He works quietly until lunchtime, when a hand comes down, claps him on the shoulder. Andy, the court reporter, is grinning down at him, Cheshire cat-like.
‘Stop slaving away over property stuff, Dom. I want you to meet Erin.’ He gestures to a young-looking blonde girl standing beside him, who is holding her hands behind her back nervously. ‘She started last week, while you were away. Erin, this is Dom.’
Dominic stands and shakes hands with Erin, noticing as he does so that he has a large black ink spot on his thumb, brilliant against the smooth white of his skin.
‘Sorry.’ He laughs, rubs at it with the fingers of his other hand. ‘Comes with the territory, I suppose. Good to meet you!’
Erin smiles back. ‘It’s lovely to meet you, Dominic,’ she says. ‘I hope you don’t mind but Andy said you guys were going for lunch together – is it all right if I join you? I’ve only just started and I don’t know the area yet.’
Behind Erin’s back, Andy winks at him and Dominic nods quickly.
‘Sure, of course.’ There’s no point protesting. Erin is Andy’s usual type; he has a big thing for blondes. In the five years that Dominic has known him he has never stayed with a woman for more than six months.
Dominic swings his chair around, pulls his jacket off the seat behind him and shrugs it over his shoulders. The three of them make their way through the newsroom to the lifts.
‘What’ve you been working on this morning, Erin?’ Dominic asks.
‘God, it’s a horrible court case. Mother accused of neglect. Claudia Winters?’
The image immediately flashes into Dominic’s mind: a small woman, dark hair tied back off her neck, hand raised to shield herself from the lights of the media. She has been all over the papers. Extreme neglect leading to infant mortality. He swallows.
‘See, this is exactly why I became a features man!’
‘I know,’ Erin says, ‘It’s not a nice one to start with. In at the deep end!’
They step into the lift together.
‘How you finding it here so far?’ he asks.
‘Good, good, you know, still settling in. Everybody seems friendly.’
‘Oh, yeah? Where have you come from?’
‘Oh, I grew up in Suffolk if you know it, over by the coast.’
‘Bit of a change from Finchley Road,’ Dominic says. ‘Lot less stabbings, I bet, although we’d all be out of a job without them.’
‘Right.’ She nods. ‘I’m living in Tooting now, though, just got a flat.’ She laughs. ‘It’s in serious need of decoration, bit of a shit-hole actually. Tooting seems a bit dodgy so far! Or maybe I just notice it more cos of the job. I’m still getting to grips with it all!’
‘Takes a while,’ Dominic says. ‘You’ll get there!’
They have reached the ground floor; he fumbles for his lanyard in his pocket but Andy dangles his own in front of his eyes.
‘Honestly, mate, what are you like.’ He grins at Erin, opens the door for her and guides her through, his large hand on her back. Dominic rolls his eyes and follows the pair of them out onto the high road. He can already tell what Andy is thinking, almost see the cogs turning in his brain. He never takes long to make his moves.
*
They make their way to the pub on the corner, the Hare and Hound. An abandoned Christmas tree sits outside it, next to a pile of empty beer cans. Pine needles blow along the pavement, dry and brown.
The three of them chat about Andy’s court case. It’s a drug deal; he says that today was the sentencing, he watched a nineteen-year-old girl go down for twenty years. Dominic shivers – he has always hated sentencings, hated seeing the look on people’s faces when the enormity of what they’d done would crash down on them. Always too late, of course. Half the kids he went to school with are behind bars now.
‘I hate sentencings, actually,’ Erin says. ‘So final, aren’t they? Imagine being locked away like that. God, it would be awful.’
Dominic looks at her. She really is very young; she can’t be more than a few years older than nineteen herself, mid-twenties at the most. It will still take a while for the edges to form. He’s surprised they’ve started her on the Winters case, it’s a high-profile job.
‘Well, prisons are hardly prisons any more, are they?’ Andy says. ‘It’s not as if they’re off to Bedlam. Most of them have gyms attached.’
‘I think gyms is a bit of an exaggeration,’ Dominic says.
‘Do you do any court stuff, Dominic?’ Erin asks him. ‘Or do you stick to the features?’
‘I’m a features man,’ Dominic says, ‘I used to cover the court stories too, but it got a bit much. I just found it a bit depressing, really. All that horror. All those wasted lives.’
He looks down, feeling suddenly embarrassed, but Erin nods sympathetically.
‘I know exactly what you mean. It gets you down, doesn’t it?’
Andy interrupts, flexes his knuckles on the table. He’s a big guy; Dominic can see the tendons in his arm straining.
‘So, Dom, how’s Corinne doing?’
Dominic shifts in his chair, pretending to be engrossed in a remaining chip congealed on his plate.
‘She’s . . . she’s doing OK, man,’ he says, although he is not sure that it’s completely the truth.
‘Corinne is my girlfriend,’ he tells Erin.
‘Beautiful name – unusual. Is that after anyone? Grandmother, or anything?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Dominic says. He doesn’t actually know, has never thought of it.
‘Well, it’s lovely,’ Erin says. ‘Have you been together long?’
‘A while, haven’t you, Dom?’ Andy says, grinning at him. ‘They’re joined at the hip.’ His chair has moved closer to Erin’s, the tip of his elbow grazes her water glass as he spreads his arms across the table. Dom is reminded of an animal, a monkey asserting his territory. He’s no idea why Andy bothers.
‘Yeah, years now actually. She’s great. We’re very—’ he bobs his head, awkwardly ‘—very happy.’
‘Most of the time,’ Andy says. Dominic ignores him.
‘What does she do?’ Erin says, and Dominic feels grateful to her for changing the subject.
‘She works in a gallery,’ Dominic says. ‘Over in Islington. They do really well, a lot of nice pieces. She’s very arty, talented, that sort of thing.’
‘Do you live in Islington then?’
‘No, we’re Crouch End way,’ he tells her, ‘closer to the rough side.’
Erin sighs, dramatically. ‘An art gallery though, wow. I always wished I could draw. The best I can manage is stick people.’
‘Stick people, hey?’ Andy asks. ‘I like stick people.’
‘Maybe I’ll draw you some sometime.’ There is a note of flirtation in her voice.
Dominic looks away from them both, traces a pattern on the tabletop.