Whatever's Easiest

Aled Pryor parked in the yard at twenty-five to seven and sat for a minute with the engine off, reading the house.

Kitchen light on. Landing light on. The back bedroom curtains shut, and shut properly, the gap in the middle pinned with something, which meant she had got up in the night and done it. The bins where the letting agent had left them. No new tracks on the wet gravel but Jas’s and his own.

Jas met him at the foot of the annex stairs with the log and a face that said twelve hours.

“Quiet,” she said. “She came down at ten past three for water. Stood in the kitchen twenty minutes and went back up. At six she asked me where the nearest pool was.”

“And?”

“I told her there wasn’t one.” Jas handed him the log. “She said, ‘Is there a bath?’ I said there was a bath. She said, ‘Right,’ like I’d told her the score.”

At two minutes to seven he heard the taps go on upstairs.

He was in the kitchen by then, standing where he could see the back door and the hall at once, and he listened to it the way he listened to everything in a house he was responsible for, without deciding to. The taps ran for four minutes. The boiler did not come on. The pipes knocked twice and went still, and then there was nothing, a long nothing, the length of time it would take to do something steadily and not stop.

She came down at twenty-five past with her hair wet and combed straight back and her face pink with cold.

“Twenty lengths,” she said. “It’s a short course. About four foot six. You have to turn a lot.”

“Cold?”

“I didn’t let it warm up. There’s no point otherwise.” She filled the kettle. “Don’t look at me like that.”

He had not known he was looking at her like anything. He looked at the back door instead.

· · ·Scene break

DC Imran Rashid came on at eight and took the room over the garage, the radio and the lane, and Jas went home to sleep and her son. Aled did the day the way he always did the first proper day: he learned the principal.

People told you who they were in the first twenty-four hours, if you let them get on with it. They did not tell you in words. They told you in where they put things down.

Esther Mayhew put things down square. The mug went on the table with its handle at three o’clock. When she left the kitchen she pushed the chairs in, all four, including the three nobody had sat on. She had no keys now, because the cottage’s keys were his, and twice in the morning he saw her hand go to her coat pocket where her keys would have been and find the folded café receipt instead. The second time she took it out, looked at it, and asked him if there was an envelope in the house.

He found one in the dresser drawer. She wrote the date on the front in small square capitals, put the receipt in, and put the envelope on the windowsill at the back, as if it were the start of something.

“You keep receipts,” he said.

“All of them.”

“Why?”

She thought about it, which he had not expected. Most people had an answer to that question ready and it was never the true one.

“Because they’re the only thing anyone gives you that says what happened,” she said. “Everything else is somebody’s opinion.”

· · ·Scene break

At ten she brought her statement to the kitchen table.

It was in a plain folder, the copy Kofi Asante had sent with her, and she was allowed it. A witness could reread her own statement; it was her account, and nobody else’s. He knew the rule and he knew the one that sat beside it.

“I’ll be next door,” he said.

She looked up. “You don’t have to go. I’m only reading.”

“I’ll be next door,” he said again, gently, and went, and pulled the door to but not shut, and stood in the front room with his back to the window he had asked her not to stand at, and listened to pages turn.

He did it three times that day. At ten, at two, and at ten past four, not quarter past, when she got the folder out again after a phone call from Kofi and he heard her say “Schedule nine” before he was in the hall. He did not look at the pages as he passed the table. That was not virtue. It was training so old that he no longer had to choose it: his eyes went to the door first, always the door, and by the time they might have gone anywhere else he was through it.

In the front room, the third time, he found he was listening for her voice. She read under her breath when she was checking a figure. He could not hear the words, only the rhythm, the little stops and restarts of someone going back over a line, and he stood and listened to that and told himself it was the same as listening to the house.

· · ·Scene break

At eleven she made tea.

“How do you take it?”

“However’s easiest.”

She had her back to him. He saw her shoulders go still.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the one I’ve got.”

She made it. He watched her do it without appearing to, which was his job, and so he saw her put the milk in first, and a great deal of it, and three sugars, and then the bag, and then leave the bag in and go to the window and look at the garden for a while, and come back, and squeeze the bag against the side with the spoon and take it out at last. She put it on the counter by his hand, handle towards him.

He drank it.

It was very bad. It was sweet the way medicine was sweet, and stewed underneath, and the first mouthful went down like a mistake. He did not let the second one show. He drank it standing at the counter, the whole mug, and put it in the sink, and ran the tap in it.

She had watched every mouthful.

“That had three sugars in it,” she said.

“It did.”

“You don’t take sugar.”

“How d’you know that?”

“Because you pulled a face at the first mouthful and not at any of the others, which means you decided not to.” She had her arms folded. “It was terrible. I made it terrible. I left the bag in for six minutes. I wanted to see what you’d do.”

“And what did I do?”

“Whatever was easiest.”

