I Let You Go

by Clare Mackintosh

‘I like dealing with the more serious jobs. But mainly it’s because I get bored easily. I like complicated investigations that make my head hurt to figure them out. Cryptic crosswords rather than simple ones. Does that make sense?’

Over the years Ray had built a defensive mechanism against the fall-out of cases like this one. Most police officers had one – it’s why you had to turn a blind eye to some of the jokes bandied about the canteen – but perhaps Kate was different.

Three sides of the shed are lined with shelves on which I place my sculptures, in an ordered chaos only I could understand. Works in progress, here; fired but not painted, here; waiting to go to customers, here. Hundreds of separate pieces, yet if I shut my eyes, I can still feel the shape of each one beneath my fingers, the wetness of the clay on my palms.

I based them on my mother; my sister; girls I taught at pottery class; women I saw walking in the park. This one is me. Loosely, and not so anyone would recognise, but nevertheless me. Chest a little too flat; hips a little too narrow; feet a little too big. A tangle of hair twisted into a knot at the base of the neck.

‘Do you live on your own?’ He wondered if he was allowed to ask that sort of thing nowadays. In the time he’d been a copper, political correctness had reached a point where anything remotely personal had to be skirted around. In a few years’ time people wouldn’t be able to talk at all.

Maybe she did smile a little less nowadays, but she was still the same Mags she’d been all those years ago. She frequently moaned about the weight she had put on since the kids were born, but Ray rather liked the way she was now; her stomach round and soft, her breasts low and full. His compliments fell on deaf ears, and he had long since given up on them.

The tide is in and he dives into the sea, barking at the cold waves. I laugh out loud. He is more spaniel than collie now, with the slightly-too-long legs of a teenager, and so much energy I wonder if he could ever run it off.