Chapter 24
1015 Words
24
Jack Culverhouse’s car rolled slowly down Parsons Close as he looked at the house numbers. Number 19 was in the corner, nicely tucked away. A burglar’s dream, he thought.
He turned his car around and parked it across the end of the driveway, facing the way he just came. He wasn’t sure why — maybe it was a subconscious preparation in case he needed to make a quick exit.
He walked up the gravel path and knocked twice on the door, clutching the bottle of wine he’d bought from the off-licence on his way over. He didn’t know a thing about wine, but he remembered the online shopping order story and guessed Chrissie liked white. Although he didn’t know anything about any of the wines on offer, they seemed to have a handy indication of niceness on labels below the bottles, denoted in Pounds Sterling. The one he chose was £15.99 — an obscene amount of money for a bottle of wine, he thought, especially as he was only going to get to drink one small glass before driving home.
He had flirted with the idea of getting a taxi, but had decided against it. At the back of his mind was Operation Counterflow. Although he wasn’t working tonight, he thought it best to remain sober just in case. The bosses weren’t keen on people doing unauthorised overtime — especially not on major cases — as it had been known for defence teams to use the argument in court that the investigating officers were overworked and overtired, and that the prosecution was therefore likely to be flawed. In the long run, it was best that investigations took a little longer or involved more officers, if only to save themselves the embarrassment of having a perfectly good case thrown out of court through there being the slightest element of ‘reasonable doubt’ required for the jury to acquit.
Besides which, he barely knew the woman and didn’t want to let his guard down too early. One glass with dinner would be just fine with him.
When the front door opened, he barely recognised Chrissie. The tied-back hair was now delicately arranged, and she was wearing a summer dress that wouldn’t have gone amiss at a garden party.
‘Off out somewhere?’ he joked, as he looked at her. ‘Sorry, I feel a bit of a wally dressed in my scruffs.’
‘You look very smart to me, Jack. Come on in.’
Chrissie’s house was clean and tidy, and decorated tastefully. She’d gone for the light and airy, minimalist look and it had clearly worked.
‘Nice place,’ he said.
‘Thank you. I had the back of the house opened up about two or three years ago, to let more light in.’
‘Looks good. I wish I had the foresight to do something like that myself.’
Chrissie laughed. ‘I can’t take the credit for that, I’m afraid. I was left a bit of money and I have a friend who’s an architect. I wouldn’t have had a clue otherwise. Not to mention the budget.’
After a few minutes they’d decided they’d have Chinese for dinner, and Chrissie poured the wine whilst Jack phoned through the order.
The conversation seemed to flow well, but Jack tried to steer the topics away from work. It never went down particularly well to tell someone what he did for a living before they’d got to know him. It could only go one of two ways: they’d be frightened off or the rest of the night’s conversation would turn to talking about murder investigations, in which case he might as well just be at work anyway.
‘So. What’s your deepest fear, Jack?’ she asked him, throwing him a complete curveball in the middle of a discussion about the new town centre regeneration scheme the council had put forward recently.
‘Uh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s the thing about fears. You try not to think about them too much.’
He wanted to move the conversation on to happier topics, but at the same time he was intrigued by Chrissie’s question. It was a long time since someone had tried to hold that level of conversation with him.
‘They say there are only five primal fears. Everything else is a form of one of those,’ she said. ‘Extinction, mutilation, loss of autonomy, separation and ego-death.’
‘Come on then. What are you, a shrink of some sort?’
‘Close. Not a million miles off, anyway. But I used to be a psychology teacher. I’ve always kept a keen interest ever since. I studied it at university.’
‘Oh? Where’d you go?’
‘Cambridge. Well, Norwich. But I lived near Cambridge. Well, I could get to Cambridge on a full tank of petrol, anyway.’
Jack laughed. He liked her sense of self-deprecating humour. ‘Where are you from originally?’ he asked, having detected a bit of an accent when she spoke.
‘A lovely quaint little village in the north-west called Liverpool. You probably haven’t heard of it.’
He laughed again. ‘I think it rings a bell.’
The food was fantastic, and Jack made a quiet promise to himself to order from that restaurant again. The conversation was great, too, and he found himself becoming more and more intrigued by Chrissie.
‘Are you sure I can’t tempt you with another glass of wine?’ she asked. ‘You’re more than welcome to leave your car here and get a cab home.’
‘To be honest, I’d be better off walking back. It’d only take twenty minutes or so, but I’m going to need the car first thing so it’s best if I don’t. Maybe another time,’ he added, before realising he’d inadvertently committed himself to meeting her again.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see her again — he did — but he didn’t want to have to admit it, even to himself.
‘Sure. Maybe next time I can find out a little more about you.’
‘How do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Well, I don’t feel I’ve got to know you very well. You seem… closed. Difficult to get to know.’
‘Is that a bad thing?’
Chrissie smiled and shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. At least, not in my experience. Often the juiciest fruit needs the hardest squeeze. If you’ll pardon the expression.’
Jack had never really opened up to anyone, and he’d be buggered if he was going to tell everything to someone he’d met in a supermarket that week, no matter how much he liked her. And that was quite a lot, he had to admit.
‘So, Jack. What do you say we pop another date in the diary and meet again?’
He looked at her for a moment, trying to squash the thoughts that were invading his mind.
‘I’ll let you know,’ he said.
- Writer
