They take Holder's car. Turning up with a baby seat in the back and Nina Simone cds in the front would not exactly be professional.
Outside in the car park, the rain has held off, just. Heaving flabs of raincloud hang heavy over the city though, over the wine bars and bistros, the tramps and office workers, the outside art and the litter.
Holder smokes a cigarette. Jones watches the way her fingers grip the cigarette and then he watches the way her lips grip the cigarette. She smokes like the smoke is a liquid and she can drink it. After watching her take three gulps of smoke, Jones forgets the promise he made between the chunks this morning and lights up too. It tastes amazing, that's what people forget.
She finishes her cigarette while he still has half to go. She puts a hand on the Peugeot's driver's door, then thinks worse of it, and lights another cigarette. The way her hands grip the cigarette, the way her lips do.
Jones remembers the way his wife started trying to smoke, despite the breastfeeding, when she found out the remission was over. She never could get the hang of smoking though. Jones remembers lighting one and putting it in her mouth in the hospital. He'd hoped it would look as cool as it did in old films. Oh, but the tiredness of her smile. The way she tried to hold his hand at the end. All those tubes.
"Come on" he says. There is not much room in the car ("shitty french cars" thinks Jones, correctly), and he pushes the car seat back.
She starts the motor. Her hands grip the wheel lightly and Jones watches the way her head looks left and right and the way she plays the cheap steering wheel material through the loose grip of her hands. He looks at the way her leather shoes with just unindecent heels press the pedal. She sighs and blows a stay curl which floats above her pretty forehead. He looks at her skin coloured tights, hoping they are stockings. More imagining than seeing, he looks at the way her tights / stockings disappear into her demure skirt. The traffic starts and stops, and as she changes the gear her legs work her skirt up higher. Jones, pleased with his subtlety, lowers his seat back so the angle at which he can watch her legs is unobtrusive. Her blouse is demure too, but he can see the outline of her breasts.
There's no way he is going to try to fuck her
"What do you think" she says. She overtakes a bus.
"fucking free buses" she says. A car honks but the honk merges with a screech and the air. She blasts past marks and spencers, and waterstones and pizza hut and then past the brown sign showing tourists that, on the left at least, is something unique.
"Important to keep an open mind" he says "I know you're hoping this is exciting case where he's done her in. Probably it isn't like that at all"
"yeah I know" she says. she hits play on her stereo
"Midway Still" Mark says, absently.
"Bloody hell, I don't think I've met anyone else up here who knows them
"I know my shoegaze" he says
"They weren't shoegaze" thinks Holder, but she doesn't say anything. She thinks that DI Mark Jones is the most beautiful man she has ever seen. The first time she saw him she nearly laughed at the absurdity of his beauty, at the fact that someone who looked like that would actually be a policeman. Were she not so sure of her ability as a copper, she'd be intimitated by his beauty.
"Who were your favouirte?" she asks
"Oh, slowdive, I think" he says. He used to be so into this sort of music until it all stopped. He blames blur. For a band to write resigned and then get popular and write girls and boys and ruin the whole scene is unforgivable, in his opinion.
She gets out of the centre, they head passed the palace, passed the revolution which used to be the porny cinema, past the new hotel and the old university.
"I wish I still had my siren" she says
"They should let you keep them" he agrees. "Bastards. Either that or let you have machine guns behind your headlights like James Bond does. Imagine gunning down these bastard students"
"That would be ace. I saw Slowdive once"
"Oh yeah, so did I. Whereabouts did you see them"
"At some shitty festival in Slough" (Holder doesn't think that the festival was really shitty, its one of her treasured memories)
"Oh I went to that, to see Ride, wasn't it amazing, in a way" He doesn't really want to talk about being young, though, because sooner or later you've got to talk about being old and that's no fun, no fun at all that is.
"Its no fun being old" he laughs, to show its a laugh.
"No fun at all" agrees Holder. She is doing 55 in the thirty zone past Platt Fields.
"There's a speed camera around here" says Mark "God I sound old" he thinks
"Its out of use" says Holder. She tries to gun the car up to sixty but there is a magic bus lumbering ahead and so she has to slow down to forty eight. Students scowl as they whizz past.
"Fucking" thinks Mark, as they pass Owen's Park
"Students" murmers Holder absently. She takes a right as if she was going to Chorlton. Mark wants to tell her to carry on to not turn left onto Yew Tree Lane but to head to his Flat. Then he thinks of all the baby stuff he's got out. Even when he was a student in Sheffield he used to tidy up his bedroom in halls so that it was spotless before he went out, he could never bring a bird back to a dirty flat.
In any case, there's no question of that, there's really no question at all. Last night in his state, he got a bit of Lilly's ashes that he kept back. There is only a tiny bit of her now. She is kept in an old cigarette tin he keeps under his pillow. He dabbed his finger in her and then, using the spit and the ash, drew a heart shape around his heart. There is ash all over the sheets.
In any case, even though the light is red, Holder hurls the car left onto Yew Tree Lane.
"Those lights are bastards" Holder explains.
They pass the park, turn right into the Old Moat Estate and park up outside. Outside it just looks like any street on any of the few not awful the council estates in Manchester.
"I'll let you handle this" says Mark. They both want a cigarette but both know that its out of the question before an interview like this.
Holder raps the letterbox. The house is made out to be like it is ignoring its council neighbours. Heavy curtains and drapes and a closed iron gate. A heavy front door in oak coloured wood has an iron letterbox with "Letterbox" engraved on it. From behind the door they feel footsteps
They are past rusholme
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