Dempsey gets through the days with the hot weight of tiredness bearing down on his head. He argues his way out of going undercover for some prizefight. Chas found a body in the road on the way back from the opera with his wife. Spikings seems to think Dempsey would be good with his fists, but he refuses. He is good with his fists, he's upped his running and boxing training to distract himself from thoughts of Harry. Luckily his boss is distracted by his wife's stolen car and he hears nothing more until Dave arrives one morning bruised with Chas looking sheepish, and tales of uniform running merry hell in the snow.
He uses the diversion over Dave's welfare to sneak out to Robert Makepeace's former house. He finds Joyce and the forensics team crawling over it on this frosty nondescript weekday morning. The house looks like any expensive Georgian abode, with large windows but it's the bedroom in the attic with the locked door that he finds frightening. Inside is a furnished room, it's certainly not a typical prison, but the thought that there isn't any escape beyond the roof line makes him feel ill.
He spends several hours carefully going through the report, aware that the team around them are irritated by his vocalisation of even the smallest shortcomings.
"I never thought I'd see the player fall in love." Joyce lights a cigarette and sits beside him on the front wall of the house under a long porch. The rains beats out a pattern that matches his heartbeat as his imagination strays after what he's seen. He's grateful for Joyce's presence but irked by her observation.
Dempsey shrugs, "No idea what you mean."
"I saw you look at her." Joyce puffs out the smoke, "You know her husband is still waiting trial and on bail."
"Ex-husband." Dempsey says, more to reassure himself than be factual. "Goddamit, I can't believe he got bail and all she has is a restraining order. It smacks of corruption."
"It's how crap the justice system treats domestic violence here." Joyce comments with a grim smile, "The defence will claim his health, work, any number of things. If Lady Winfield wanted to press for domestic abuse, they'll stitch her up and then watch her unravel. They're mindless pigs."
Dempsey raises a curious eyebrow, "You say it like you know this sorta stuff."
"My sister. Her ex-husband was free in eighteen months, has his own business and probably beating the shit out of some other poor cow." Joyce says bitterly, "She's got the life sentence."
"Man, that's…" Dempsey runs out of words as the enormity of the situation unfolds.
"Be careful Jim, he's a nasty piece of work, unstable in my humble opinion and pathologically jealous." Joyce puts out her cigarette and catches Dempsey's glare, she observes, "You're in deep already. I hope she's worth it."
"I think so, if she'd talk to me. Seems to think I'm trouble too." Dempsey says remembers Harry's words if it was yesterday. If anything he's even more determined that he was. Then because he knows Joyce is on his side, "I just gotta wait it out haven't I?"
They stand in silence, both thinking of Harry. He has his reasons for his views, but he finds that he wants to tell Harry first, not Joyce. If she'll speak to him,
"I'll make sure this report is watertight. You know that uniform picked up Angie Hughes, the American he was involved with? She has previous on illegal guns." Joyce comments. Dempsey looks at her in surprise, he had no idea. She watches her friend race down the path and hears the squeal of tiers as he drives away.
"Hey handsome." Angie Hughes is about Harry's height with dark blonde hair. This, and their gender, is all they have in common Dempsey concludes. She drawls at him in an East coast accent that he may once have thought sexy, now it sounds cheap. She leans back, provocatively, on the chair eyeing him up.
He thundered into the room after bypassing Spikings and is expecting to be dragged from the interview any second now. This broad is making his temper rise. Once before Harry, when he thought he'd be here for a few weeks, he'd probably accepted a one night stand. The idea feels abhorrent now. He has to do this right for Harry, and tries to ignore his own, uncomfortable, moment of self-introspection.
"I wanna know all you've got on Makepeace." Dempsey says quietly with a hint of steel he won't hide.
She looks him up and down, "You could always cuff me, I speak better under duress."
Chas bristles beside him, and Dempsey looks over and gets a small nod. His cue to ramp up the pressure and he does so before he can linger on how he feels about it.
"Like his wife?" Dempsey gets up from the chair he's been sitting in and to her surprise, he flings it across the room. It hits the wall with a loud bang, a leg falling off as it does. Chas doesn't flinch beside him, he knows Dempsey too well.
"What the fuck are you? A mad man?" Angie yelps and Dempsey looks calmly, waiting for her to break. She will.
"He locked up his wife every day in the attic. We can take you there now, or we can put you in a cell. The experience is the same, just one is legal and other ain't. And if she so much as protested, he'd beat her up. Now that's where I'm drawin' a line because your boyfriend ain't even human." Dempsey hisses, "So tell me again, what do you do with Makepeace, what does he know and where the hell is the piece of shit right now."
