Emily Barr - The Sleeper

The Catcher in the Rye was Laurie’s favourite book, and this was his favourite park. He liked it because it was small but rich: ‘distilled’, he used to call it.

Sometimes we would stand on the bridge and feed the ducks. He would never let me bring bread. ‘That is terrible for them,’ he would say. ‘Why the hell do people think that ducks want bread? What good is a diet of processed carbs going to be for creatures that live in water and eat waterweed? Why would you take something that lives off veg and live protein, and stuff it with sugar and salt and preservatives?’ He would pack a careful picnic for the ducks, containing pieces of bacon, and bags of nutrient-rich grains that he would pick up from a pet shop near his office. It was one of the reasons why I loved him so much.

Those were our happy times. We lived in west London and everything was perfect, and I could never have imagined us as we had been for the past few years, cowering away from the world, a shadow of a shadow of the way we had once been.

I walked along the pathways and across the grass, stomping around the park without much purpose. I liked the children, running about with rosy cheeks and excited anticipation of potential snowmen to come. I liked looking at the Whitehall people too, in their suits. They hurried along, still wearing their work auras over their expensive overcoats. They had brought a little bubble of politics to the park and they clearly felt the park should be grateful.

‘There you are,’ he said, and I looked up and there he was, tall and geeky, towering above me, smiling with a hint of nerves.

‘Here I am,’ I agreed, taking a step away from him. Although I was here to meet him, I had somehow not expected him.

Neither of us said anything. It was still freezing. It was still not snowing.

‘You made it then,’ I said eventually, and started walking. He walked with me. He was looking more casual than I had ever seen him before: an off-duty policeman, it turned out, looked nothing like you would imagine. If I hadn’t known Alex was a detective constable, I would have thought he was something far less straight. He was wearing jeans and a bright red jumper with a pattern on it, like someone’s Christmas jumper but somehow just stylish enough. His coat was a downy mountaineering-style one that I would never have chosen for anyone, but that I instantly envied for its obvious warmth.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That journey gets longer, I swear. But it was fine.’

‘I like your boots,’ I told him. ‘They’re like cowboy boots, aren’t they? Like rock-star boots.’

That pleased him. ‘I got them in a charity shop,’ he admitted. ‘I wasn’t sure they were me, but I bought them anyway, and it turns out they’re the most comfortable piece of footwear that has ever been crafted by human hands, so that was lucky.’

‘That is lucky,’ I agree. ‘Shall we go somewhere warm?’

‘I’m starving. Did you collect your passport?’

I started to undo my bag so I could show it to him, but my fingers wouldn’t work the catch properly, so I just said yes.

As we reached Trafalgar Square and started to head past the lions, tiny snowflakes began to fall.

‘So,’ he said, leaning back in his chair. ‘Here’s what I’ve found out, and they are getting pretty pissed off with my meddling, I can tell you. This did come up in the investigation when Mrs Finch initially went missing.’

‘Lara,’ I told him, eating a piece of cucumber.

‘Yes. Lara. Sorry. I forget I’m off duty. I’ve always tried not to think about cases when I’m on holiday. I normally spend my holidays walking on the beach and not reading the paper. Anyway. Lara. About twelve years ago, she charged into a police station, very upset, and confessed to something completely outlandish.’

He took a chip off his plate. We were in an upmarket burger restaurant on the Charing Cross Road, and I was appreciating how very much better you can eat when you’re with someone. Sitting in a restaurant by yourself could be all right, I thought, if you had a book and were in the right mood. However, there was nothing to beat company.

I was chilled to realise that I had not had a friend, apart from Lara, for five years. That was bizarre. Something inside me was waking up, happy. It was pushing aside the things I needed to address, and enjoying the moment.

‘What was it?’

‘Right. Now, this is a really weird one. She turned up on her own, in a state of considerable distress, and announced that she had been smuggling drugs in Asia for a period of some months and that it was her fault some woman was in prison. No one quite knew what to do with her, as you can imagine. Anyway, nothing came of it. She ran out of the building, and went back the next day with a guy, her father, in tow and retracted it all. He explained that she was under lots of stress and didn’t know what she was saying, and that she’d made it all up. But in between those two things happening, someone had vaguely looked into it, and discovered that she’d confessed the same thing in Singapore and had been treated as a time-waster and put on the next flight home with instructions not to come back.’

‘She said she was a drug smuggler?’ I frowned and sipped my wine. ‘Lara?’

‘I know. No one believed her. The question is, though, why did she say it? Was she protecting someone? Trying to flag something up? We don’t have any details from Singapore, but I’ve asked for them.’

‘And all this already came up? And you guys ignored it?’

He widened his eyes. ‘Penzance ignored it. It’s not my case. The trouble is, her affair with Guy Thomas overshadowed everything. There was no need to go into her deep past, when her more recent past – her present, really – seemed to offer all the answers.’

‘Yeah. I can see.’

‘Much as I’m not at work, if you’re trying to figure it out, which you are, I’ll help.’

I smiled at him and lifted my veggie burger. ‘Thank you.’

We wandered through a tiny snow shower to the National Gallery, and I took him to my favourite painting, Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne .

‘It’s the blue,’ I said. ‘I used to come and stand in front of it, any time I needed calming down. And I like it that she’s been abandoned by the person she thought was the great love of her life, and along comes Bacchus and not only offers to marry her, but also to give her some stars as a wedding present. Actually, I’m surprised I’ve been in London for this long without coming to say hello to it.’

In fact, I wasn’t surprised. I had been trying to keep away from my old haunts, until today.

‘I can see it would do the job,’ Alex agreed. ‘Did she take him up on the offer, out of interest?’

‘I think so.’ I was sure she had, in fact, but for some reason I did not want to tell Alex that.

He nodded. ‘You know what used to do it for me?’

‘Tell me.’

‘Just wandering around a gallery, like this one, looking at all the Madonna-and-Child pictures. Often the babies look so weird that they make you laugh. They have little-old-men faces and strange creased necks. You can see the artist has tried to make him look more serious than a real baby. What with him being the son of God and all that. And it’s an incredibly hard thing to pull off.’

I was staring at him. ‘I used to do that too. Most of the babies look as if they’re from horror films. And occasionally you’ll come across one that is just so gorgeous and tender, it makes you forget about all the others.’

‘Yes! Those are surprisingly rare, though.’

‘Do you like the Leonardo cartoon they’ve got here? The one with St Anne and John the Baptist?’

He laughed. ‘I hardly think I’m in a position not to like something by da Vinci. Shall we go and look at it? I love it, actually. It’s one of my favourite babies.’ He looked at me with a smile. ‘Are you going to say the thing about it not being very funny for a cartoon, or am I?’