I knew thatsheknew that she couldn’t go into the men’s bathroom to check if this was the case, and of course, she knew thatIknew the answer to her question. If I told her, she could then act on that information without having HR ringing her up and slapping a bunch of disciplinaries on her wrist.
‘I’m not really sure…’ I murmured as unintelligibly as I could.
‘Don’t bullshit me, Gareth,’ she snapped, finally glancing up from her notes to lock eyes with me, but her hand was still darting and dancing across the page.
I took a sharp inhale whilst looking into the python’s eyes. Suddenly, it felt as if the central heating in the room had been cranked up. I mean, I could lie; I could claim that I didn’t know where everyone had gone, or that I hadn’t noticed people choosing the bathroom over the breakroom. But that wouldn’t be the truth.
‘Yes, yes, we do,’ I confessed, my face grimacing as I did so.
‘I knew it, those little pricks,’ she said, smacking her pen against the desk somewhat triumphantly and throwing herselfback on the chair, hands behind her head. ‘You know, Gareth, if they want to act like school children, they’ll be treated as such. You can go.’
In a quiet display of resignation, I rose from the chair without a word and tried to skulk, in the most professional way possible, out of her office.
‘By the way, don’t feel bad that the boys haven’t asked you out yet,’ she reassured me as I wrapped my fingers around the handle of the door to pull it shut behind me. ‘They’re worse than a bunch of teenage girls. Just… you’re too much like a golden retriever, Gareth. I need you to be more…’ She made a weird kind of claw with her hand. ‘Rottweiler.’
Geez, I wasn’t just wishing she wouldn’t get the cat now; I was practically rooting for the other guy.
I hurled my fist into the dashboard of my car, and the pain of punching the hardened polyvinyl struck up my arm, which – obviously – only made me angrier, making me punch the dashboard again, as hard as I could this time. Which, of course, began a very brief self-flagellation cycle of pummelling and pounding before wincing and pouting. Rinse and repeat. It was when I could feel my knuckles beginning to bruise that I realised I probably wasn’t helping myself feel any better.
I had had my fair share of scowls and intimidating looks for the rest of the day, so I was glad to be leaving the station to avoid any more threatening glares. Vivian had printed a piece of A4 off and pinned it to the bathroom door, saying that only two people were allowed to be in the boys’ bathroom at once. She had typed it up in Times New Roman, which I thought was a touch too far in the passive-aggressive scale, although Vivian probably thought default Calibri was too polite.
After driving home, I pulled up outside the house and glanced at my watch. Four thirty. Fran would be meeting with the young boy and his foster family now, I guessed, and would probably be home within the next hour. I had to admit, it was nice to know that I would finally be able to have dinner at home today. I knew the move had been rough on Fran. She had been walking around with hermad-but-I’m-not-going-to-talk-about-itface for the past month.
I had been the one who’d asked her to move, after dropping small hints for the last year that our flat really wasn’t big enough anymore and my promotion to sergeant would come with a nice pay rise. However, I don’t think the gravity of the situation truly hit her until we arrived. She had been pretty content and jolly until the moment we pulled up, started unpacking, and met the neighbours, and then I think the penny dropped. Even though it was only half an hour’s drive away from where we had been, it didn’t feel like home to her.
I strolled over to Mr O’Neill’s house now, and having done a few of these visits before, I crossed my fingers and offered up another prayer to God, hoping not to find another old geezer who had passed away on the loo – just like the last three times on the trot.
I rang the doorbell and waited the standard twenty seconds. Nothing. I repeated the process, still nothing. I pushed open the letterbox, crouched down, and shouted into the house.
‘Mr O’Neill, it’s the police, we’re here checking up on you,’ I hollered. I waited in vain, hoping to hear the sound of an old man come hobbling down the stairs, but of course, not a thing.
I pushed down on the door handle, expecting the usual locked clunk, but instead, I heard the metallic crunch of the bolts, and the door slowly creaked open. Unlocked door? Not a positive sign.
I tiptoed precariously into the house, shutting the door behind me softly, and slipped on my gloves as procedure dictated.
‘Mr O’Neill,’ I called out again as I made my way through the identical house design and structure that Fran and I were getting used to – only this one smelt distinctly of pensioner.
What does that smell like? you ask. Google ‘nonanal’.
Approaching the downstairs toilet door cautiously, like a moment from a horror film, I gently pulled it open and took a quick peek inside the loo. No corpse.
I checked around the downstairs of the house, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Through a process of elimination, I imagined he had probably passed away in his sleep. I hopped up the stairs and pushed open the bedroom door – but his bed was empty, pristine, in fact, sheets perfectly folded back and made with impeccable placement of the decorative pillows. Strangely, there were no family photos adorning the walls of his home. Instead, the walls were hung with framed poems – a rather unusual choice of décor. As I paused to read a few, I recognised the names – Poe, Tennyson, Cummings – but could not, for the life of me, tell you a single line they had written. Most of the poetry I knew was from nursery.
I checked his upstairs loo and wet room: no body there, either. I could take a little bit of solace in knowing I had broken that particularly macabre streak.
The last place left to check was his study. I walked in, ready to call Vivian as soon as I glimpsed the sight of a dead body hunched in its chair, but the room was empty – except for a lone piece of paper on the desk. I leaned closer to read it.
Left
Penelope Thornfield (1891–1945)
Sharp Days stretch and stretch, for long everlasting grey.
Lone sunrise burns bitter, galls on flaked tongue.
The birdsong aches and rings a mere discord.
Motherly hand beckons my neck
