nathan screeched to a halt as the traffic lights in the town centre turned red.

'go on.'

he turned to her, his monkey face cheerful in the light of the street lamp. you get away with murder, freya thought, and you probably always will.

'see, this poem says there's two ways. you can spend hours by the phone, pining, waiting and hoping, counting the minutes ...' he put the car into gear and raced satisfyingly ahead of a bmw that had been pulled up beside them in the next lane. 'yeesssss.'

'or?'

'or. a better way is you get to know him better.'

freya laughed. 'ok, very good. now let's hear about you, constable.'

'me, well, you know. very happily shacked up with my em.'

'exactly.'

'what?'

'shacked up. for god's sake. and how long is it?'

'be two years.'

'time you did the decent thing then.'

'what decent thing would that be, sarge?'

'how like a man can a man be? marry the girl, constable coates, propose to her, go down on bended knee, spend your overtime money on a diamond. they had some lovely ones in the window of duckham's in bevham last time i looked.'

'prospecting was you?'

'seriously. your emma is lovely. she deserves more than "shacked up". if she'd be mad enough to say yes, of course.'

'yeah, yeah.'

'don't you want to settle down?'

'i am settled.'

freya shook her head. 'it's different.' she had meant it. her own mistake had not made her disapprove of marriage in general and the pretty, delightful and eminently sensible emma was what nathan needed.

nathan slewed the car neatly into a space in front of the station, and they went inside.

freya entered the emptying cid room and looked round. it had the usual seedy, end-of-the-day air, bins overflowing with screwed paper and empty plastic coffee cups, desks littered with computer printouts, chairs anyhow. her own was not much of an example and she spent five minutes clearing, tidying and sorting it out so that she would not feel too depressed at the sight of it in the morning.

her computer was still switched on and for a moment she hesitated over spending another hour going through the drug data, or even going back over the stuff that had come in - what little of it there was - on the missing women.

but she was tired and irritable and hungry and the hour would more than likely be wasted. home, she said, taking her suede jacket off the back of the chair and knotting the cream pashmina round her neck; home, a piece of fillet steak with mushrooms and tomatoes, two or three glasses of red wine and half an hour going through the score of the b minor mass ready for tomorrow evening.

she switched off a couple of lights, said goodnight to the only other person left in the room, pattering away at his keyboard, and went out and down the corridor.

a light was on in simon serrailler's office and the door was slightly ajar. freya hesitated. don't do it, don't do it, leave it. if nathan had noticed, how many others might have done so? don't do it, where's your pride?

she tapped on the door.

'come in.'

he had his jacket off, tie loosened, blond hair all over the place. the files on his desk were a foot thick.

'freya - thank god, an excuse to stop. come in, please, please come in.'

'don't tell me this is all drug stuff.'

'a ton of it. any joy today?'

she shook her head. 'there was never going to be.'

'i know what you think about all this. it's not the minnows we want and it's only minnows who are going to be hanging about the road tunnel to the eric anderson and nobody but minnows are going to live in flats on the hartfield estate. but first of all, the minnows can and do lead us to the sharks, and secondly, there have been enough public complaints, especially from parents, about drug pushing to the school children, that we have got to be seen taking it seriously. and as you know, there's not a lot of point in putting cars full of uniform out to warn the dealers off until the fuss dies down. grin and bear it, freya. it has become pretty serious recently and we might well get somewhere. we've half the county's forces on drug ops.' he looked at her for a second. 'but that isn't why you're here is, it?'

freya went still. what did he mean, what was he going to say? what had he noticed?

then the dci stood up and pushed his chair back. 'i've had enough. i'm absolutely bushed. so are you. how many cups of takeaway coffee have you had today?'

then it was easy. 'enough to know i don't want another for a week.' she turned to go, remembering the steak and the glass of wine and the bach score. there were worse things to have waiting for you at home.

'sandwiches? bags of crisps, kitkats ...?'

'i passed on the crisps.'

'right, we both need a decent dinner. do you know the italian place in brethren lane?'

the floor lurched beneath freya's feet.

'if we go in my car, we can leave it in the close and walk to giovanni's, it's five minutes. you can keep yours here and get a taxi home. that way we can enjoy a bottle of wine.' simon was at the door, tie pulled straight, jacket over his shoulder. he glanced round. 'or - not?'

these are the times you remember until you die, these ordinary, unplanned, astonishing, joyful things, these spur-of-the-moment, unexpected things. you remember every word, every gesture, the colour of the tablecloths in the restaurant and the smell of the liquid soap in the cloakroom, so that for the rest of your life, when you smell it again, you are there and you are the person you were, on that day, at that time, thinking what you thought, feeling as you did. these are the times.

'god, sorry ... i was miles away. thanks - sounds good.'

'low blood sugar. makes you tired and faint and cross. giovanni's fegato alla veneziana will sort it. come on.'

they ran down the concrete stairs and out through the doors to his car laughing. stay the moment, freya thought quickly, looking up at the starless, moonless night sky, please god, stay the moment.

in the car she realised that she looked as if she was at the end of a long day at work, not at the beginning of an evening out. the cream-coloured pashmina was as near as she got to being dressed up. the next thought was that he must like her if he invited her out no matter how she was looking.

the restaurant was a glowing warm oasis, one of the small, old-fashioned italian places that made no concessions to interior design and twenty-first-century food fashion.

'i love it because it's straight out of the sixties,' simon said, as they were greeted effusively by the proprietor and given a cosy table in an alcove near the window. 'look, the candles really do come in chianti bottles with straw waistcoats.'

'i hope there's a proper pudding trolley.'

'oozing cream from every pore.' the menus arrived, the specials of the day were described lovingly by a waiter with the sort of italian accent people used to joke about. 'the difference is that the food is fantastic. there may be prawn cocktail but it contains huge, salty fresh prawns in the most wonderful creamy home-made mayonnaise and the veal is thin as tissue paper and the liver melts in your mouth.'

'the best sort of comfort food.'

a bottle of chianti arrived and was poured, ruby red, into huge glasses.

'comfort drink,' simon lifted his to her and smiled, that devastating, extraordinary smile. the restaurant was full but there was no one else at all in the room, in lafferton, in the world. this is happiness, freya said, this, now. perhaps i have never known what it was until tonight.

and then they talked, as they had talked on the evening in his flat, filling in more of the spaces they had left then, discovering more about each other's lives, talked about simon's last visit to italy and the preparations for his next exhibition, a little about the choir - but he didn't sing, wasn't interested in music, liked silence; about cricket, which he played for lafferton police and also in his mother's village; about his childhood again, which freya thought he was still trying to explain to himself as much as to her; his being a triplet and also the different one of the three seemed to intrigue rather than trouble him. they moved to her childhood, the met, and then her marriage which she had glided over quickly the last time; it was like simon's childhood - she needed to try and understand and explain it to herself, and as she talked about it to him now, she thought she might at last have begun to do so. they went on to books - they had similar tastes in fiction - food - he cooked but was not, he said, unacquainted with tesco's finest range - meriel's charities. they did not talk about work. the restaurant food was exactly as he had said, old-fashioned and unfashionable 1960s italian, wonderfully cooked, wonderfully fresh. they gazed at the pudding trolley for several nostalgic moments - tiramisu, sherry trifle, coffee and brandy mousse, creme br