Lynda La Plante - A Face in the Crowd

“Last night’s dinner-one of those frozen chili con carne things.”

“What have you got for tonight?”

Snapping her fingers impatiently, waiting for the connection to be made, she glanced over at him. “One of those frozen chili con carne things… DCI Tennison,” she said into the phone.

Oswalde draped his raincoat over the back of the sofa, picked up the disgusting plate between outstretched fingertips, and wandered off with it. Tennison was momentarily distracted.

“Where d’you think you’re going?” Then she was nodding, talking fast. “Right. Did she leave a number? A pay phone?” She scribbled it down. “Okay… right… thanks.” She hung up and started to redial. Oswalde had disappeared. “It’s not the hospital,” she called out to him. “It’s an informer of mine trying to get through to me.”

“Right…” Oswalde’s voice floated in from the kitchen.

“What are you up to?” she wondered aloud. “Rachel? It’s me, Jane Tennison, darling. What’ve you got for me, darling?”

When she came through into the kitchen there was water on the boil, a package of pasta waiting to go in. Bob Oswalde had raided her meager shelves and come up with canned tomatoes, a can of tuna, one onion, and a few dried herbs, the last in the jar. He’d found a clean pan and had made a start on the sauce. Shirtsleeves rolled up, he was standing at the countertop, expertly chopping garlic and crushing it into a saucer.

Tennison leaned in the doorway, watching him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Oswalde wiped his hands and opened the refrigerator door. He rooted inside and picked something up. “What’s this?” he asked, holding up what appeared to be a moldy brown tennis ball.

“It’s lettuce,” Tennison said. “Well, it was once.”

Oswalde chucked it in the trash, tut-tutting. “You need to eat some decent food. What was the call about? Anything interesting?”

“No, not really,” she said, deciding to humor him, and besides, the smell was making her ravenous. “Apparently it seems the girl that was at Number fifteen sacked it in afterward and went legit. No one seems to know where she is now, but they’re all sure she’s not on the game.”

“Right,” Oswalde said, busy now forking tuna into a bowl. “I took a look at Tony’s school record. Everything was fine until 1986. When Tony came back from the summer vacation, he was a different person.” He glanced around at her, eyebrows raised. “Educational psychologist’s report talks of depression, anxiety attacks, low self-esteem.”

Tennison studied him for a moment, lips pursed. “What is it with you?”

“What?” Oswalde said, blinking.

“What are you trying to prove?”

He emptied the tomatoes and stirred them in with a wooden spoon. “Do you have any tomato puree?”

“No.”

“How can I work in these conditions?” he complained to the cupboard door, his brow furrowed.

“It’s as if you’re taking some kind of test all the time…”

“You should know,” he retorted, and that made her stand up straight. “I watched you on the course. You know they’re all lined up, wanting to see you fall flat on your face. Thorndike, all the Senior Shits. You always want to be the best, come out on top.”

This was straight from the shoulder, and Tennison wasn’t sure she liked it. She certainly wasn’t used to be spoken to so directly, least of all by a subordinate.

“I’m the same as you,” Oswalde went on imperturbably. He tasted the sauce, added black pepper. “Which is why-when I calmed down and thought about it-I understood why you’d been treating me like the office boy.”

He was one cool customer, had it all down.

“And why you’ve gone off and done a number on your own?” Tennison accused him sharply. He had the gall to laugh-a confident, unforced laugh at that. “I mean it, Bob. You are a member of a team,” she reminded him.

“Am I?” Oswalde said, instantly serious, his stern dark eyes coming around to meet hers.

“Well,” Tennison said, wishing to high heaven he wasn’t such a big, broad-shouldered, handsome bastard. “From now on you are.”

“Okay,” Oswalde said, back to his cheery self. He tipped the pasta into the boiling water and ladled the tuna into the sauce. “I don’t suppose you’ve got anything to drink?”

That she had, and she went off to open a bottle of Bulgarian red.

Tennison was confused, and annoyed with herself for letting him get the upper hand. Was Bob Oswalde taking liberties or just trying to be friendly? She knew she was paying the penalty for that one hour of passion in the hotel room. The demarcation lines had been blurred; no other officer under her command would have waltzed into her flat and made himself at home by cooking dinner, without so much as a by-your-leave. Damn Kernan for drafting him onto her team! It was all his bloody fault! But she was as angry with herself for getting herself into this pickle in the first place. Being ruled by her libido instead of her brain. Cunthead.

They ate off the coffee table in the living room. Tasting freshly prepared food and drinking three glasses of wine worked a minor miracle. It took the sting out of her anger and made her almost mellow. It even crossed her mind to wonder what might happen later, and instantly slammed the door shut on that speculation. Hadn’t she made enough of a fool of herself already, for Chrissakes?

They didn’t talk about work until the end of the meal, when Oswalde again brought up the subject of Tony Allen. He seemed to have almost a personal vendetta against the boy. Tennison was wary, not wanting to rush their fences. Oswalde couldn’t see why. The fact that he’d known Joanne Fagunwa was sufficient in itself to have him picked up.

Tennison drained her glass and set it down. “Not yet.”

“The boy was involved in that murder,” Oswalde insisted. “I’m sure of it…”

“We have no evidence of that.”

“You didn’t see his response to the clay head,” Oswalde told her bluntly.

“All we know is that he was on the same bandstand as Joanne-”

“So he’s been lying.”

“-and we’ll question him about that at the right time.”

“What does that mean?” asked Oswalde rudely, his face becoming stiff and surly. He detested all this fooling around. Get in there and get it done with.

“It means not yet.” Tennison’s voice was firm. Three glasses of wine didn’t make her a pushover. She held up a finger. “I can crack Harvey. He holds the key-except the bastard might croak on us any minute. I’ll talk to Tony when we’ve got more on him.”

“More?” Oswalde was both pained and puzzled. “I thought you’d really go for this.”

“Look, Bob, I don’t want to argue about it.” In other words, the Chief Inspector was saying, subject closed.

Oswalde got the message, or thought he did. He stared across at Jane Tennison, a muscle twitching in his cheek. “But the real point,” he said stonily, “is that I shouldn’t have come here, should I?”

“No, you shouldn’t have-we said that in the hotel room. But that’s not the point, actually. Look, all I’m trying to say is…”

“Don’t bother.”

Ten seconds later he was gone, raincoat over his shoulder, door slammed. Tennison piled the dirty dishes in the sink and went to bed.

The Incident Room was quiet when she arrived the next morning, shortly after eight twenty. She went to her office to catch up on some paperwork before the rush started.

WPC Havers eventually turned up, looking a bit worse for wear, and Tennison sent her off to the cafeteria to get a coffee and bring one back for her. She was sipping this and fighting the desperate urge for a cigarette when word came from the hospital. Tennison slurped the rest of her coffee, spilt some on her best chiffon blouse, and made the air blue and Maureen Havers’s ears turn red as she grabbed her coat from the coatrack and hurried out.