Everything would be all right.

Sometimes, she even dared to believe it.

118

1976

Farmer was checking in again with DS Poulter, who had been Donny Maguire’s sidekick. Charlie Poulter was a big rangy guy with unruly salt-and-pepper hair and a big schnoz of a nose. When he saw Farmer coming, he dumped the paper he’d been reading on the desk and heaved a sigh. Curry had won gold at the Winter Olympics, Farmer noted, and Lowry had died. And Poulter looked pissed off – cool to the point of icy.

‘What d’you want to know this time?’ he asked Farmer.

‘I want to know more about the case DI Maguire was working on the week he disappeared.’

‘Fuck’s sake.’ DS Poulter pushed his frameless specs up his nose and sat there, arms folded. ‘I thought we’d sorted this out ages ago. Why are we still going over it? I told you. He did a runner.’

‘Look,’ said Farmer. ‘I know it’s a pain in the arse having to go through things again and again. But you must be curious, surely? He was your boss. Don’t you want to know what really happened to him?’

‘Mate, I know what happened to him.’

‘Come on then. Share it with me because I am getting no fucking where with this and it’s driving me crazy.’

‘It’s bloody obvious. He took off somewhere with a bird. Have you met his missus? Cold as fucking Christmas. Maguire always loved the birds, the hotter the better.’

‘Right,’ said Farmer.

Poulter was silent for a beat. Then he said: ‘You know what? I don’t miss him. Get out on a case and his eye would start to wander. He wasn’t fussy. Even witnesses, he’d be chatting them up, saying how pretty they were, saying you could be a model, like they hadn’t heard all that shit about a thousand times before. Mind you, some of them lapped it up. He scored more often than not, that was for sure.’

Farmer took this in. He was thinking: jealous husband or boyfriend? Then he said: ‘What about the last day he was on duty? Where did he go? Did you hear anyone make a threat against him?’

‘No. Nobody did that. Not in my hearing, anyway.’

‘OK, so what precisely was he investigating on that day?’

‘You really want to go on with this? Ain’t you tired right up to the back teeth with it all? Bastard’s lying on a beach somewhere, we should be so lucky as he is.’

‘I really am. Tired of it. But I do want to go on.’

‘OK.’ Poulter hauled himself to his feet and headed for the files.

Farmer sat for hours poring over the paperwork Poulter dished out to him. Of course he’d been through the whole lot before, several times, but he was thinking he must have missed something.

‘Just put the bastards away safely afterwards, or my arse will get chewed by the clerk, all right?’ said Poulter, his exasperation at Farmer’s persistence plain to see.