Elizabeth thanked him and said that sounded about right, and Bernard returned to his crossword. I looked up centimetres and inches afterwards, and at least I was right about that.
Elizabeth went back to her question. How long would the girl stabbed with the kitchen knife have to live? I guessed that, unattended, she would probably die in around forty-five minutes.
‘Well, quite, Joyce,’ she said, and then had another question. What if the girl had had medical assistance? Not a doctor, but someone who could patch up a wound. Someone who’d been in the army, perhaps. Someone like that.
I have seen a lot of stab wounds in my time. My job wasn’t all sprained ankles. So I said then, well, she wouldn’t die at all. Which she wouldn’t. It wouldn’t have been fun for her, but it would have been easy to patch up.
Elizabeth was nodding away, and said that was precisely what she had told Ibrahim, although I didn’t know Ibrahim at that time. As I say, this was a couple of months ago.
It hadn’t seemed at all right to Elizabeth, and her view was that the boyfriend had killed her. I know this is still often the case. You read about it.
I think before I moved in I might have found this whole conversation unusual, but it is pretty par for the course once you get to know everyone here. Last week I met the man who invented Mint Choc Chip ice cream, or so he tells it. I don’t really have any way of checking.
I was glad to have helped Elizabeth in my small way, so decided I might ask a favour. I asked if there was any way I could take a look at the picture of the corpse. Just out of professional interest.
Elizabeth beamed, the way people around here beam when you ask to look at pictures of their grandchildren graduating. She slipped an A4 photocopy out of her folder, laid it, face down, in front of me and told me to keep it, as they all had copies.
I told her that was very kind of her, and she said not at all, but she wondered if she could ask me one final question.
‘Of course,’ I said.
Then she said, ‘Are you ever free on Thursdays?’
And, that, believe it or not, was the first I had heard of Thursdays.
PC Donna De Freitas would like to have a gun. She would like to be chasing serial killers into abandoned warehouses, grimly getting the job done, despite a fresh bullet wound in her shoulder. Perhaps developing a taste for whisky and having an affair with her partner.
But for now, twenty-six years old, and sitting down for lunch at 11.45 in the morning, with four pensioners she has only just met, Donna understands that she will have to work her way up to all that. And besides, she has to admit that the last hour or so has been rather fun.
Donna has given her talk ‘Practical Tips for Home Security’ many times. And today there was the usual audience of older people, blankets across knees, free biscuits, and a few happy snoozers at the back. She gives the same advice each time. The absolute, paramount importance of installing window locks, checking ID cards and never giving out personal information to cold callers. More than anything, she is supposed to be a reassuring presence in a terrifying world. Donna understands that, and it also gets her out of both the station and paperwork, so she volunteers. Fairhaven Police Station is sleepier than Donna is used to.
Today, however, she had found herself at Coopers Chase Retirement Village. It seemed innocuous enough. Lush, untroubled, sedate, and on her drive in she had spotted a nice pub for lunch on the way home. So getting serial killers in headlocks on speedboats would have to wait.
‘Security,’ Donna had begun, though she was really thinking about whether she should get a tattoo. A dolphin on her lower back? Or would that be too much of a cliché? And would it be painful? Probably, but she was supposed to be a police officer, wasn’t she? ‘What do we mean when we say the word “security”? Well, I think that word means different things to different …’
A hand shot up in the front row. Which was not normally how this went, but in for a penny. An immaculately dressed woman in her eighties had a point to make.
‘Dear, I think we’re all hoping this won’t be a talk about window locks.’ The woman looked around her, picking up murmured support.
A gentleman hemmed in by a walking frame in the second row was next. ‘And no ID cards please, we know about ID cards. Are you really from the Gas Board, or are you a burglar? We’ve got it, I promise.’
A free-for-all had commenced.
‘It’s not the Gas Board any more. It’s Centrica,’ said a man in a very good three-piece suit.
The man sitting next to him, wearing shorts, flip-flops and a West Ham United shirt, took this opportunity to stand up and stab a finger in no particular direction, ‘It’s thanks to Thatcher that, Ibrahim. We used to own it.’
‘Oh do sit down, Ron,’ the smartly dressed woman had said. Then looked at Donna and added, ‘Sorry about Ron,’ with a slow shake of her head. The comments had continued to fly.
‘And what criminal wouldn’t be able to forge an ID document?’
