“Pull over,” said DCI Bob Beattie.
“Where?”
“Anywhere. Pull over!”
“Okay.”
“Wait, don’t. I can’t do it here.”
“You want me to pull over or…?”
“Oh, Jesus…”
Bob started retching.
“I’ll pull over.”
“DON’T PULL OVER!”
Laura had come to learn that men like Bob had a working-class respect for an upper-middle-class neighborhood like Hampsteadvillage. He couldn’t allow himself to throw up outside a Gail’s bakery.
“All right, all right, I won’t.”
“Put the blues on.”
“Seriously?”
“PUT THE BLUES ON!”
The siren started. Laura got them through the red light, up the hill, and away from the high street.
“Up here. Okay, pull over.”
Bob, the older, plainclothes detective, the crumple-suited overweight cliché of a divorced man, jumped out and onto Hampstead Heath. Laura watched him from the shoulder as he proceeded to dive into the first bush he saw. She’d seen this kind of behavior from Bob before. Usually, it would be the morning after a night when she’d left him and the other old tragics in the Wheatsheaf, ducking out before they hit the whiskey and pretended it was still the 1990s and their bodies could take it. Why did they do it to themselves? Because it was all they knew? Habit? Were they running from their feelings? When it came to “men’s mental health,” they’d got as far as putting some posters up around the station but no further.
Fair to say each of them who did the job they did had to face down a degree of the macabre. Laura enjoyed a post-work drink as much as anyone but it wasn’t her crutch. When she wanted to escape the day’s horrors, find some form of distraction, she found it in episode after episode ofMarried at First Sight: AustraliaorBelow Deck. She wasn’t proud of it, but she was comfortable with her vice. Pretty Australians having vacuous shouting matches in attractive locations was what got her through. It was a lot healthierthan thirty units of alcohol and a Big Mac meal, which seemed to be Bob’s method of facing down the demons.
Maybe if she stayed in the pub for longer she’d be making more progress. She was still a detective sergeant; the game plan had been to be a detective inspector by now. She’d be a young one, but Laura was ambitious and not ashamed of it. Perhaps it was that people found her inherently funny. Her name was Laura Welsh but she was—get this—Scottish. Every new encounter in the force would start with peals of hilarity about her ironic name. It made her, she feared, a figure of fun rather than one of respect. She had two options: marry into a new surname or develop a Welsh accent. Neither was appealing.
Bob got back into the car, a drop or two of vomit on his shirt, which he wiped with his tie, pointlessly transferring the bile from one garment to another. Laura looked at him. This wasn’t like a hangover. Bob’s park pukes, on the odd occasion when they happened, were an early-morning thing. This was something else.
“Sorry,” he said.
Laura didn’t move the car. In their year together she’d learned how to play him. Give him a moment, she thought.
Bob stared in silence, then let out a guttural moan. “This is bad. Fuck me, this is bad.”
Laura spoke quietly. This was serious. “What?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
But she did. Laura always wanted to know.
Eight
Margaret smiled atthe baby in the café. It drooled on its mother’s shoulder while she struggled to get something out of a bag full of baby-related paraphernalia. Sweet. Margaret looked around at people working on laptops, on their phones, a barista handling six orders at once, and it occurred to her that she was the least busy person in the building. Perhaps, she felt, the least busy person in London.
Margaret had arrived at the café on Hampstead High Street fifteen minutes early. The place had been Catherine’s choice, but Margaret wasn’t sure if it was her scene. At least at Costa Coffee she knew where she was. Here it was all “long blacks” and funny-looking pastries that cost seven pounds. The staff had interesting haircuts and tattoos that Margaret supposed were ever so fashionable that particular week. In her youth, tattoos had been the preserve of a certain type, a particular class. Now some of her friends’ children had them. Middle-class people with middle-class jobsand anchors tattooed on their forearms. Was this what they called cultural appropriation?
