Lucie Whitehouse - Critical Incidents

Seconds later, the outer porch door opened. Lennie ran to him, the bag bumping against her back. ‘Hello, sweetheart.’ He held her away to look at her. ‘You’ve grown again, haven’t you? Who said you could do that?’ He lowered his voice. ‘I’ve got some Creme Eggs in for you – we’ll have one after lunch.’

Lunch.

Lennie turned, eyes wide. Robin shook her head: Say nothing .

They could smell it now, the scent wafting through the open door: roast beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, gravy, carrots, sprouts, peas and god knows what else. Shit . Why hadn’t her mother said something? No – why hadn’t she known ? Of course she was going to cook the fatted calf. And that was why Luke and Natalie were here, wasn’t it? Luke wouldn’t drive five minutes to see her but he’d never miss a free lunch.

Over Natalie’s head, her dad winked. When the others had moved inside, he took her bags then pulled her into a hug, crushing her face into his sweater. His smell, it never changed: Ariel detergent, Camay soap and, faint but unmistakeable, the stealthy cigarettes that he disappeared off to smoke twice a day and still believed her mother knew nothing about. Her ribcage buckled as he gave her a final squeeze. ‘Good to have you back, love.’

‘I knew you’d be later than you said so I aimed for three o’clock and it’s a good job I did, isn’t it? Was there traffic?’ Christine slid the potatoes back into the oven, straightened up and retied the apron over her cream blouse and floral skirt. The pattern was yellow roses, not unlike the one on the oven gloves, the blinds and the covered stools. Robin felt like a biker crashing the Women’s Institute garden party.

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘Hello.’ Christine touched her cheek briefly to hers. ‘I’ll get the greens going now you’re here. So was there?’

‘What?’

‘Traffic.’

Robin glanced at Lennie. A couple of minutes ago, when she was bringing in her suitcase, Lennie had come racing out of the house to tell her there were starters – ‘ Cheese soufflé! ’ – and pudding, too. ‘What are we going to do ?’

‘Nothing. And not a word.’

‘But …’

‘We eat. Just do your best.’

The tea towels, Robin noticed, had the roses, too. ‘It was pretty busy,’ she said. ‘Especially round the Oxford turn.’ Before the epic Burger King, they’d had several goes at catching a stuffed pink alligator with a mechanical claw, and they’d lingered round the books in Smith’s so long they’d attracted the security guard.

‘It’s normally worse going into London, isn’t it?’ Christine said, sorting broccoli florets into portions. ‘How nice, to have Elena here.’ She turned and gave her a side-hug. ‘Now, the boys are having a beer, Robin, and there’s lemonade.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Natalie’s not drinking at the moment but don’t make a song and dance about it.’

‘Really? The thinnest woman in the West Midlands? Is she on another diet?’

‘Sssh. They’re trying again. Don’t say anything.’

‘Trying what?’ Lennie whispered.

‘To have a baby.’

‘Oh.’

‘Have you got a drink, Mum?’ Robin asked.

‘I’m going to have a spritzer once everything’s on the table. Would you like one?’

‘No, thanks, I’ll have one of these.’ She picked up a beer from the cluster on the end of the counter. ‘Purity? I haven’t seen this before.’

‘It’s local – the brewery’s out near Studley, I think. Your father likes it.’

Robin flipped off the cap and took a sip. ‘Yeah, I can see why. What?’

‘At least use a glass. And take that jacket off before we sit down, please. And those boots. You look like …’

She couldn’t help herself. ‘A dyke?’

Christine suppressed a shudder. ‘Like you’re going yomping across the Falklands.’

They managed the soufflés without major incident. As he’d pulled out her chair, her dad had murmured, ‘Don’t have a fight, will you? For your mother’s sake,’ and he’d done his best, steering the conversation towards such anodyne topics as the decking that Natalie and Luke were laying in their garden – or rather Natalie’s brother was relaying, Luke having botched it – and the restaurant in Moseley where they’d been for their anniversary, which now had a Michelin star, apparently.

‘A Michelin star in Birmingham – who’da thunk it?’ Robin said.

‘Actually,’ said Natalie, tight-lipped, ‘there’s five.’

The main course proved a bridge too far. The temperature in the room seemed to be rising, the oxygen level decreasing in inverse proportion. Robin had had the same piece of beef in her mouth for a minute but her stomach was drum-taut, painful when it met the table-edge. Glancing to her right, she saw Lennie – genius! – disappear a roast potato into a piece of kitchen roll on her lap. She pushed back her chair to go and get a piece for herself but Luke, obviously afraid of losing his sitting target, cut Dennis off mid-sentence.

‘So, Robin,’ he said, ‘Mum and Dad told me, obviously, but I’m still having problems getting my head around your … situation.’

‘Which part is troubling you?’

‘Well, for a start, how did you actually get fired? We thought, me and Nat, that you were some sort of golden girl down there, the great white hope of Scotland Yard.’ They looked at each other, struggling not to snicker.

‘Luke,’ warned Dennis.

‘What? I’m trying to understand.’

In another situation – any situation with no Lennie – she’d grab him by the collar and bounce his head off the wall. He’d done it to her enough times when his two-year advantage still counted. But then she’d turned eleven and knocked one of his front teeth out and that had been the end of it. The beatings, anyway.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘in layman’s terms, to help you get your head around it , my boss wanted to charge a bad man with a murder he didn’t commit just because he was bad and the public would be better off if he was inside, but I didn’t think it was right, so I said so and he – my boss – didn’t like it.’

‘And you got fired for that?’

‘Yes. They’re quite hot on insubordination in the police. I’m guessing it’s not such a big deal at Carphone Warehouse. Or is it T-Mobile these days?’

‘Robin.’ Dennis put a hand on her arm, calming or admonitory, she wasn’t sure.

‘But from what Mum told me,’ Luke said, ‘it wasn’t just that your boss didn’t like it. The guy – the bad man ,’ he made a face that Robin yearned to plunge her fist into, ‘has gone AWOL, hasn’t he? So he’s out there somewhere, a known killer, because of you.’

‘He didn’t do it.’

‘But you don’t know that.’

‘I didn’t have evidence to prove it – I needed more time – but I’m pretty sure.’

‘And that’s enough, is it? The great Robin Lyons says so? “Oh, I’m pretty sure he didn’t do it, let him go – oh look, he’s killed someone else, that’s a shame.”’

‘ Beyond reasonable doubt – heard of that? You can’t just lock people up because you think they’re bad apples.’

‘I don’t know why not,’ said Christine. ‘That always seems like a good idea to me. Put them away before they can do the damage.’

Robin gave herself credit for not rising. Even a couple of years ago, she wouldn’t have been able to let that pass.

‘But, sorry,’ Natalie took a prim sip of her water, ‘if you really were highly thought of’ – Princess Di eyes over the rim of the glass – ‘would one thing like that be enough to get you fired?’