Some of you may be mad at me for this one…
Chapter Ten: Lunch in an Elevator
1.
"Brian still not back?" Gerry asks, irritated, as he returns from his post-prandial fag break. "I wish he'd get a move on. It's half past one. If the guv'nor gets back from her meeting with Strickland before we've even left for the records office, she'll have my guts for garters."
"It wouldn't be your fault if Brian is out chasing up some idea," Jack responds mildly.
"I know that and you know that, Jack, but when has that ever made a difference to Sandra?" Gerry fidgets as he sits at his desk, eager to be off and doing something.
"Think of it in abstract terms, Gerry: when Sandra gives you a tongue-lashing for something you haven't done, it's just the universe's way of paying you back for past indiscretions – so justice is being done."
"I have three ex-wives," Gerry responds gloomily. "I pay for my past indiscretions every month, in pounds sterling."
2.
Six and a half floors up, Sandra braces her elbow against the elevator wall and sighs. "I knew I should've taken the stairs." When her fellow sufferer doesn't answer, she looks over her shoulder. "Are you all right, Brian?"
Brian has his eyes closed as he leans against the back wall. "Considering that I have a fear of confined spaces and we are most certainly confined here, I think I'm doing reasonably well."
Sandra winces. "Someone is bound to realize soon that the elevator is stuck," she assures him brightly.
"Not soon enough."
They've already learned the hard way that the emergency call button is non-functional. The elevator car lurched to a sudden and unscheduled stop some twenty minutes ago – twenty-two minutes, thirty-seven seconds, Brian would tell you if you asked him – and is becoming uncomfortably stuffy as the temperature gradually but steadily climbs higher. Sandra doesn't need to ask Brian to know that he's taking slow, measured breaths because he's trying to convince himself that they're not running out of oxygen and doomed to slow suffocation, a la King Solomon's Mines. He eyes her dispassionately, and she can practically see his precise brain clicking away, using her bone structure and body mass to determine her lung capacity, or some such, and establish exactly how much oxygen she's consuming.
You know what to do, Pullman.
"What did you think of Michelle Lawrence's story?"
"She's lying."
"I think so too. She can't know as little as she claims – she was thirteen when it happened, not three – but is she covering up for her father, her brother, Reynolds, or someone else entirely?"
Brian slides down the wall into a sitting position, his arms folded over his chest. "Don't know."
Sandra hitches up her red skirt and joins him on the floor, partially to keep him company, but also because even her favourite black boots sometimes make her arches ache. ("Must be the flat feet," she hears her mother saying, and mentally swats Grace away. I'm busy right now, Mum.) "Look, I'm nearly half an hour late for my meeting with the DAC. He's probably already called down looking for me, and he and the boys will eventually put two and two together, if nothing else." She smiles. "And do you think all those lazy arseholes in fraud are going to stand for having to take the stairs?"
"Gerry will be wondering where I've got to," Brian adds, sounding the tiniest bit less gloomy. "We're meant to be going to check through the military records."
"Yes, you are, and Gerry will be playing merry hell at the thought of having to do all that hard graft by himself." She grins at Brian. "Good thing I didn't tell you to go with Jack. He'd never shop you to me."
"About Gerry," Brian begins, and pauses weightily as if considering his words carefully. Oh, shit, thinks Sandra. She's succeeded in distracting Brian from his fears, but at what cost? Esther can't have told him; she wouldn't. But then, Brian is some sort of savant, a brilliant Holmesian detective who seems completely unable to read people in social settings, yet who somehow develops X-ray vision when he puts his detective hat on. Sandra has more than once had the awkward, vulnerable feeling of knowing that some falsehood or omission was transparent to the former inspector.
"What about him?"
"Do you think he's been behaving at all strangely?"
Certain signs of the apocalypse #174: Brian wants to know if I think Gerry is behaving strangely. "This is Gerry we're talking about," Sandra says. "He's pretty predictable, Brian."
"He is an' all," Brian returns immediately. "That's why I'm worried. You haven't noticed?"
It's probably best to tread carefully. "He doesn't seem worried or upset," she replies, going for neutrality. "He's not banging on about money the way he used to."
"No, I doubt it's anything financial. I –" He breaks off and hesitates, as if considering whether it's wise to proceed. "I think it's more serious than that, Sandra," he continues solemnly. "I think he may be ill."
Right – not what she was expecting. "He doesn't look ill," she responds reasonably, "and he hasn't been off sick."
