‘Did you have a nice Christmas?’ she asks.
I wonder what a nice Christmas means to Dr Allen. A houseful of emotionally balanced relatives, effortlessly adapting to the radical shifts in daily routine with humour and good grace? Friends happily discussing their feelings between courses, sipping moderate and responsible amounts of alcohol and only eating until they’re satisfactorily full?
I attempt a smile. ‘Not bad, thanks. You?’
Her nose wrinkles. ‘Oh, quiet,’ she says, softly. ‘Peaceful.’
Which sounds just peachy but could be her way of saying it was bitterly lonely and crushingly dull. We all have our own stories to frame.
I’d had an OK Boxing Day, all things considered. An empty house. Curtains closed. Heating cranked up to Caribbean setting. Just me, chocolate and enough weed to guarantee a twenty-four-hour moratorium on dark feelings. I’d switched my phone off after Jacqui’s third call. Ignored the front door when it buzzed sometime in the late afternoon. Didn’t even peer out to see who it was. The only contact I’d attempted with the outside world all day was to try Saskia French’s phone again but got no joy there. A fairly joyless day all round, I suppose, but as Dr Allen said it was ‘quiet’. ‘Peaceful’.
‘You’re off somewhere?’ says Dr Allen, looking at my wheelie case. ‘A short break before the New Year?’
‘No, no, it’s work.’ I spot an escape hatch. ‘Actually, is it OK if we finish a bit early today, I’m cutting it fine for my flight as it is.’
‘Of course. What time’s a bit early?’
I push my luck. ‘In about ten minutes?’
She arches an eyebrow, writes something down quickly. It can’t be more than one word.
Liar?
Futile?
Stoned?
She puts the pad to one side, it wobbles precariously on the arm of the chair and I will it to fall off. A burst of activity to liven up the routine.
‘So’ – she looks at me hopefully – ‘things must be going well if you’re being sent off on international assignments.’
‘Yeah, or you could look at it another way. Steele’s sending me off on pointless day-trips to keep me out of the way.’
A tilt of the head. ‘Is it pointless?’
I shrug. ‘It’s background stuff. And when we’ve got a possible suspect coming into view – someone I identified – it just feels a bit lower-league, that’s all.’
She lifts her hands, palms forward. ‘Well, clearly I don’t know the ins and outs of the case but I think it means she trusts you to operate alone, and that’s a good thing.’
‘It means she trusts me to keep my passport up to date, that’s about all.’
‘Come on, is that really what you think?
My head’s still a bit woolly from the weed and I haven’t got the sharpness to fight. ‘No, probably not,’ I concede with a sigh. ‘Anyway, I’m only going to Ireland, is that classed as international?’
She smiles. ‘Your family’s Irish, aren’t they?’
‘My mum. She was from the west coast.’
‘A beautiful place, I hear.’ Eyes slanted. ‘You said she “was”.’
‘Yeah, she died a few years ago. Actually, it was five years ago. Is that still considered “a few years”?’ Feels like yesterday to me.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Cat. There’s never a good time to lose a parent, of course, but you were, what?’
‘Twenty-one. The year before I joined the Met.’
She shuffles in her chair, instantly piqued. ‘Are those two things connected?’
Oh, on so many levels that I can’t even go there. Craving a new family, a new sense of belonging when the only person I felt I ever belonged to had gone. Finally having the freedom to totally fuck with Dad’s head, now that I didn’t have to worry about Mum’s censure.
I opt for telling a part-truth. ‘There’s probably some connection, yeah. The world seems a scarier place when your mum’s not in it. I suppose by joining the police, I thought I could make it less scary.’
‘For you or for other people?’
Good question.
‘For both, I think.’
She nods, steeples her fingers. ‘What else do you get out of your job?’
Another decent question and far more preferable to our first half hour when every question centred around how I was feeling, how I was sleeping, how I did nothing wrong in that bedsit and so on and so on.
This time I go with a whole truth. ‘I get first-hand reassurance that the rules work.’
Dr Allen loves an abstract statement, delights in them like a kitten with a ball of wool. ‘Well that’s a very interesting way of putting it, Cat. What do you mean? What rules?’
‘I’ve just always had a bit of an obsession with fairness, I suppose. Take school, for example, if the wrong kid ended up getting blamed for something, it’d really upset me. Like, really. And God, if someone got a bigger slice of cake than me, there’d be blue murder – but then I always had to make sure that I didn’t have a bigger slice than anyone else either.’
‘Fairness.’ Dr Allen chews the word over. ‘So you’re talking about justice?’
I laugh. ‘Justice? That’s a bit of a lofty goal. I’ll settle for the basic rule that says bad people get punished.’
A glance of recognition, things clicking into place. ‘But the rules didn’t work for Alana-Jane and her mother though, did they? Her father’s still walking free. No one’s been punished for that. Is that why you find it so tough to deal with?’
‘He will be punished. One way or another.’ And I really do believe that. One look at my Dad’s face as he realised his ‘baby’ believed he could actually be a killer has given me new perspective on the word ‘punishment.’
The most devastating punishments aren’t always the legal ones.
Dr Allen leans forward. ‘What’s the difference between punishment and justice, Cat?’
This doesn’t take me long. ‘Punishment’s tangible. It’s something that’s actually meted out. Justice isn’t tangible, it’s just a feeling that things are as they should be.’
‘And is that important to you?’
‘Of course it is,’ I reply. ‘That’s like asking a bin-man if bins are important to him.’
A tiny thin-lipped smile. ‘Well yes, it’s just that some of the officers I see struggle with the idea of true justice. I’d go as far as to say they don’t think it exists.’
‘Well, I bloody hope it does, because if it doesn’t, we might as well all become bin-men. At least what they do is tangible, it’s something people actually need – the crap removed out of their lives.’ I ponder that for a second. ‘Although maybe that is part of what I do. And you,’ I add.
She seems to like this answer. ‘So do you think we have removed some crap together, Cat? How are you feeling?’
I check the clock. Time to go.