Paul Gitsham - The Last Straw

After she had split up with Owen her mother had wanted her to come back home and live with them again. It was a kind offer and in fact, unlike many of her friends, Karen had never had a problem living with her parents, having spent various stints off and on between university courses and jobs staying in her old bedroom. But those days were gone now and, besides, her parents lived well north of Cambridge, making the daily commute impractical. Moving police forces was not an option, she had told her parents emphatically. She was just starting to find her feet and equally importantly she had just been accepted onto the detectives’ course.

Nevertheless, she thought, as she hung up her coat in what the letting agency laughingly called the ‘hallway’, a bit of company in the evening would be nice. Not a boyfriend — not yet; the relationship with Owen was definitely over, but her heart still missed him — but a bit of companionship. Perhaps she should have gone for a shared apartment with a flatmate? No, she decided, she’d had her share of flatmates at university. A mixed bunch to say the least: two of them she remained in close contact with, a third she had deliberately rejected all ‘friend requests’ on Facebook from — in the same way that she had rejected all of his ‘more than friends requests’ when they shared a flat together.

Opening her tiny fridge, she remembered that she still had some leftover pasta sauce from the night before. Sniffing it reflexively — another habit she’d acquired in her university days, when the age and or provenance of anything in the communal fridge couldn’t always be guaranteed — she placed it into the microwave. She still had half a packet of fresh tortellini and so she filled the kettle. As she waited for the water to boil her mind wandered back to the case. Unlike DI Sutton and some others, she felt that DCI Jones might be right to be sceptical about the guilt of Severino. At the very least, she felt that something wasn’t quite right about the whole thing. Nevertheless, she had no intention of raising her head above the parapet just yet. She’d been in the office that afternoon when Jones had stormed in and hauled Tony Sutton out. Rumour had it that Sutton had gone behind Jones’ back to Superintendent Grayson to try and get Jones to leave the Severino charges alone. Karen wasn’t entirely sure why Sutton was so set against probing any deeper into the case, but she was the new kid and had no intention of taking sides and offending anybody this early in her career.

The kettle started dancing around and belching steam. Its automatic cut-off was a bit dodgy and so Karen flicked it off at the mains and poured the water into a small saucepan. Turning the electric hob on, she brought the water back to the boil, before pouring in the pasta and dripping what she estimated to be a teaspoon of olive oil over the top. At the same time, she started the microwave off. She could also use the timer on the microwave to time the pasta. “Jamie Oliver, eat your heart out,” she said out loud.

Opening the fridge again, she took out a packet of fresh, grated parmesan. As she did so she noticed the half-drunk bottle of rosé wine. Looking at it longingly, she eventually decided against it. Drinking alone, even a glass or so, was only one step away from owning a cat, she decided. She did not want to wake up on the morning of her thirtieth birthday single, with an empty bottle of wine beside her and a cat yowling at the door. That, frankly, was a stereotype too far. She settled instead for some of the sparkling grape juice that she had recently developed a taste for.

The ping of the microwave informed her that dinner was ready. Turning off the hob, Karen strained the pasta through a colander. As usual she noted, despite what it claimed on the packet, adding a teaspoon of olive oil to the pasta as it cooked had not stopped it from sticking together. Oh, well, she rationalised, it all goes down the same way, and with that she dumped it into a china bowl. Covering it with the reheated tomato sauce and a liberal sprinkling of parmesan cheese, she grabbed a spoon and her grape juice, put everything on a lap tray and walked the three paces to her sofa.

Flicking on the TV, Karen noted that she was still just inside the seven until nine p.m. ‘dead zone’, when the television offered up nothing more stimulating than endless, mind-numbing soap operas, crap game shows and insultingly contrived ‘reality shows’. With nothing worth watching being broadcast live, Karen flicked over to the catch-up TV service. There were usually a couple of good comedy panel shows that she always seemed to miss each week. To her delight an episode of Mock the Week was available. Selecting it, she settled back on the sofa, spooning up a large dollop of pasta shells and tomato sauce. The familiar error message informing her that her cable company was ‘experiencing a high level of demand’ from her area and to try back later almost made her throw her bowl at the TV.

Turning off the TV, she sat back, thinking dark thoughts about the large sums of money she was paying for this so-called service. After a few moments, however, her mind turned back to the case. Something about it didn’t feel right. There were loose ends to be tied up, for sure, but that wasn’t it. She had a feeling that there was something in front of her that didn’t add up. Something that they had accepted at face value without questioning. She mulled it over as she finished her pasta and drained her grape juice. The chilled drink was a welcome relief. The last few days had been intolerably hot and Karen’s apartment had direct sunlight. She kept her curtains closed during the day to minimise the heat from the sun. However, she had spent too long as a beat constable to feel comfortable leaving her windows open when she was out at work to circulate air through the apartment, even if she was on the top floor of a six-storey building.

However, now she was in, she had no such reservations, opening the big window to the evening air. The building was old and, unlike modern apartments with their double-glazed uPVC windows, this one had an old-fashioned sash window that could be opened all the way. Unfortunately, the evening air wasn’t much cooler than the air in her apartment. The complete lack of a breeze and the fact that she had no other windows meant that the stuffy air wouldn’t circulate. Karen resigned herself to another night of poor sleep. At least she had Karin Slaughter’s latest novel to keep her occupied. She’d picked it up from Tesco when she was doing her shop at the weekend. Now that she thought of it, she’d also seen a special offer on desk fans. Was it worth it? She knew that fans alone didn’t cool air — they just circulated the hot air — you needed an air conditioner for that. She fantasised briefly about the air-conditioning units that American hotels attached to guests’ windows. She’d experienced them firsthand when she had visited the US one summer. The temperature outside had been somewhere north of forty degrees Celsius, yet when she’d returned to her room she’d had to turn the unit off and put a sweater on to stop her teeth chattering. Sod her carbon footprint — she’d take the bus a bit more and turn down the thermostat in winter to compensate.

Suddenly it came to her in a flash of inspiration. She knew what didn’t feel right. The air conditioning. Even as she thought about it she felt yet another idea coming on. She paced around her room, all thoughts of her lousy cable TV signal or the stuffiness of her apartment vanishing. Taking a few deep breaths, she forced herself to calm down. She grabbed a piece of paper, and quickly scribbled down her thoughts, terrified that they would disappear if she didn’t record them.

Next she picked up her laptop. She hadn’t used it in over a week and it seemed to take an age to boot up. “No, I don’t want to install bloody updates for Java,” she yelled at the machine in frustration. Finally, Windows stopped loading all of the unnecessary programs and patches it felt it needed and let Karen access what she wanted.