When he falls to the ground, they kick him once, then twice, then he ceases to count. Such a stupid argument, the wrong thing said, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. When he stops crying out, when he lies still, they leave him. Now he waits, gathering his strength.

The alcohol deadens the pain, so he’s able to make it to his knees. He vomits and then, spitting and drooling, forces his battered body to move. As he does so, pain penetrates the alcohol, and he vomits again. Swaying from side to side, his head hanging down between his arms, he manages to crawl for a few yards. He encounters an obstacle, raises his blood-encrusted head a little, and strikes it against something hard. Using the bollard, he drags himself up. The blood is running into his eyes now, and when he tries to wipe them, his hands are bloody too, but eventually he’s on his feet.

Blind, drunk, horribly damaged—it must be instinct that has guided him here, to his place on this wharf. As he staggers towards the arch that marks the entrance to their pier, he knows that if he can just lie on the cool, wooden boards for a while, if he can just rest, he’ll be all right—until the morning at least, when they’ll be sure to find him. But as he lurches through the cast-iron arch bearing his family name, he trips. His blood-slicked hands scrabble to grasp the rusting upright, and he tries to regain his balance, but his wet hands slip, and he stumbles again. Head down, arms flailing, he continues down the pier for several paces before one foot meets air, not board, and he falls.

When he enters the water, it’s a relief. The coolness soothes his body’s pain, and he descends without struggle, down, down. The river water is soft and caressing. It’s only when he turns and kicks his poor damaged legs, to try and rise again, that he realises. He kicks a second time. Now, he’s sure. One of his feet is restrained in some way. He kicks for a third time and understands that it’s tangled in a rope. Probably a spare mooring that slipped over the pier side to hang unnoticed in the water’s depths. Perhaps his brother didn’t secure it well enough. He’s not as methodical as the drowning man, not such a good sailor. His knots can be faultily tied, can work loose and unravel. But the drowning man doesn’t curse him. He feels strangely calm.

One of his attackers wore shoes that were pointed at the tips and capped with steel. His final kick ruptured the drowning man’s spleen. It’s an injury that can cause light-headedness, blurred vision, and faintness.

As he hangs beneath the surface of the Thames, he continues to struggle for a while, but part of him is too confused, too weak, too ready to accept his watery fate. It’s quiet down here, and cool and dark, and as the blood pours into his abdomen from his spleen, his remaining strength ebbs from him and the water begins to enter his lungs. The river presses down on him, and the rope ties him. Images of his wife and children float past him and, reaching the surface, are borne away by the small waves that lap gently at the pier.

It’s 1990 in downtown Stoke-on-Trent, and though there’s a file open on my lap, I’m not reading it. I’m staring at the condensation running down my office window and wishing I wasn’t here at eight o’clock on a cold, January night. I’d rather be out…out there… somewhere… But I’ve got to get things in order, because Frank says that’s the nature of the job. Organising bits of this and that, fragments of people’s lives, times, dates, old documentation, new forgeries. You collect it all and then play jigsaws and find out what’s on the front of the box—the whole picture.

I’m trying, but it’s hard. This is a constant thing with me, this wish to be elsewhere, to be otherwise engaged. I find it hard to settle. Take this swivel chair, for instance. I’m perched on the edge of it. At any moment it could lurch round, and I’d have to grab at my desk. I know this, but I still brace myself with the tip of my foot and keep poised, ready to get up, or maybe to lean back. I could do either, but instead I hear a noise behind me, press down on my toe, make a controlled turn, and watch an envelope come through the letterbox and land with a dull thwack.

“Pick that up,” I think, and then, “Yeah, in a minute,” because I’m sure I’m about to come to some conclusion about paperwork and life, and I need just two more minutes listening to Major Lance quietly um-ing in the background, just a little more time to watch the condensation on the window. It’s beginning to form fat droplets, pregnant with possibility, ready to roll. I watch until some of them make a break for it and fall, carving lunatic pathways down the misted glass.

There’s also the chill in the room, the dead noise the letter made as it hit the mat. All these things work together and make me let those vital minutes pass before getting up, walking to the door, picking up the envelope, and thinking, “Delivered by hand? This time of night? Had to be.” So I run to the window and check the street—too late—for whoever dropped it off and thought I wouldn’t still be here, except I am, due to the paperwork.

That’s how I made my first mistake, and by the time I realise, I’ve made another, i.e. I’m now holding the envelope in my hand. “No gloves!” I can hear Frank shouting in my head. “And you call yourself a professional!”

No, I don’t call myself anything, because I haven’t yet settled, haven’t yet decided. Maybe I’m afraid I can’t live up to any label—private investigator, or mother, or partner, or… “Enough!”

I walk over to the desk and put the envelope down under a lamp—which, incidentally, does look professional, like the swivel chair.Under the lamp, the envelope almost seems to glow. This makes me sweat a little, so I pick it up again and weigh it in my hand. Twenty-five grams? More like fifty. I sweat some more and run my fingers over the surface. Nothing, no sharp corners, no protrusions, no coils of wire. Even so, I hold my breath as I bend the envelope gently to form a humpback bridge. Again, nothing. My breath whistles out, and I put the envelope back down on my desk, where it resumes its gentle glowing.

I’m busy appreciating this phenomenon all over again when I spot the words and read (centre front, in caps) “Ms. C. Kaye.” Charlotte Kaye, alias…alias nothing. I have no aliases because I have not yet fully become. What’s more, part of me is still a child, and this bit is now impatient. Wants to snatch up the letter and rip it open. Thinks this could be a present. “A present!” scoffs the grown-up, while yet another bit of my brain is wondering if the typeface might be traceable and concludes not. It looks standard. Probably from some cheap portable bought from a secondhand shop, used and then dumped.