She said it lightly, and then she did not say anything else, and he understood that she was not joking, or not only. It had been a test and he had passed it the wrong way. He had been the man who did not mind, and she had wanted, for a reason he did not have yet, to find out whether there was anyone who did.

“Milk after,” he said. “No sugar. Bag out quick.”

“Thank you.” She unfolded her arms. “Was that so hard?”

It had not been hard. That was what bothered him, driving home that night: how little it had cost to say, and how long it had been since anyone had asked.

· · ·Scene break

She asked him things in the afternoon. Not all at once. She came at it the way she came at the statement, a line at a time, going back.

Where was he from? Port Talbot. What was that like? Loud, he said, and grey, and the best people in the world, and you could see the works from the beach. What did his father do?

“Steel,” he said. “Thirty-one years.”

“And you didn’t.”

“He wouldn’t let me. Said there’d be nothing there by the time I was forty.” Aled looked at the lane through the gap in the hedge. “He was nearly right.”

How long had he been a police officer? Twenty-one years. Joined at twenty-two. Protection for fourteen of them, nine in London and five here.

“London doing what?”

“Standing next to people.” He thought about how much of it he could say. “Ministers, some of the time. People visiting. You’d be in the back of a room while somebody made a speech, and afterwards nobody could tell you what you looked like.”

“That’s the job?”

“That’s the job done well.”

She considered that. She had a way of considering things with her whole face, the eyebrows first.

“And at the end of the day,” she said, “you go home to someone who can tell you what you look like.”

“I go home,” he said.

He had meant it to close the subject, and it did, and he saw her see that it had. She went back to the table and her crossword. He stood at the counter where he had drunk the tea and, for no reason he could have given the log, heard Siobhan say it again, in the hall of the old flat, with her coat on and her bag already in the car.

You’re very good at being in a room, Aled. You’re just never in it.

Four years. She had said it kindly. That had been the worst of it; that she had not needed to shout, because she had been right for so long that it was not even news.

· · ·Scene break

The officers’ phone went at ten past five, and it was her mother.

Pat Mayhew could not have the number of the cottage, and could not know where it was, and so she rang the unit, and the unit put her through to the phone in his pocket, and she said, in a Weston voice with no nonsense in it, “Is this the one for Esther?”

“It is, Mrs Mayhew.”

“Is she eating?”

“She had soup at one.”

“What sort?”

“Tomato. Tinned.”

“Well, that’s not eating,” said Pat Mayhew. “Tell her this. Seven letters. One who saw humour on the headland.” A pause. “Say it back.”

He said it back. He took the phone into the kitchen and held it out, and Esther took it and said, “Mum,” and then, almost at once, “Witness. Wit, and Ness. Mum, that’s not funny,” and then she laughed, and turned away from him to the window with her hand over her other ear, and he went into the hall and stood by the front door and did not listen.

He did the clue in his head while he stood there. It took him most of a minute. She had done it in the time it took to say it.

When she brought the phone back her eyes were bright and she was smiling in a way that had not quite finished being something else.

“I want to see her,” she said.

“I know.”

“She’s sixty-one. She’s on her own. She lives twenty minutes from where I grew up and she’s never been further from me than an hour’s drive, and she’s ringing a police switchboard to ask whether I’ve had soup.”

“Not this week,” he said.

She looked at him, and he knew what she was waiting for, because it was what he would have been waiting for. A decision, from a man she had known a day, about her mother.

“Your mother’s house is somewhere anyone could look,” he said. “It’s the first place anyone looks for a woman who’s gone. And this week’s when they’ll be looking hardest, because they’ve just lost you and they’ll want to know where to. If we take you to Weston now, we take you to the one address they’re sure of.” He stopped. “Not this week. It isn’t never. I’ll say when, and I’ll say why.”

She held the phone a moment longer and then put it in his hand.

“All right,” she said. “That’s a reason.”

“It is.”

“I’ll hold you to the next one.”

· · ·Scene break

Jas came on at quarter to eight. Rashid handed her the radio and the lane and went, and Aled stood in the kitchen with his coat on while Jas read down the day log he had written.

“No issues,” Jas read. She looked up. “That’s your whole day? ‘No issues’?”

“It was a good day.”

“Three times out of the kitchen,” said Esther, from the doorway. She was holding a mug of her own. “One tea, milk after, no sugar. He went round the house at eleven, at two, and at five past four, and he tries the back door twice every time and then once more from outside. He’s very regular. You could set a clock by him.”

Jas laughed. It was a real laugh, the first of her shift, and she looked at Aled over the log with her eyebrows up.

“She’s got you,” Jas said.

“Good night, Ms Mayhew,” he said.

“Good night, Aled.”

He drove home the long way, because the long way was the route, and it was not until he was on the motorway with the wipers going that he went back over what she had said and checked it.

Eleven. Two. Five past four. The back door twice, and once from outside.

It was right. All of it, to the minute. And he had been watching her all day, because that was what he was for, and not once had he seen her look at a clock.