I’ve nearly caught up with Waterhouse when Sergeant Zailer calls after me. ‘Jemma?’
I turn.
‘If he breaks during the interview, come and find me,’ she says.
31st May 2006
That bitch. Cruel dictator bitch. She’s basically told me I have to love Paddy and I’m not allowed to love Ollie, as if it’s up to her how I feel about anything or anyone!!
It’s the most unfair thing in the world. It feels like a tragedy. My love for Ollie has not one single tiny grain of badness or wrongness in it. I love him for the extraordinary person he is. There is no purer, more altruistic feeling that could exist. It’s unbearable to know that I have to spend the rest of my life deprived of him and, even worse, to think of him forever going without the endless, amazing love I know I’d give him, which he deserves more than anyone I’ve ever met. When I think about his sheer goodness, with no trace, spot or stain of anything bad in it, I want to cry.
Ollie isn’t like most of us. He’s different. There’s nothing tainted or compromised about him. When I was with him and thought I might actually get to keep him, I felt my own inner taint start to dissolve. Not that I’m a bad person, but most of us, me included, are sometimes driven not by the highest moral principles but by slightly more squalid motivations: making sure we’re okay at other people’s expense. Ollie would never behave like that and he’s proved it. You don’t become a firefighter if you’re as self-serving and venal as most of us are. You have to be willing, day after day, to walk into burning buildings and risk your life in order to save others.
Ollie’s strength of character, his exceptional bravery, his kindness – most people don’t have those qualities. And he’s so modest too, and so, so beautiful. I’ll admit it: his beauty is part of the tragedy – that snatched-away, once-in-a-lifetime chance to have something perfect. How gorgeous would any babies be who had him as a father?! It makes no sense to torture myself by thinking about it, but I can’t stop.
The hardest part of this ordeal is not that he’s being forcibly removed from my life by a tyrant. That sort of cruelty, or something equally evil, happens to so many people in this pain-filled world – they lose homes, jobs, loved ones, often not as a result of unavoidable natural disasters but because of the wickedness of a human monster or monsters. And everyone, quite understandably, feels desperately sorry for them – but there would be no sympathy for me, even if I were honest about how I feel. No one would understand. I could well be the first person this particular awfulness has ever happened to. No one on this planet has felt what I’m feeling now – at least nowhere near as strongly – for someone who is forbidden to them for the particular cruel, senseless reason that Ollie is to me.
If they knew about it, people would say there’s something unnatural about the strength of my love for Ollie, and how much I want him back. The only person who might understand my predicament is Ollie himself, because it’s his predicament too. From him to me, from me to him, it’s the same: a palindrome of loss. Oh, I’m sure he doesn’t feel as strongly about me as I do about him. Not yet, anyway. But I know he would, and soon, if only we hadn’t been forcibly separated. Ollie is a strong-feeler – unlike Paddy, whose reaction to most of life is a shrug and a ‘Who cares?’ He’s so inert so much of the time. I’ve met stuffed toys who have more agency, ambition and vision. Yet Paddy – the one who smokes joints all day long and keeps getting fired from one crappy bar job afteranother – is the one I must now somehow brainwash myself into preferring. How the hell am I going to manage it?
It’s true that I did once think he was lovely. That was before I met Ollie, obviously, but still. Maybe I can feel that way about Paddy again, if I try? There was a time when I’d have said, ‘Anyone who fires him, it’s their loss,’ and ‘Who cares about a bit of weed? We’ve all done it.’ But that was before he behaved so despicably, before his endless, callous demonstration (it felt endless at the time, though it did eventually end)of his complete and utter unwillingness to commit. Can I revive the way I felt about him before that unforgivable display of ingratitude? It was really the worst … let’s call it ‘Romantic Relationship Vandalism’ I’ve ever seen done by anyone ever to someone they know adores them.
Stopping describing his behaviour as ‘unforgivable’ would be a start, I suppose. The trouble is, I don’t want to forgive him. The real question, and a far more interesting one than ‘Do I want to?’, is ‘Do I want to want to?’
Every time I try to untangle the mess of all of it, a panicked scream rises up inside me: No, no, no! Don’t just accept this! Do something, anything.
What can I do, though? The Tyrant has made it very clear that I’m never going to see my beloved Ollie again.
3
Monday 30 October 2023, 5.40 p.m.
CHARLIE
Charlie Zailer resisted the urge to follow and take charge of matters herself as she watched Jemma Stelling turn the corner and disappear after Simon. He couldn’t do her any serious psychological harm, could he? How resilient was Jemma? It was a question Charlie doubted Simon would be asking himself. His mind was occupied by one thing and one thing only, and had been for the last week: the wreckage that his working life had become, in such a shockingly short space of time.
The new superintendent, Fran Whittingham, had started at the beginning of the month. Exactly seven days ago, she’d announced that Simon’s team was to lose two members. The jobs of DI Giles Proust and DS Sam Kombothekra were being relocated to Lincolnshire Police as part of a regional collaboration on serious and organised crime, and if Proust and Sam didn’t want to follow them to a new building and county, then Superintendent Whittingham was afraid there was nothing she could do about that; their presence at Spilling Police Station would no longer be required.
Simon had been wandering around like an upright corpseever since he’d been told the news last Monday. Though he kept denying it to Charlie, she was convinced he was now actively doing everything in his power to get himself fired. ‘Why not resign, if you want out?’ she’d asked him. ‘We could get by on my salary, just about.’ He wouldn’t answer, would barely speak about it.
In his present, messed-up frame of mind, would he think to check whether Marianne Upton – Jemma’s prospective murder victim – was alive and well? Charlie had an uncomfortable feeling about Jemma Stelling, who might well be in denial about already having committed this murder she seemed so preoccupied by. The eyes gave it away: the ‘How did I end up here?’ shock, the dark glow of something once tidy and self-contained, now spiralling …
But who was this Marianne Upton woman? If Jemma had killed someone, why wasn’t it her husband? That’s what Charlie would have expected. Evidently something was seriously wrong on the marriage front. What was it Jemma had said? Her daughter would be better off parentless than relying only on Paddy? A criticism as specific as it was devastating.
Someone needed to establish, and quickly, who was alive and who was dead. A detective – which meant not Charlie herself. Not any more, or not yet, or both.She started to move, feeling as if she was chasing her own thoughts, which were galloping twice as fast as her legs could go.
Did she want to go back to CID? To Simon’s team in particular? Trying to manage him at home was enough of a struggle. Would Simon mind? If she told him – asked him – and he responded with anything but uncomplicated delight …
Right. Great. Have you ever met your husband?
‘Who better than you to rein him in without making him feel persecuted?’ the new super had said with a warm smile.‘He knows you’re not against him. Anyone else comes in as his new skipper, he might view them with … well, a certain amount of hostility.’
Only if, by ‘a certain amount’, you mean the biggest possible amount in the whole history of amounts,Charlie thought.
Shit, had she just blurted out something about maybe being a detective again to Jemma Stelling? Yes, she had. And now Jemma was with Simon, and it wasn’t impossible that she’d …
No, Jemma would be too busy talking about her own problems. A random police sergeant’s career plans would be the last thing on her mind. Still, this was a ‘note to self’ moment: the outbursts and oversharing had to stop. The more unstable Simon became – and so far today he’d been acting as if he hoped to set a new record – the more together Charlie would need to be. They couldn’t both lose their jobs.
Charlie stopped at the open door of the canteen, out of breath. A quick look around the hall revealed no Colin Sellers, no Chris Gibbs, no Sam Kombothekra.
