Page 23 of Dead to Me

‘OK,’ Reid said.‘That’s good to know.Thanks.’

‘No problem,’ Gael said, as if he were already on to the next thing.‘Hey, Reid?You know the Met Commissioner personally?Well enough to put me in touch?’

‘Ahhh, no,’ Reid replied.‘Sorry.’

He decided not to add that he was about as far from the commissioner’s acquaintance as a burger flipper was to the owner of McDonald’s.It was probably better to keep Gael thinking he was useful.

‘Hey, no problem,’ Gael said.‘Take it easy!’

Reid hung up, feeling his unease increase another step.Gael had said Anna was involved in something financial.No mention of a murder in Cambridge.Maybe she’d ended up with two investigations on the go and really was at a bank somewhere.

Or maybe Gael knew very well that Anna was supposed to be in Cambridge, and had fed Reid a load of bullshit to avoid spilling their secrets.

He sat back to think about this.Ifher father was right about what she’d been doing and she’d been trying to uncover a murder, then the fact that she hadn’t turned up for lunch, the fact that she wasn’t answering her phone, and the fact that she hadn’t been into the office… all of these things together weren’t great.

Twisting it round and imagining Anna had been a detective looking into a murder, if she’d missed those contact points, he would have been concerned.Genuinely concerned.

Should he be calling Cambridgeshire up and asking them to take this seriously?Let his colleagues there take this on and do their hopefully efficient work?He could spur them on and then stand back.

That would be therightthing to do, procedurally.If he gave them enough of a reason, then Cambridgeshire might step up and get a couple of actual detectives on it.

Beyond that, Anna was no longer his problem.She was his ex-girlfriend, and she’d seriously let him down.He should be calling Cambridgeshire right now, and letting someone else deal with this.

He looked out of the living-room window for a moment, at the sunshine pouring down past the sycamore tree outside.It was almost five-ten.The park would be a perfect temperature now.If he called Cambridgeshire and left in ten minutes for a run, he might just get out before the post-work runners descended.

Sunny days off were so precious, and he’d wasted so much of this one already.Did he really want to waste the rest of it on an ex-girlfriend he would prefer never to see again?

He looked at his phone, and kept looking at it.He somehow couldn’t quite bring himself to make the call.

It’s the right thing to do,he told himself.

But it didn’t feel like it.For the first time he could remember, the right procedure felt like totally the wrong thing to do as a human being.

If Reid left this to Cambridgeshire Constabulary, and they did very little– if he did that and harm came to his ex-girlfriend as a direct result– Reid knew that he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself.And somehow, in spite of how muchshe’d angered him and how little he ever wanted to see her again, the idea of a world with Annanotin it was achingly wrong.

He drifted through to his bedroom again and looked down at the discarded running shoe.Then he sighed and started changing into his suit trousers and shirt.

‘You win, Anna,’ he muttered.‘You win.’

11.Anna

I need to tell you about what happened next, I know.But I’m back here, and all I’ve been thinking about on a loop is what it was you thought you saw in me to make you fall out of love with me so fast.

After the first time you decided that you didn’t love me I got a little obsessed with that thought.After we’d finally hooked up, only to have you say, ‘That shouldn’t have happened, I’m sorry,’ it cut me surprisingly deeply.

I couldn’t work out exactly what it was that you’d decidednot to love, even though with every other break-up I’d always been kind of ‘screw it, we just weren’t compatible’.I guess it’s harder to take rejection when you’ve stupidly let yourself fall hard for someone.You start searching for thehowand thewhy.Looking for what you can do to stop it happening again.

It has a weird effect, thinking like that.You suddenly find yourself having these little anxious moments in conversations with other people.You wonder whether you’ve talked too much about something, or gone off on too much of a tangent, and whether they secretly think you’re a tiresome freak.You start to imagine that all those cupboard doors you’ve left open in your life have been a black mark against you, as irritating as your mother said they were.And you wince at the times you’ve forgotten birthdays, or told a terrible pun at a bad time, or drifted off in the middle of important events.You become convinced that everyone must secretly be keeping score, and that you just never knew.

I think I’d only just managed to get back to my normal ‘whocares?’self by the time you walked back into my life.I was half tempted to tell you to fuck off, because I didn’t want to feel like I wasn’t good enough again.But I’d missed the way you spoke straight to my oddness.You’d always made it feel like you actuallyvaluedall those things about me, and wanted me to be one hundred per cent myself.

I never felt like I had to try to be anyone else around you, actually, and that was one of the things that really worked.Also one of the things that made it a heap of shit when you broke things off again.

Therealkick in the teeth was that it wasn’t any of those things that you broke up with me over.It had never even occurred to me to worry that you’d think I was a bad person.

And here I am, writing all of this, and part of me is wondering whether you weren’t right in some ways.And it’s… not helping.

OK.Enough.Let’s just get on with the facts.

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