Free The Light of Day: A Novel by Graham Swift

Wimbledon Common next to Putney Vale. He’s smiling at the thought now, at
my
thought, he’s reading my thoughts. Yes, just over there, like mad things. In the woods, in spring. Don’t give me flowers.
    I’m standing in a cemetery thinking of two people fucking. You have to picture the scene. Even when they had that flat in Fulham. Because of the mad thrill of it. Even that last autumn, after the picture had changed—after the Croats had won. A last walk in the woods.
    They shuffle through last year’s leaves. September: this year’s leaves still form a screen. He brushes bits of leaf, twig, bark from her back. A sort of ritual by now. She’s wearing that old outdoor jacket. It’s his. They’re still wet and bruised with each other. And she’s already aware how this may be a memory soon. An English wood. Bracken and brambles and silver birch. There was a reason once why she came to this country. But she’s still a student of English words—and he’s her teacher now.
    She scuffs at something at her feet and stoops and looks. The hair parts from her neck. She knows the word “mushroom” but she’s forgotten, if she ever learnt it, the other word. “Toadstool,” he says, and they both have to think about it while he explains a bit more.
    “Toadstool.” The mystery of words. Toadstool. Fox-glove . . .
    But which ones are these? The safe ones or the poison ones? He’s not sure, he doesn’t know. And she pretends to pick some up and cram them into her mouth. Then steps back, clutching her stomach, rolling her eyes—pretends to be sick. A joke: she laughs, but sees the look in his face and stops. He thinks (maybe she reads his thought, maybe she has the same thought at exactly the same time): suppose she got pregnant. What then, what then?

16
    Marsh said, “What was it to you?”
    But maybe he had the scent already in his nostrils too. Maybe I was giving it off in clouds, along with (I could see the phrase in his report) my “evident state of distress.”
    “. . . witness in evident state of distress . . .”
    An interview room. The smell of stale smoke. From down the corridor the muffled ring of a phone. How strange to be there, to be back.
    “It looks pretty odd, you see. Our officers are barely on the scene and then a third party, a member of the public, turns up, in an agitated state, demanding to be let through. And, what’s more, saying he has a right because he’s really one of us. Meaning, as it turns out:
was,
once.”
    A quick flinty stare.
    Sandy-haired, greying around the ears. Grey, watery eyes—with the hidden flint. Late forties. The type who can look harmless and mild and then come on strong. The type that’s well placed for being a detective because he doesn’t look like one. He might be a schoolteacher. And he must have done his homework. A bell ringing somewhere—or he’d have chased it up, as soon as he knew I was ex-CID.
    He leant back a little. A simple, tired expression. Had he finished with Sarah yet? He held his tie like a referee holds his whistle.
    “This must be the first time that two DIs have sat down on either side of this table.” The soft approach that can suddenly bite. “And the last—so far as I’m concerned. I’m being let out in four weeks. My time’s up.”
    So: this was his last case of any consequence. And only his because it looked wrapped up. Confession and arrest within minutes of the deed. Hardly four weeks’ work. But then—there was me.
    Your last case. How would it work? You’d want it to be no bother, you’d want an easy ride? Or you’d want to make a meal of it? Chew every detail.
    And he knew what
my
last case was. I could read it in his eyes.
    “But it seems”—a quick smile at his own joke—“you want to be let back in.”
    Had he finished with Sarah yet? What was it to him? She was just a case. And you don’t get involved.
    But his last case. He hadn’t had to tell me that. Maybe he was proud. His last case, and it was a