"There are other signs." Brian darts a look from the corner of his eye, as if he's afraid they might be overheard even trapped in the elevator. "He's not been playing poker online; he hardly said a word when I told him Chelsea were sure to have a losing season; he was excessively polite to DAC Strickland yesterday; and he's cut back his workday ration of fags from fifteen to twelve."
Sandra sternly represses a smile. "I have to tell you, Brian, that you haven't said anything that leads me to believe his demise is imminent." Her stomach rumbles loudly in the confined space. According to her watch, it's gone two, and she hasn't had time for lunch.
"There's more," Brian returns darkly. "I've not gotten to the oddest part. While you and Jack were out yesterday afternoon he volunteered to help me with a bit of filing, and he's only been late in once in the past two weeks."
That's Gerry, Sandra thinks, that paragon of good-humoured responsibility. "You mean he's finally decided to do his bloody job? How novel," she responds, a bit more harshly than necessary. How fitting: Brian is deeply suspicious because Gerry is behaving too well.
"You're cranky because your blood sugar's low," Brian says, unfolding himself to reach into one of his jacket's many cavernous pockets. He produces a pre-packaged sandwich. "Bacon and salad. Have half."
She gratefully accepts. Is it strange, she wonders idly, as Brian opens the packaging and hands over half his lunch, that sitting on the floor of the elevator, going halfsies with Brian, doesn't seem much out of the ordinary? "I don't suppose you have a packet of crisps in your other pocket," Sandra jokes, and only blinks when Brian holds up a small bag of Walker's.
"Good man, Brian," she lauds through a mouthful of sandwich.
"You can have a bit of me orange, too."
"You deserve a rise in pay," Sandra replies with a twinkle. "If I ever get stuck in an elevator again, I'll arrange to have you with me."
"It's better than being on me own." It's not exactly extravagant praise, but Sandra knows the man well enough to take it for a compliment. She stretches her legs out straight and crosses her ankles, and Brian actually chuckles.
"What?"
"Better me than Gerry, hey? Unless you fancy a lunch of fags and breath mints."
Sandra grins. There are other reasons it's probably best she's not confined in here with Gerry. There's not a lot to do in an elevator. "I don't think you need to worry about Gerry, Brian. He seems healthy enough."
"There's something I haven't told you."
She waits, feeling the first tiny niggle of doubt. She'd know if there was anything wrong with Gerry, wouldn't she? He might not say, but she'd be able to tell. I am a detective, after all. Surely Brian is on the wrong scent altogether.
"Yesterday we went to interview Eslpeth Dalkins."
Sandra arches an eyebrow. "I'm aware of that, as I sent you."
"Listen, would you? Ms. Dalkins is… quite attractive. Even I noticed that much, Sandra. Expensively dressed, nice jewelry, quite slender, with long dark hair. She was even a bit flirtatious – had her eye on Gerry."
"She must need glasses," Sandra responds immediately, just out of habit.
"That isn't the point. Gerry didn't respond at all. You would've thought he'd sworn off sex altogether. So Jack said something afterward to Gerry about her practically gaggin' for it, and he didn't want to know. I ask you, is that at all like Gerry?"
"He prefers blondes," she says, because she has to say something.
"Oh, please. When has that ever stopped him?"
It's a fair point, and Sandra doesn't know how to respond. She is nowhere near romantic, young, or just plain stupid enough to think that Gerry Standing's famously roving eye has stopped roving because it's fixed on her. Blimey, she wouldn't even want that to happen. Part of the appeal of her – arrangement – with Gerry lies in the fact that neither of them has the illusion that it's a great romance. Sandra doesn't have to worry about counterfeiting the long-standing emotional commitment – okay, the love – of which she seems, as Grace told her, incapable; Gerry isn't in danger of becoming emotionally entangled, because he's been emotionally entangled with someone else as long as she's known him, whether he fully realizes it or not.
Maybe that's it, she muses. For once, jack-the-lad Gerry is having his physical and his emotional needs met. By two different women, but then, that's par for the course with him. Gerry has always been perfectly frank; she has to give him credit for that. No matter how much he loves a woman, he's always looking for a bit on the side.
Christ, I'm Gerry Standing's bit on the side, and I'm totally fine with that. My life is bizarre.
