A Fine Romance

Tommy chuckled to himself as he copied the witness statement into his notebook. Pure gold, every word of it. Names and locations would be changed, obviously, but the rest was going in. The woman must have been a poet in a former life. A born raconteur, despite her limited and colourful vocabulary. Vivid and visceral, her description of the brawling prostitutes read like Hemingway.

Tommy struggled with similes and metaphors. His prose marched along with mechanical precision. ‘The man’s face died, along with the rest of him, as the knife punctured his left atria.’ No-one in his writing group valued that kind of accuracy. They just wanted to know what everything smelled like.

Smells gave useful warnings, though. Like a familiar perfume, citrus and patchouli, seeping through his mask. Tommy drew in his elbows and rested his chin on his tented knuckles, concealing his notebook as the sergeant leaned over his shoulder.

His skin prickled at the intrusion of his personal space. “What’s up, boss?”

“You tell me, Tommy.” Her voice just a little too loud in his ear. Straightening, she moved round the side of his desk. Tommy dropped his interlaced hands to cover the notebook and returned her steady gaze. Six years his junior, they’d struggled to bond.

“Why are you reading the Sharon Jacobs statements? The file’s already with the prosecutors.” Her eyes never left his face, her demeanour predatory.

“Just seeing if we missed anything, Sarge”. He turned back to his monitor, as if hunting for clues in a criminal investigation which had been solved in twenty seconds by the first officer at the scene. He could feel her contemptuous stare, as she debated whether to waste her time on his lie.

“Concentrate on your own cases, please, Constable.” She turned on her heel and stalked away. Over her shoulder, she added, “Oh, and there’s someone here to see you at the front desk”.

****

Resisting the urge to click his fingers in the youth’s face, Tommy cleared his throat. “Ben? I’m Officer Pilkington. You wanted to speak to me?”

His reverie broken, the young man turned to look at the policeman looming over him as he sat in the row of grubby plastic chairs by the draughty sliding doors.

Tommy weighed him up. Clear brown eyes, confident, calm. Probably not a drugs thing then, despite the bulky black gym bag at his feet. Grey windbreaker, decent trainers. Six feet plus, skinny. Mixed race, close cropped hair, slightly receding.

“Morning, Officer Pilkington. You write the social media posts for the Marlham Police, don’t you?”

Tommy smiled under his mask. “Well, it’s not just me, but I write most of them, yeah.” He’d commandeered the social accounts about a year ago. The other officers were indifferent, saw it as an unnecessary chore, like paperwork.

“Was it you that wrote about me, then? I was fined for breaking lockdown. I drove here from New Whycombe to see my girlfriend.”

Tommy’s smile faded away.

‘200 quid for a fumble in a Fiesta!’, his post had crowed. Tommy loved an alliterative title, and the local paper had used it too. New Whycombe was a 100 mile drive, across county lines. An inexcusable breach of lockdown. A selfish, thoughtless crime, putting thousands of people at risk. It wrote itself really, Tommy just added the mocking touches that played so well with the force’s 5K+ followers.

The response had troubled him, though. There were the inevitable price comparisons - “He should of stayed in New Whycombe, he could of got it for two cans of Stella lol.” The lockdown puritans - “break the law, suffer the consequences.” But lots of indignation too, more than he’d expected. “Suicide and depression sky rocketing. But yeah punish the folks reaching out for human contact.”

Uneasy, he’d watched the responses until the Sarge had weighed in. “Take it down, Tommy. It’s smug, and it’s upsetting people.” The local paper had kept stoking the fire anyway. Dirty little rag.

He stepped back, eyeing the gym bag. “Come to pay your fine then, have you?”

Ben nodded slowly. “That’s right. Gail’s as well. Wanted to pay them in person.”

Tommy ruefully rubbed the back of his neck. “Wow. You really like that drive, don’t you?”

Ben shrugged. “When it’s allowed, I don’t mind it. Clears my head, you know? Also, I wanted to bring you this.” He lifted the gym bag with both hands and dropped it on the plastic seat beside him.

Tommy stayed put, his eyes on Ben’s face. “I’ll let you open it.”

“Oh, right, course. Here you go.” Ben unzipped the bag and pulled it open.

Tommy’s forehead creased. “Eh?” He leaned over to take a closer look. “How much have you got there?”

Ben sat back, folded his hands over his stomach. “£20,000. It’s yours.”

He glanced round the deserted reception area. “How is it mine?”

Ben’s response sounded rehearsed. “Someone started a GoFund Me page to pay our fines. This money was only donated because of what you wrote about us on social media. I don’t want it. I don’t need anyone’s charity. Way I see it, it’s your problem.” His face and tone remained calm, but his eyes were fixed on the policeman, challenging him.

Tommy felt queasy. “Give it to a proper charity then!” He barked, a little louder than he’d intended. His voice echoed off the metal conduits suspended from the ceiling.

Ben shook his head. “Like I said, it’s yours. If you want to give it to charity, that’s your shout. Sounds like a great idea. You can make a nice little social media post about it afterwards. Keep me and Gail out of it though, this time, yeah? If you don’t mind.”

