. No matter what she did, there was far too much time for brooding. She had been used to looking forward to Peter’s return home as something to occupy her mind, but these days it never seemed to work.
Peter had brought with him an odour of cold and damp from outside. The smell was on his coat and in his hair, and there had been snow on the shoes that he had left on the wet doormat. For the past few hours, the only thing Grace had been able to smell was the scorching of dust on the radiators, the invisible dust that gathered behind them where she couldn’t reach to clean. A few minutes before he came home, she had sprayed the rooms with air freshener. But still he had brought in this unpleasant cold smell, and the world outside had entered the bungalow with him.
‘You know it wouldn’t make any difference,’ he said. ‘You’re expecting too much, Grace. You’re getting things all out of proportion again.’
‘Oh, of course.’
She swung the wheelchair towards the centre of the room and lowered her head to rub at her limp legs. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, waiting for a sign that he was weakening. Although he was stubborn, he was susceptible to the right tactics, like any man.
Peter threw himself on the sofa and dug the remote from under a cushion. The set came on with a sizzle of static. There was news on – leading with a report on the effects of the bad weather across the country. Shots of children sledging and making snowmen were interspersed with clips showing lines of stranded cars, airport lounges packed with frustrated holidaymakers, railway travellers staring morosely at information boards, and snowploughs piling up snow twelve feet high by the side of a road in Scotland.
‘Where’s Dad?’ asked Peter.
‘He’s with his photographs again,’ she said.
‘It’s been a bad night, Grace. We had two young men brought in who’d taken a terrible beating with baseball bats.’
‘I’m sorry.’
They sat for a few moments in silence. Grace could tell from the angle of her husband’s head that he wasn’t taking in the news on the TV any more than she was herself. She waited, aware of the power of silence, calming her breathing until she could hear the ticking of the radiators and the sound of a car engine on the crescent. There was a faint rustling of feathers from the far corner, where their blue and green parrot stirred in its cage, perhaps sensing the atmosphere in the room. It turned a black eye on the couple, then snapped at its bars with a sudden, angry click of its beak.
‘If you must know,’ said Peter, ‘I think he’s gone back.’
Grace felt her shoulders go rigid. ‘Gone back where?’ she said, though she knew perfectly well what he meant.
‘Where do you think? To London.’
‘To her?’
‘Yes, to his wife. She has a name.’
‘Andrew said she’s in America, at a cousin’s funeral.’ Grace slapped one of her knees as if it had offended her by its inactivity. ‘I’ve tried to phone him again, Peter. He’s not answering.’
‘We’ll just have to wait until we hear from him, Grace. What else can we do?’
Grace manoeuvred alongside one of the armchairs, feeling the wheels slip into well-used grooves in the pile of the carpet. Peter made no move to help her, and he didn’t even look to see how she was coping. She was glad he didn’t do that any more. Once, she had lost her temper at his clumsiness and had pushed him roughly away. He had said nothing, but she knew he had been shocked and hurt by her violence. Her legs might be useless, but her hands and wrists were strong.
‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ she said. ‘Why should he arrive out of the blue like that and then