She's quite good at being the bit on the side, the other woman. Sandra has been on a long hiatus, but really, Gerry is the most recent in a long line of emotionally unavailable men to whom she steadily gravitates. At fifty years old, she can finally admit that she doesn't want all that messy relationship stuff; neither does she fancy living like a nun. She and Gerry are colleagues and, more importantly, good friends. He respects her – and, yes, she respects him as well (she just doesn't want it going to his head). They're really very different people with a handful of common interests, namely catching villains and eating good food. They're quite compatible, physically – who would ever have thought? Basically they provide a safe outlet for one another, and have a hell of a lot of fun together in the process, especially when Sandra doesn't have to be in governor mode. She's quite content with her life at the moment, which confirms what her mother said about her own emotional unavailability, but there you have it. Sandra Pullman is pretty happy.
Which is why she has to tread carefully and not cock it up.
"Why are you smiling like that?" Brian interrupts her thoughts, and she immediately wipes the unconscious expression from her face.
"Just thinking. How long would you say we've been in here?"
He glances at his watch. "Forty-two minutes."
"Christ." She tips her head back against the wall in disgust.
"I need to go to the toilet," says Brian.
3.
In the office, Gerry has just completed the undesirable task of fielding a call from an extremely irate Strickland, who informed him in no uncertain terms that Detective Superintendent Pullman needn't bother coming in that afternoon for the meeting for which she was an hour late, but that he'd expect a full report on their progress, in triplicate, on his desk by eight a.m.
There go my Thursday evening plans, Gerry thinks morosely as he replaces the receiver. All right, he's a bit uneasy. Missing a meeting with Strickland is not Sandra's style. She and Brian still haven't returned from questioning Michelle Lawrence; they've been gone well over half the day. Gerry can't raise Sandra on her mobile, which is going straight to voicemail. Whenever she does turn up he'll catch hell for not having been to the army's records office, but he's worried. Probably irrationally, but worried.
He lifts the receiver of his UCOS phone and dials the front desk. "Mike, Gerry Standing down in UCOS," he greets the sergeant who answers. "You haven't seen my guv'nor or Brian Lane at all this afternoon, have you?"
"Er, yeah, mate, actually I have. She's got on that red skirt today, you know, so I remember." Gerry did know. "Richards had just brought me a sarnie, so I reckon 1:30 or so."
"Did you notice where they went?"
"Not particularly. I suppose they just got on the elevator, didn't they? Must've done."
Oh, bleedin' hell, thinks Gerry as he hangs up. Sandra is not going to be happy about this.
4.
"I suppose he could be involved with someone," Brian says, startling Sandra, who has almost drifted into a light doze.
"Gerry?" she asks around a yawn. "Don't you think we'd've known in thirty seconds?"
He shrugs. "Not necessarily. If he were serious about some woman, I can imagine him keeping it to himself."
It does somehow make sense, and Sandra reflects that in a way Brian is right even though he's wrong. The primary reason for Gerry's silence, she knows, is that he realizes if he were to say so much as one word about giving her one on the quiet, it would be the last thing he ever said.
But he hasn't said a word to her about Jayne, either. And he won't.
Recently Sandra had begun to wonder if Emily was wrong about her father's feelings for his ex-wife, but then she'd had the opportunity to observe them together Saturday night. They'd spent a great deal of time together, talking and laughing, and Sandra had realized that the interest wasn't one-sided. If anything, it was Jayne who sought Gerry out, sitting next to him at dinner and then right beside him on the sofa, engaging him in a tete-a-tete when the other wives had departed. And, too, there were the reluctant glances Gerry had kept darting at Sandra as he and Jayne conversed. Part of Sandra had thought it would be kinder just to go and leave them to their own devices; but she'd gone to the trouble of putting on the corset, and she'd be damned if she was going to have to get out of it by herself too. Besides, she'd made it pretty clear that tonight she was a sure thing, and Jayne was still a gamble, if she judged rightly. Gerry, like most men, liked a sure thing.
That should've been a little demoralizing, she supposed, but with the silk and lace chafing against her tender skin in very interesting places, it hadn't been. And then Gerry had been very appreciative of his birthday present.
"Well, maybe," she says to Brian noncommittally. "But I'm not going to be the one to ask him about it." She absently wipes her fingertips, which are sticky from the juice of the orange, on the hem of her jumper.
That's when they hear banging, and a voice calling up the elevator shaft, "Ah, ma'am? And Mr. Lane? We'll have you out shortly."
"Gov, you two all right up there?" calls a much more familiar voice, and Sandra knows Gerry is worried about Brian because of his claustrophobia. "I told Strickland you wouldn't just miss your meeting."
It's Brian who answers, smiling as he divides the last two orange sections and hands one to Sandra. "We're fine, Gerry," he shouts. "Just having a bite of lunch."
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