Evelyn Bathurst looks not unlike Jo.
She parks the car on the road at the bottom of the garden of the large house in Helensburgh, steps out into the rain. Stares at the lights in the house fifty yards away along the driveway, wonders about what she is doing. Shivers, pulls her jacket closer around her.
She locks the car door. Her own car under repair — faulty brakes — she has borrowed the car from Constable Forsyth, on duty through the night. Forsyth believes that she may repay the favour sometime.
She will not get the chance.
She swings back the gate, feels the beating of her heart. Looks at her watch, wonders if the Superintendent will be at home. A Friday night, not long after ten o'clock. Whatever it is that Miller does, she will find this an unwelcome interruption, with unwelcome information.
Takes a deep breath, tries to calm herself; begins the long walk up the driveway. She has somewhere else to go, someone else to whom she could talk — not that she was going to mention that to Thomas Hutton — but she has decided to come here first. Perhaps she'll move on later. Perhaps not.
Should she have listened to Hutton? But it wasn't Hutton talking, it was her conscience. She had been meaning to do the same thing for the past year. Slowly the desire had worn off. The months will do that to you. But now it was back, born of fear, guilt and self-loathing for what she had been a part of. There was no need to confide in Hutton any further. What he had said earlier in the station had been all that she'd been needing to hear.
Her ponderous steps take her nearer to the house, her stomach crawls with nerves. She wonders if she is about to be dismissed, in the manner she has heard Miller dismiss so many officers in the past. Not as bad as she seems, Hutton had said, and she hopes it is true.
She automatically rings the bell, without a clear thought in her head; moves back from the second step so that she is outwith the meagre protection of the front of the house. The rain soaks her head. She shivers again in the cold. Throat dry, nervous fingers.
The door opens, catching her unaware. She stares into the dim light of the house, feels the rush of warmth. Charlotte Miller stands in front of her. Doesn't recognise Bathurst at first. Miller wears a long, blue silk pyjama top, her legs are bare. Bathurst looks at her skin, smooth and gold in the dim light from behind.
'Constable Bathurst?' she says, surprise in her voice coming with sudden recognition.
Bathurst nods, says nothing. No words. They stare at each other for a few seconds, before either awakes to the other. Miller shakes her head, feels the cold, summons her inside and closes the door behind her.
Bathurst stands in the hall, looking around. Unaware of what her husband does for a living, she wonders what Miller earns as a superintendent to afford such opulence.
'I'm sorry to bother you on a Friday night,' she begins, but Miller stops her with a shake of the head.
'Don't be silly. Take your coat off and I'll get a towel. How long were you standing out there?'
Bathurst thinks of stepping out of the car, seems like an hour ago. Doesn't answer, removes her coat, Miller ushers her into the sitting room.
'I've just got a quick phone call to make, then I'll get the towel,' she says.
She disappears. Evelyn Bathurst stands in the middle of the room, suddenly warm, aware of the dampness of her hair.
There was nothing special about the story of the kid walking along the road, bumping the head of a dead baby in the potholes. Fuck, I grant you, it sounds special. It sounds like the kind of thing that doesn't happen every day. But that's just what people think nowadays because most of the population haven't spent time in a war zone.
Previous generations, those bastards were always going to war. That's what they did. Everyone went to war, everyone got used to it, learned to live with all the complete shit you see when you're in that situation. You got home, you coped. If you didn't cope, they locked you up, or you became the guy stuck away in the corner of the village that everyone told their kids to stay away from.
These days, it's all about coping. Society is about the individual. It didn't use to be. It used to be about society functioning as a whole, and if that meant that individuals got shafted to enable society to function, then so be it. These days individuals have the right not to get shafted. Very thoughtful of society to put the individual first, except it's the very reason why society is falling apart.
So everybody hurts and everybody cries and everybody has a story to tell, and this is just me telling mine. Except I don't want to tell it; I don't want to talk. There's so much of it, that if I have to think about it, if someone was ever going to force me to think about it, then by fucking God, I won't just cry, I won't just go quietly fucking mental…
I don't know what I'd do. I just don't want to think about it.
There was nothing special about the kid and the baby with its head bouncing off the road, except it was the only story I told to the psychiatrist I saw a month after I got back from the Balkans.
I sat down, she asked me a couple of questions, I cut her off and told her the bouncing baby's head story, and then before I'd got to the end — although, of course, it's a story that doesn't really have an end — I got up and walked out. I didn't want to tell her any more, and if I wasn't going to talk to her then there was no point in being there.
As I talked, I stared at her throat. She had an unusually large Adam's apple for a woman, and I just stared at it the whole time wondering if she was really a man, or if the Adam's apple wasn't actually all that big and I was exaggerating it in some bizarre attempt to distract myself.
I never saw her again. Looking back, her Adam's apple probably wasn't all that big and she probably wasn't a man.
Not much after six a.m. The rain still falls in a steady drizzle, as Constable Bathurst arrives at the station, leaving Forsyth's Peugeot in the car park, the keys in the exhaust. He will be off duty in a couple of hours. From there she will walk home, a ten minute promenade through wet, deserted streets in the middle of the night.
As she steps out onto the street and rounds the first corner, someone sees her, sees her dark brown hair dully reflect the orange street lamps, but she does not see him. She walks on, the dull ache in her leg muscles heightened from sitting in the car.
She thinks about Charlotte Miller, has vague thoughts of Thomas Hutton, but thinks not of the problems with which she stepped out that evening. Wonders whether to have coffee when she gets home, or whether she should go straight to bed.
She will, however, never get to choose.