Hilary Bonner - When the Dead Cry Out

“Yes, you fucking well would, and you know it. You also know that the reason you keep blowing me out all the time and doing your best to make my life a fucking misery has nothing whatsoever to do with this case.”

“Do I?”

“Will you stop being such a fucking smart-ass?” he almost screamed at her. “Of course you fucking do. And so does half the bloody nick by now, I shouldn’t wonder, with the way their minds work and the way you’ve been fucking well behaving.”

He sat down abruptly. Again without being asked.

Karen was taken aback. Cooper was a mild-mannered man. His language was usually nothing like as colourful as hers. She had rarely even heard him swear before. As ever, though, she did not intend to let her true feelings show.

“Have you been drinking?” she asked, realizing as she did so that she was continuing to handle this every bit as badly as she had done ever since the night she and Cooper had gone to bed together.

Cooper looked up at her, the anger still flashing.

“No, I fucking well haven’t,” he stormed. “I’ve just driven back from London, for Christ’s sake. Do you think I’m barking mad? We don’t all have to be pissed out of our fucking minds in order to show a hint of genuine emotion, you know.”

To her astonishment she saw that there were tears in his eyes. She sat down opposite him. Something about the rawness of him made her want to be honest for once. To tell the truth rather than to cover it up with that act she had so perfected.

“I’m sorry,” she said, running her hands through her hair, trying to make sense of it all. “You’re right, of course. I didn’t know how to handle what happened between us, and how you were with me afterwards. I guess...”

She hesitated. What she was about to admit was quite monumental for her.

“I guess I was hurt.”

His eyes opened wide.

“You were hurt?” he queried.

She managed a wry smile. “Don’t sound so surprised. Women don’t particularly like being fucked stupid and then ignored. Not even policewomen. It doesn’t make us feel very good.”

“Is that what you thought?”

“Yes. Except it isn’t ‘what I thought.’ It’s how it was.”

He shook his head vigorously. “No, no, honestly no, I just didn’t know how to deal with it, either,” he stumbled. “It wasn’t that way. It really wasn’t. And I intended to explain, eventually, I really did. But when you kept turning on me, when you kept bawling me out in front of everybody, well, I just thought you didn’t want to know. Honestly I did.”

He paused. She said nothing. She didn’t know what to say.

“So I decided tonight, that I’d had enough. That I couldn’t take it anymore. That I was going to tell you...”

His voice trailed off. She was curious.

“Tell me what?” she prompted.

He didn’t respond for a while. She stared at him, genuinely puzzled. Her first thought was that he was going to tell her that he’d applied for a transfer or something similar — that he no longer wanted to work with her or be with her in any way. And she realized that she wouldn’t like that at all. Even baiting him the way that she knew she had over the last three months had given her a certain twisted satisfaction, had scratched the itch that was inside her. She didn’t like the idea of losing him for good, even though he had never been hers. Except for one brief night. And only part of a night at that.

She felt the tears welling. This would never do. As ever she fought to show nothing, to keep her expression blank. Her mind was still intent on exerting control — over her tear glands as well as her body language — when he spoke again.

“To tell you, to tell you... that I’m in love with you,” he said.

Karen was dumbfounded. She had not expected this. In fact, it was the last thing she had expected. She was not a woman with a high opinion of herself when it came to men and their feelings for her, or the effect that she had on them. Indeed, she was not a woman with a high opinion of herself in any area. Even when it came to the career in which she had been extremely successful, Karen did not consider herself a success. She was always plagued with doubts. Her whole persona, the way she was when she went out in the world, was so much based on pretending. It really had not occurred to her, given his behaviour towards her following their one-night stand, that Cooper cared about her one jot, except maybe as a senior officer who could affect his future prospects in the job.

She stared at him in amazement.

“I thought it was you who didn’t want to know,” she stumbled. “I thought I was just a quick lay, and that you regretted it the next day. That’s how you behaved, or that’s how it seemed to me, anyway. Indeed, that’s how you’ve been behaving ever since.”

He shook his head. She thought he looked a bit like an overgrown puppy dog that knew it had misbehaved badly and was craving affection, wanting to be stroked and made a fuss of.

“I knew I was in love with you the moment I touched you,” he said. “I guess I was in love with you before, actually, but I didn’t realize it. The night I kissed you after that Indian meal, for a moment I thought you were going to ask me in then. I wanted you to so much. But I just didn’t dare do anything about it. And then when you did, well, it was beyond anything I could have expected, beyond anything I’d ever known.”

He began to cry then. To weep unashamed tears. His shoulders shook. Big sobs racked his body.

“I really am in love with you,” he muttered through the tears.

She got up from her seat, went across and sat next to him. She wrapped her arms around him, this big strong man. He buried his head in her shoulder and just carried on weeping.

It was several minutes before he stopped. She did not try to say anything. Instead she just held him very tightly, her whole body encouraging him to let his feelings out. He certainly seemed better at doing so than she was, she thought. And she warmed to him even more because of it.

Eventually he pulled away from her, wiping his face with both hands. His eyes were red and swollen and full of anguish. She didn’t think she had ever witnessed such an instinctive outpouring of raw emotion.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No,” she responded gently. “I’m very very flattered.”

He pulled even further away, the pain in him all the more apparent.

“Is that all? Just flattered? What about you? What do you feel?”

“I–I don’t know,” she said. She thought that she did know well enough. In fact, she knew that she did. But old habits die hard. It was not in Karen’s nature readily to open her heart.

“You don’t know?” He sounded quite distraught.

“You’ve given me a shock, Phil,” she went on, trying to be lucid, to be logical, to cool the situation a little. “I mean, you’re a copper. And a married one. I actually know nothing about your personal life. I don’t know if you’re happy, I know nothing about your marriage or your family. I am well aware, though, how so many of the blokes in the job are. I’m privy to locker-room gossip. I’m another cop. I know how they talk about women, particularly the married ones. How they talk about their wives. How they talk about other women who are stupid enough to let them into their beds. Most of them have no intention of rocking their marital boat, that’s for certain. They just like a bit of variety. And they’re quite inclined to boast about it. They’re into one-night stands, because that way they don’t get any extra problems. I thought that’s what I was to you. Just a one-night stand. I thought you made that perfectly clear. I thought maybe that was how you lived your life. That you liked to play away from home occasionally but that was all. And that in the cold light of dawn you backed away — particularly from me, a woman you worked with, a woman who is a senior officer.”