She carted all of this home. She carried the bag of food along the path at one side of the conversion behind which she lived. She noted, as she always did, that the ground-floor flat attached to the yellow house showed no sign of life, but she told herself as she always did that circumstances made it unlikely that the flat would be occupied anytime soon. More likely, it would be offered for sale or to let.
Once inside her garden shed of a cottage, she plopped her dinner onto the small table that served many uses in the kitchen, which itself also served many uses, especially when it came to her smalls that twice a week got washed in the sink. She returned to the Mini and pulled out the flowers she’d been sent. She felt a perfect fool parading them along the path to the cottage, but she knew that out of sight was out of mind. Dorothea wasn’t about to stop wheedling for the name of the sender as long as the flowers were within her view, and Barbara’s colleagues would love to take the piss for a few more days with the flowers as good a prompt for their humour as any.
Then there was the fact of the card and the question of how to respond. When someone wrote We must meet again soon, was that person extending an invitation or merely being polite? When Barbara thought about that—an invitation or an act of courtesy—it seemed to her that the former was probably the case. They had not met in three weeks and that meeting—at the far extreme, she supposed one could call it a date—had gone well, full of conversation and not a few laughs.
But she would eat first, before taking this any further, wouldn’t she? Yes. She would.
She opened a bottle of Newcastle brown ale. Greek food and chips with ale to wash it down? Sounded perfect to her. She unpacked her food, delved for ketchup in the fridge, excavated for malt vinegar from a selection of what she liked to refer to as “rescue condiments” that she kept in a cupboard. Then she went at it. She had nothing to follow save a bag of boiled sweets. She’d bought them the previous Easter, thrown them in the freezer, and rewarded herself with two or three or ten of them on the nights she managed to have a healthy meal, healthy being a relative term, of course. This meal seemed to weigh in on the healthy side of the health-o-meter, so she allowed herself two. She unpeeled each from its cheerful foil wrapper and set it down in order to meditate upon the flowers.
Then she dug her mobile from her bag and spent two fags trying to come up with what she wanted to say. Finally, deciding that straightforward was always best, she found the number and tapped it.
The mobile rang four times with no one picking up. Then five times. She told herself she’d end the call at six—Why hadn’t it already gone to message? she wondered—when she heard his voice.
“Lo Bianco,” he said. “Pronto.” Then as if remembering where he was, “Sorry. Hello?”
“Salvatore?”
“Barbara! How nice! To me, it pleases . . . No. No. Ho torto. This is not correct. I am happy at your call.”
“How’s the English coming along?”
“I wish to have learned it when I had five years.”
“When you were five years old? That would’ve been nice, eh? Well, you’re doing better with English than I’d ever do with Italian, I can tell you that.”
“To speak it—Italian—is best to live it . . . best to live there. It goes similar for most languages, I’m thinking. Unless one is a genius for language, like my Marco. His mother has a television with many, many . . . canali is the word in Italian.”
“Channels?”
“Yes, yes. She has many channels; therefore Marco watches English. He likes the crime dramas.”
“That’ll give him an interesting vocabulary, eh?”
Lo Bianco laughed. “Also I should watch such programmes. Marco likes to teach English to me, what he learns from the programmes, this is. Dodgy. He likes this word. And ‘the nick.’ He tells to me, ‘Papa, when you return to the nick?’ I do not know what this means so he must explain. So now I can ask you. Barbara, how is all . . . no, not that. How is everything happening at this nick where you are?”
“We’re up to our ears. A cop was murdered.”
“I am sorry to know that. A friend of yours?”
“No, no. She worked for the Met but in a different part of town. We got the case because she’s a cop, though. The AC—the assistant commissioner, I mean—isn’t exactly chuffed when a copper is cracked on the head and ends up dead. So here we are.”
“We are where?”
“Sorry. Just an expression. It doesn’t mean anything, really.”