Charlie Zailer wasn’t sure if she’d won or lost. On the victory side of the equation, she’d managed to avoid spending Christmas Day with her sister, and she’d successfully blamed it on work. Her ‘Sorry, but I have to go in for at least a few hours’, delivered in a tone that suggested it was the fault of someone intransigent in a position of authority, had been accepted without question.
On the defeat side, here she was: at work, by choice, with a cold steak-and-potato pasty in her bag as a Christmas dinner substitute, struggling to communicate with a stranger who’d judged her to be not worth speaking to. Was it her karmic comeuppance for avoiding her so-called loved ones at Christmas? If Charles Dickens had written her day, that was what this encounter would turn out to mean.
The woman standing opposite Charlie in the too-warm interview room had refused to sit, and was still wearing her coat to prove a point, though her cheeks grew pinker by the minute. She repeated her refrain line: ‘There must be a detective in the building.’
Charlie tried once again to steer her away from her obsession with the physical location of the nearest DC. ‘First you’ll need to tell me what the problem is. Then, if it turns out that we need…’
‘It’s no offence to you,’ the woman interrupted. ‘I’m sure you’re great at your job, but this is something a PC wouldn’t know what to do with. Even a detective might not understand, but I think there’s a better chance. They must see and hear all kinds of… irregular things.’
She was in her mid-forties, Charlie guessed. Married: gold band on her wedding finger, topped by an engagement ring that looked like a battleship made of sapphires and diamonds. Perhaps illogically, the ring confirmed Charlie’s impression of the woman as someone who lacked a frivolous side.
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