I was thrilled when Suzanne said she one hundred per centagreed with me. ‘I just can’t believe he said it.’ She winced. ‘He’s a douchebag of epic proportions.’
‘Obviously he was Old Paddy when he said it. Commitment-phobic Paddy. But, yes, there’s no denying that those words did come out of his mouth: “No one else I’m fucking at the moment is anywhere near as good as you”, and he definitely would have meant it as a compliment.’
‘Oh, for sure,’ Suzanne agreed. ‘Which makes it so much worse.’
‘Right. A clever man would have realised it was an insult, and not said it.’
That’s when Suzanne made her interesting, and really quite brilliant, observation: ‘It’s two insults for the price of one,’ she said. ‘There’s the obvious one – “Hey, just be happy you’re easily winning the competition I’m torturing you by forcing you to enter” – but there’s a deeper, more subtle insult too.’
I was on the edge of my kitchen chair, waiting to hear more. Surely, I thought, there can’t be anything Paddy’s done wrong that I’ve failed to think of and add to my list.
‘It’s actually so subtle, it’s hard to put into words,’ Suzanne said.
‘Try,’ I ordered.
‘It’s like … not being chosen is painful enough, when you’re madly in love, but normally when that happens you can at least think, “I’m losing out because he prefers someone else.” It makes sense, however much it hurts. But Paddy was saying, effectively, “You’re losing out to something I don’t value at all and think is crap.” The cheek of it! It’s like, “I can’t have dinner with you tonight because I’m staying in to eat a dog turd I’ve fished out of a bin.” The message is basically, “I don’t care enough about you to choose you, even in preference to something I think is worthless.” To me, that’s the ultimate insult.’
Undeniably true. Every word. And I’m supposed to think that’s all in the past now, because along came New Paddy! New Paddyemerged from the ashes of Old Paddy, the one who’d done and said all the despicable things, and arrived on the scene glittering with all the allure of the previously unavailable. I said something like this to Suzanne, who said, ‘Yeah, it’s a well-known marketing trick: create a sense of massive scarcity, then tell your audience this so-hard-to-get thing is now, amazingly, available. They’ll all want it.’
Apart from those of them who would still so much rather have Ollie, I thought, but didn’t say.
16
Monday 30 October 2023, 10.30 p.m.
SIMON
‘Have you been outside all this time?’ Charlie was sitting at Simon’s table in The Brown Cow when he walked back in from the garden, blowing on his hands to warm them up. ‘For God’s sake, Simon. It’s pitch black and freezing. What were you doing out there, communing with the stars?’
In his absence, his tabletop arrangement had changed. His empty glass had gone, replaced by a new, full pint of Coke, and there was a sandwich wrapped in clingfilm balanced on top of the Marianne Upton case files from 2012. There ended the list of changes Simon approved of. He tried not to notice the gin and tonic Charlie had ordered for herself.
Simon didn’t understand why almost all the adults he knew treated alcohol as if it were nectar from heaven. He’d never been a drinker himself, but recently it had started to annoy him when other people did it. He’d heard on the radio that it was hard for cancer to kill you if your liver was functioning at its highest level. He’d tried telling Charlie that alcohol was poison, but she either laughed at him or said, ‘So are killjoys.’ Simon wasn’t sure he was capable of feeling joy, but this was where he tended to feel least discontent: at his regular table at TheBrown Cow, next to the fireplace, opposite a framed oil painting of a black and white cow (yeah, it made no sense to Simon either) standing side-on between a thick, gnarly-trunked oak tree and a red wheelbarrow. Inexplicably, a large green apple was balanced on top of the cow’s head.
This wasn’t the original brown cow painting; that one, in which the cow had been an appropriate shade of caramel, had gone last year and taken the smell of old wood with it. Now, under new management, the place reeked of roses and leather, which Charlie liked and Simon hated. So far he’d had no luck tracking down the source of the smell. There had to be a vent somewhere pumping it out, one he planned to bury under dozens of layers of masking tape if he ever found it.
It was half past ten. The pub was empty apart from the bar staff, Simon and Charlie.
‘Anyway, well done,’ she said. ‘You successfully manifested a sandwich.’ He’d texted her an hour ago:‘brown cow bring cheese sandwich’. ‘Less successfully,’ she continued, ‘you left confidential paperwork lying around on a pub table while you went out and … did what, exactly, for twenty minutes?’Cause that’s how long I’ve been here, waiting with your stupid sandwich.’
‘I asked for cheese, not stupid. Are we out of cheese?’
‘I can’t believe you left all this lot just lying here for anyone to rummage through.’
‘I don’t care about keeping Spilling Police’s secrets any more.’ Simon was annoyed that he had to spell it out. Didn’t Charlie know nothing was the same now that his team was going to be torn apart? That it never would be again? ‘I went out to ring Doug Brodigan. Couldn’t get a signal in here.’
‘You still haven’t enabled Wi-Fi calls on your phone, have you?’ Charlie sighed.
‘Don’t know what it means,’ Simon said proudly.
‘Can I do it for you now? It’ll take four seconds.’
‘No need. I’ve already spoken to Brodigan, who confirmed I was right. Made a nice change.’
‘What?’ Charlie looked confused. ‘Simon, you’re always right. When aren’t you? Oh, for God’s sake!’ It was convenient for Simon that she could read his thoughts most of the time. Saved him having to string sentences together. ‘The super’s not doing what she’s doing because she doesn’t think you’re a brilliant detective. You know that. Everyone knows how good you are.’
‘It’s my fault, what’s happening to Sam and Proust. The team. There’d be no exiling of anyone if it weren’t for me,’ Simon said. ‘If I was as good at the job as you say I am, Dooper’d be scared of losing me and she can’t be, or she wouldn’t be trying to push me out the door by firing the only people I want to work with. If I’d been less disruptive, more conventional—’
‘An entirely different person, yeah?’
