‘I know. I’m sorry,’ I said with the biggest grin I could muster, trying to be as charming as humanly possible. I couldn’t resist going to her. Cis was the best at what she did. Everyone else just seemed to pale in comparison.
‘You know Vivian will find out about this eventually, though? She always finds out,’ she said, as I felt my heart rate begin to steadily drop. Cis checked to see how many calories she had burned on her smart watch. ‘And then she’ll probably get us both disciplined when she does – remember, she’s still above me, too, Gareth.’
‘Oh, I can handle Vivian. Don’t worry about her. What was your final time?’
‘Twenty-two minutes, fourteen seconds. You?’
‘Twenty-eight minutes and twenty-three seconds.’
‘You’re getting slower,’ Cis said to me with a smirk. ‘There used to be days when you’d be done in nineteen minutes flat.’
I walked over to the dewy park bench and began to smooth my hands over my thighs. I was no longer the young upstartwho could run a lean 5k in sub-twenty minutes. When I became a detective, I had found that a perk of the job was that I didn’t need to do much running any more. But the best time to be able to catch Cis was when she was doing her morning jog at 6 a.m. around the local park.
‘So, nothing more since Vivian green-lighted the case?’ Cis asked, regaining her breath much quicker than I did.
‘Breadcrumbs. What I really need is a full forensic sweep.’
‘So, what are you thinking? We do a double act? You as the officer in charge and investigating officer and me as the crime scene manager?’ Cis walked over to the bench, twisted herself around, and began to do dips. I lost my words for a minute, unable to tear my eyes away from her remarkably defined arms, which were reminding me to visit the station gym the next time I had a spare hour.
‘I need a forensic team there by the end of the day, really; at least a set-up and a photographer,’ I said. ‘We’ve already cordoned it off, but I’m spread too thin with other cases, and I need someone like you to volunteer – someone who knows what they’re doing. I can’t really ask someone like Phil, now, can I?’
‘You know about the toilet seat story?’ she inquired, not stopping for breath in between dips.
‘Of course I know the toilet seat story. Everyone knows the toilet seat story.’
‘A whole case down the pan,’ Cis said. ‘Literally.’ She yanked her water bottle out of her bag, took a swig, and joined me in sitting on the bench overlooking the water as the sun began to creep up from the horizon. There was a short, uneasy stretch of silence between us, which I knew meant she was working up to say something serious to me.
‘I am a little worried about you, Gareth.’
Here we go. I jolted my head back slightly. I didn’t like the way she said those words, like a teacher who’d asked a kid to stay behind after a lesson.
‘Why? What did I do?’
‘You’re Moby Dicking.’
‘What?’ This sounded like a weird German sex act.
‘Moby Dicking,’ she repeated, enunciating the words more slowly as if that would suddenly make me understand what she was saying.
‘You’ve lost me,’ I said, squinting at her and trying to follow her eyeline, but her gaze was fixed on the gently moving currents of water. I still wasn’t sure what ‘Moby Dicking’ was, but it irritated me that Cis seemed to be singing from the same hymn sheet as everyone else in the CID. Crazy old Gareth and the case that was blindingly obvious.
‘Cases like this, you don’t need someone like me, you don’t need a forensic team, you don’t need hundreds of case files of witnesses and alibis. We both know that people go missing, and sometimes they just don’t come back. There’s no foul play, no murder. He’s just an old man who walked off and didn’t come back. He even left a poem. In a few years, someone will find a corpse washed up on some bay on the Thames or somewhere, and that’ll be that. Are you sure you need a whole forensic team to get to the bottom of this?’
‘He was killed, Cis. I’m certain.’
‘How can you be so sure, Gareth?’
‘I don’t know,’ I muttered, somewhat defeated, as Cis reached out and began to rub my shoulder tenderly. ‘I just am.’
‘Everyone gets burnt out. Look, give yourself a few hours. Sit in the office and mull it over. If you still feel as strongly about this then as you do now, I’ll get stuff in order and be right there to set up forensics. Who does Vivian have lined up to be crime scene manager now? Don’t say Phil.’
‘Phil,’ I confirmed in a groan. ‘Why do you think I came to you?’
‘Oh, my darling,’ she said, gently placing her hand against my temple and pulling my head against her shoulder. Laying my head on her deltoid felt like I was resting against one of the rocks at Stonehenge.
‘This isn’t very comfortable,’ I said, realising I was, in fact, in the world’s most tender headlock.
‘Aren’t you relaxing?’ she replied.
