50
Getting along with her mother, when he sent her hormones aflutter, was one thing, but somehow McKenzie brought Terence on board, too. Roisin began to think of Matt as a sorcerer.
Such a stark irony, to be shunned by his own family and so effortlessly beloved by other people’s.
Ostensibly, there was nothing about Matt that would be appealing to Terence. He was inherently suspicious of those who resided in the metropolis, tossing about with their e-scooters and braised chicory.
Yet through a winning combination of Matt seeking Terence’s advice, chatting to him easily on topics of Terence interest, and a willingness to roll his sleeves up and clean up a dramatic spill from the exploding keg of guest ale, Terence was won round.
Enough to say to Roisin, ‘How long’s the pretty boy staying?’ and when she said, ‘Oh, only a few weeks,’ he nodded contemplatively and said, ‘Certainly a vast improvement on Ring Tone Brandon.’
Roisin knew better than to ask who Ring Tone Brandon was.
Watching Matt seduce everybody in his path made the rift with his own family all the stranger. That had played on Roisin’s mind a lot since he’d told her. She thought about why his cousin might’ve sought Matt out to tell him. Whether she’d wanted him to report it, then recanted. Given he was older than his cousin, and the opposite sex, it seemed quite a tribute to him, to have chosen Matt to confide in. Roisin asked herself what she would’ve done.
She thought about how he had concealed it, and those strange Christmases; what the dismissal from Benbarrow Hall must have felt like as a result.
She thought about how he didn’t date anyone he might end up liking, because he didn’t like himself.
I think he can’t be with Gina because it’d have to mean something, and he can’t risk that.
Mid-week, Matt announced he had to head back to ‘the Big Apple’ – Manchester, for Webberley parochials – for a few days.
‘My former employer wants to talk to me. No idea what’s going on – maybe they want the gardening leave cash back. I’ll hear them out at least, I guess, and the plants in my flat need watering,’ Matt said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back in good time for the fête.’
Roisin suspected Matt might also have man-about-town dating business to attend to, but didn’t pry. It wasn’t as if there was much else to do on the evenings in Webberley other than scroll the apps. Who knew which movie stars were lurking behind false monikers on Hinge.
Lorraine had finally found a couple of bar staff to trial: a forty-year-old woman called Amy and a twenty-year-old lad called, somewhat surprisingly, Ernest. (‘Must be coming back in,’ Lorraine said.) Roisin agreed to make herself scarce rather than have them fighting for the soda gun with the landlady’s daughter. She still didn’t want to face the flat.
Therefore, early on Thursday evening, Roisin was rather ashamed to say, out of pure loose-endyness more than anything else, she decided to confront the final two episodes of Hunter.
Watching it on an iPad, headphones in, was a far lower-stakes experience than the Benbarrow screening room. Her mum’s iPlayer history showed she’d still not watched the first episode: thank God.
It faded in with The Stone Roses’ ‘Fools Gold’ and a sleeping Jasper Hunter. In the darkened bedroom, his girlfriend, Becca, waves his iPhone handset in front of Jasper Hunter’s sleeping face and with Face ID, it ripples open.
His eyelids flicker as she scrolls and, as quietly as possible, replaces the phone in the charger on the nightstand.
Cut to Jasper rubbing his face of suds in the shower.
‘I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong,’ Jasper says to camera. ‘I collect evidence, I don’t create it myself. There’s nothing on my phone, because only idiots get caught like that.’
There was procedural investigation, quips from Shaun Ryder, the murder of a nightclub hostess in Ancoats, and more frenzied rumping in Jasper’s car, bare buttocks pressed against the glass. Roisin realised the greatest threat was to her attention span, not her nerves. She paused it to check how long it had left for episode two. Twelve minutes. Alright: she’d get through that and then go have a beer.
She was zoning out when Jasper was stood in the briefing room, discussing the dead waitress he’d had sex with in a toilet stall, while pointing at a whiteboard.
Another detective flopped open a notebook and read aloud: ‘Hard to track down anything about her, something of a mystery and had no records. She’s Croatian, from Split. Tangled love life. She was seeing a married man in the military police. We don’t have a name for him …’
Roisin raised both hands as if she was a passenger in a crashing car, leaping off the sofa as if it was aflame. She’d always thought that ‘jumped out of my seat’ was a figure of speech.
She hit pause on the chatter on the iPad, hands trembling. Roisin replayed the words in her head. She dragged the arrow at the bottom of the monitor backwards and let the scene play again.
Hard to track down anything about her. She’s Croatian, from Split. Tangled love life. She was seeing a married man in the military police. We don’t have a name for him …
Roisin’s teeth were chattering as if she’d walked into a meat locker. That was her – that was the waitress from Sesso, the night Joe said didn’t matter, and nothing happened?
Roisin added up the points in her head: Croatia. (That was enough on its own, really. What were the odds on that coincidence?) The affair with a military policeman. Her lack of digital footprint. Oh, and her appearance, which Roisin thought must in fact be significant.
Here it was. The proof. Joe had sex with this girl? No, surely not? But how else was the Sesso waitress so clearly the inspiration for this character, someone he supposedly didn’t know?
She messaged Joe.
When are you back today?
Just now! I was going to ask if you were free for dinner.
On my way
Roisin made a garbled explanation to her preoccupied mother and jumped into her car, scrunching gravel as she departed Webberley like a bat out of hell, a bat who nevertheless didn’t want a speeding fine. Her thoughts were in a tumble throughout a journey that hit rush hour and dragged.
She was going to reveal she’d checked up on Joe, and yet it would surely pale into insignificance compared to what she was about to expose.
Her mind ran on and on with possibilities: was it a one-off, or was this something he did habitually? The thought of it, the thought that she had been sharing her bed with someone she didn’t know …
Joe opened the door as she stood outside, keys poised. He looked dressed to go out, in a Fred Perry polo shirt.
‘Hi, I reserved …’
‘Hi.’ Roisin stepped past him, to encourage him to shut the door again, which he did. ‘I’ve got a question about episode two of Hunter.’
‘Er. OK?’
‘Can you explain to me how a waitress, Petra, who worked at Sesso, two years ago – and so was there when we went for Gina’s birthday – was Croatian and had a secret married lover in the military police? And a character in your show, who looked like her, had the exact same biography?’ She drew breath. ‘Art mirroring life, to an uncanny degree?’
Joe looked at Roisin, eyes narrowed, apparently neither at ease nor startled. ‘How do you know all this?’ he said.
His voice was steady and calm. He was unruffled and composed. He was either a borderline psychopath or … he was innocent? Roisin didn’t see how he could be.
‘Let’s work out how this coincidence happened, first?’ she said, fronting considerably more bolshiness than she felt. ‘You got home later than me that night, having left your scarf behind, collected it, and walked home. You showered when you got in, which was unusual. You obviously knew this girl. I’d like to hear the super-articulate explanation. Or am I being “ridiculous” again?’
‘Oof, OK. I’m starting to go mad, I think …’
‘YOU’RE starting to go mad? YOU?’