Angie looks carefully at the chair and back at Dempsey, "He locked her up?"
Dempsey slides over the photos that he's purloined from Joyce, details of Harry's wounds from the night of the reception, and he feels like he's betraying this beautiful woman's confidence showing them to Hughes, but he needs answers. When the suspect slides her hand to take them, he refuses and sees her face pale. He hits the record button as she starts to speak, her confession tumbling out in a show of belated sisterhood.
A few hours later, Angie is charged and locked up. Chas leaves with a team to pick up Robert Makepeace. Dempsey drops the tape on Spikings desk. "More evidence for the trial."
"Thank you." Spikings looks at it and calmly carries on writing.
"Is that it?" Dempsey drops into the seat opposite his boss. He feels uneasy at pressurising a woman. It's behaviour he extends to the lowest that inhabit their cells but it doesn't sit right. Not now, if at all.
"I can hear what you're thinking," Spikings looks up. "You're nothing like Robert Makepeace."
Dempsey runs a hand through his hair. If only his boss really knew. He hesitates for a moment, wondering if he ought to explain but the phone rings and the moment, if indeed there was one, is passed.
When he gets home, he spends another crap evening running ten miles and punches the crap out of his punchbag - again - wondering what he's done wrong. As he slumps into his chair he thinks, if his mind is all over the place, his body is healthier.
Beside him the phone rings and he lets the message from Thelma go to voicemail again. He'll ring back when he's caught his breath.
00000
In the small studio near her home, Harry takes out her frustration on planks of wood. She has kicked her way over brick stacks and learned how to throw punches on the bags. She dropped a man over her shoulder last week, the husband of her trainer who easily out stacked her flimsy husband. Harry wonders if she could take out James and grins. She thinks he's the type of man who'd be proud of her if she did so.
Her trainer, a focused woman called Karen, cheers her when she does it. Harry can't believe she's never done this before. She learning the power of her body and developing muscles and she's holding her head up higher. This renewed energy is making her think a lot more about James, and a lot less about Robert.
James Dempsey. He's come up a lot in her therapy sessions where she's had space to swear, cry and scream and let out the demons. In the group sessions she's been tentatively attending, she made the breakthrough of sharing her story and for the first time had the feeling that she wasn't alone.
It was during these conversations that some of the women talked about dating, others doing well and some less so. And her thoughts turned to the American who was slowly steeling her heart in his absence. When he'd left the museum, she'd watched his car leave and kept an eye out for it ever since. Impossible and stupid given the volume of traffic in London.
She'd shared more in her private session. Crying an awful lot over James as she began to realise it wasn't him. It certainly wasn't her either, but Robert and his legacy. She started to feel guilty about giving James hope and then easily dismissing his feelings and her own.
One day, at Winfield Hall, she'd cried until there was nothing left. Told her father everything. Freddy had hugged her and told her how proud he was of her and urged her to put things right with James, whatever she chose to do. She resolved to ring when she got back to London and now here she is. In her hall starting at the phone. It won't bite. Twice she picks it up. Finally when she rings his flat and asks for him, the voice at the end is female.
She slams the receiver back down and bolts to the bathroom almost in tears. Then she tells herself that it could be a wrong number, she could have misdialled. It could be his cleaner, or a visitor. Maybe it's Joyce. She wills her mind not to think it's another woman and he's moved on. He's entitled to and he said he'd had girlfriends. It's Friday, it could be a date…
Her confidence is shot to pieces. As she drinks a large glass of wine and burrows down in her bed, Harry wonders how she'll ever get over James. He seems irreplaceable. She falls into a restless sleep berating herself for missed chances.
In the morning, she's still tired. All night she was thinking of him, wrapped in the arms of another woman. She drags herself out the front door and pounds the pavements in the hope that she'll feel more alive. It helps a little. She's able to tackle tea and toast but thinks of him as she tries to swallow.
At the museum, there's a pile of work waiting for her and she's grateful for the distraction. She's not meant to work on a Saturday but she usually likes the museum at this time. It feels alive with families, different from the awestruck silence of academics during the week. As she walks through the halls in need of movement, rolling her shoulders as she does so, she can't help look wistfully at the parents with kids. Harry is grateful not to have them right now, she'd never be able to cut ties with Robert if they had. But she'd like them, not out of duty to the family estate, but for love. The trouble is the only man that she could ever see being a father to her children, is probably wrapped up with someone else. Having breakfast in bed and morning sex.
Or standing right in front of her, with messy hair in that black shirt that she thinks suits him, and rough jeans. With a child wrapped around his long legs, her small hands bunched into the denim around his knees, with something of the look of James about her.