Tommy whistled through his mask, grimacing as he folded his hairy arms. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to prove. You won’t take the money, but I will, is that it? Do you think you’re better than me? You’re the one who broke the law, pal.”

Ben looked away, gazing out through the glass doors at the stormy slate sky. Grim faced key workers, hunched against the wind, hurried to and from their essential roles.

Finally, he spoke. “It ruined her, that thing you wrote. All those people, laughing at us. I don’t want their pity. Or their money.” Tears gleamed in his eyes. “I’m not defending what I did, officer. But I couldn’t stay away.” He closed his eyes, inhaling deeply, before continuing. “It’s like a physical pain, you know? When you want someone that badly. Like fish hooks, right through here.” He tapped his chest. “Since the first moment I saw her.”

His voice grew hoarse. “Just a fumble to you though, isn’t it, Officer Pilkington. Were you never in love, then?” He eyed Tommy curiously for a moment, then turned away, shrugging, and walked out into the grey streets of Marlham.

Tommy watched the young man’s grey jacket until it was indistinguishable from the iron and concrete. “Once,” he murmured. He shook his head to clear it, zipped up the gym bag, and headed back upstairs.

****

“We could still give most of it to charity, though. It’s not like anyone would know. It’d be a romantic celebration. Appropriate, really.”

“Oh. You’re actually serious.” That matter-of-fact disdain was back again.

Tommy was struggling to remember the last conversation where she hadn’t spoken to him this way. “Well…yeah. We could book it for September, things have got to be opening up by then. And if things ease off in the meantime, we could maybe get a cheeky weekend in beforehand?”

As the silence lengthened, Tommy stared at the thin beige carpet of the living room in his flat. He was tired of this, he realised.

Finally, he heard her exhale, the sound like static on the crackly phone line. “I really thought you’d started to understand. You managed to stop pressuring me for about two weeks, and now here we are again. For the last time, I’m not going to put my parents at risk just so you can get a shag.”

Alone in his flat, he raised his hand in protest. “Claire, I just-”

“Don’t interrupt me, Tom.” She was almost shouting now. “God, you just don’t get anything, do you? For a man who wants to be a writer, you have zero understanding of people. You think spending that money on yourself is romantic? How does that make up for it? For what you did to that couple? You’re clueless. And these phone calls are just making me angry, now. I think we’re done here. Best of luck, Tom. Goodbye.”

The ‘call ended’ message floated up the blue screen. Tom stared at his phone until it went dark. He sat back, tilting his face towards the ceiling, listening to the neighbours cackling along with the canned laughter.

****

New Whycombe was pretty, in a tea shop and hiking boots sort of way. Tommy followed the sat nav to a semi-rural housing estate full of squat pebbledash terraces. “Turn left onto Cypress Avenue. Your destination is on the left.” He pulled over.

He picked up his black notebook from on top of the squashed, almost empty gym bag on the passenger seat. He turned it upside down and opened the back cover.

The notebook had been repurposed. No more villainous dialogue stolen from witness statements, or salacious crime scene detail. Now he wrote lists, names and addresses, each with a cash amount.

He’d been reviewing lockdown breach fines. Most of them - the party houses, the Ebayers, the day-trippers - didn’t make it in the book.

But there were other cases. The lymphoma girl, trying to catch one last ocean sunrise for her bucket list. The estranged father, desperate to attend his little boy’s first birthday party. The grief-stricken friends, raising a toast in the woods to their fallen brother.

Tommy tried to avoid complex moral judgements. He just looked for any case within 100 miles where the basic human need spoke to him, louder than lockdowns and infection rates. These would join his list. He’d turn up unannounced, invent a charitable organisation, and reimburse their fine from the bag.

It’s not even the money, one trembling old woman had said, it’s the kindness that matters. He’d turned away quickly, embarrassed by a rush of pleasure.

Two hundred and eighty pounds slid around in the bottom of the bag. The cases he reviewed no longer spoke to him of heartfelt urgency, only of self-interest and entitlement. It was time to return the bag. He turned the notebook over in his hands, riffling the heavy, ivory-coloured pages. He gripped the front section containing the research for his crime novel, and ripped it clumsily from the notebook, leaving a jagged shark fin of damaged paper still attached through the spine. He threw these pages behind him, into the back seat mess of takeaway packaging and used face masks. Dropping the damaged notebook into the gym bag, he got out of the car.

Gate hinges, but no gate. Dandelions curled out between cracked flagstones and festooned the square of faded grass. A woman answered the door, brown and grey hair scraped back into a high ponytail, green and blue checked shirt and jeans. “Can I help you?”

“Hi, is Ben in?”

She looked bored. “I’ve not seen him in three weeks. Might have moved out, for all I know. Do you want to take his mail, in case you find him?”

Tommy bit his lip. “You don’t know where he is? I need to give him this bag.”

She squinted suspiciously. “How do you know my son?”

He forced a smile. “I’m a friend of Gail’s.”

“Oh yeah? Well you can tell your little friend that Ben’s better off without her.” She peered at the bag. “What’s in there?”

“Just some stuff,” Tommy said. “And a notebook.”