“Good work,” says Frank, and this praise encourages the rational region of my mind to get a proper hold. It classifies the vellum of the envelope as solicitor’s quality, very good stuff, could be from a specialised supplier.

Now I get down to it. I slide open my desk drawer and lift out surgical gloves and a scalpel. I angle the brilliant lamp and carefully draw the blade in a line about a quarter of an inch from the top edge of the envelope. And…well, now it is my birthday! Because when the edges spring apart, when I separate them gently using the tip of the scalpel, there they are, yes, there they are—a whole fat pile of used tenners. I take a bottom corner of the envelope between gloved finger and thumb and shake out “oh, round about a hundred.”

Time for a fag, but my rubber gloves stick as I try to flip open the lid of the packet. I strip them off and light up and get into that deep nicotine inhaling that always helps people’s concentration in the movies. It works in this instance too, because, as well as calming down, I make a cognitive leap and start to push the notes around with the tip of my scalpel.

My idea is that maybe…yes, I’m right. There it is, “like a bleached bone amongst brown leaves.” (This poetic turn is largely due to the role-playing involved in the fag-smoking.) I’m feeling pleased because I know from experience that money alone can mean trouble—bribery and other capitalist sidelines—but this, well, this looks like a job. Good. Good, earned money. Money for…

And there he is, right on cue: that son of mine, staking his prior claim. Money for trainers for Jack. Okay, Jack. And now he’s telling me the style and the make and the size. Okay, okay, Jack, let your mother get back to the job. Let me take a celebratory puff and then put the gloves on again and unfold the piece of A4 bond paper (standard typing quality, no watermark) to reveal… Now just look at this! A neat four-inch square drawn in black ink (probably indelible, judging by the slight blue tone), and inside the frame is letrasetted (Helvetica, font no. 58) “PLACE PHOTOGRAPH HERE.”

“What photograph? Where?” I lift the notes carefully, one after another. “Eighty, ninety, one hundred.” No photograph. Well, that’s strange, because up to now this looked professional, very, very professional. And all of a sudden I wonder. It comes to me in a flash: “Am I up to it? Mick? Frank? Am I? After all these years of sleazy, provincial sleuthing, adulterous husbands and wives, petty fraud, insurance scams, sitting around dreaming in atmospheric, shabby offices, am I up to this cool efficiency?”

You see, I more or less fell into this business. But first I had to fall off my motorbike. Mick Winter, Private Investigator—fat, florid, and an inveterate gambler—dragged me to safety when my wheels skidded on some loose gravel and I was deposited face down in the middle of a busy road. After he had recovered from this bout of unexpected physical effort, when he eventually stood upright and stopped wheezing, I thanked him and we started talking and ended up bonding over the damage to my bike (he’d been a serious biker in his youth). All this led to an offer of some paid work. Mick asked me to follow people, to wait outside premises watching for adulterous lovers to leave or burglars to enter. He asked me to do the tedious, time-consuming stuff that he hated. I worked for him all the time I was at university, and it supplemented my grant and helped me upgrade from bike to car.

I had no idea he was ill. I put his high colour and general lack of fitness down to late-night card games and drinking at the dog track. I was shocked when he died, and even more surprised when he left me the business. He had no other family, no one else to continue his legacy. In his will, he said I should have it because, like him, “Charlotte Kaye has a restless soul.” (There was a touch of the bad poet about Mick too, especially after a win on the dogs and a couple of pints of mild.)

Since his death, the job has clung to me, like an old spider’s web. I’ve tried to brush it off a few times, but still, it gently binds me to this office, to this swivel chair.

Musing on all this, I look around and lose both my concentration and my footing, so that the seat slews round and cracks my ankle against the desk leg, and I’m in silent agony when the telephone rings.

I recover my balance, sits square, and clear my throat. “Charlotte Kaye, Private Investigator, speaking.”

On the other end a woman’s voice says, “Still working?”

“Brigid?” Of course that’s who it is. The gentle, mocking tone is unmistakable.

“Coming home?”

To me the word “home” sounds emphasised, insistent. I find myself shivering. Well, it’s cold in here and my leg hurts like hell. Something brushes against it, and when I look down, I see that a couple of tenners have fallen to the floor, trembling from some unknown draft. “Later,” I stall.

“I’m cooking.”

“It smells great.”

Brigid laughs, but she sounds a long way away and not amused. There’s a long pause. “Well, don’t work too hard.”

“Something’s come up, but I’ll be back soon.”

“Fine.” This last very faint, and the telephone replaced with an almost inaudible click.

I keep the receiver to my ear, just in case, but also for company, because my office is suddenly very quiet and empty. All at once, I sense all the other, deserted offices in this silent brick pile, and so I just sit, listening to the dial tone, until a car starts up outside.

I thump the receiver down, run to the window, wipe away the condensation with my sleeve, and instantly regret it as the moisture goes straight through to my skin and runs down my arm. Cold, cold like the street out there, cold and empty now that the car’s back lights have disappeared around the corner. I stand there anyway, looking out and imagining Brigid in our warm kitchen, deftly bending and turning, chopping and stirring, humming high up in her throat.

I always imagine Brigid smiling. Is she? Always? I rub the frown lines between my eyes and rub out Brigid’s image. Then I go over to the office door and open it to check the landing outside. It’s empty, of course. I close the door and turn back to my desk, but my foot spins on the mat, and I look down and see a small, brown envelope (large wholesale supplier, probably available at several retail outlets).

This second envelope may have been delivered at the same time as the first. I might have missed it, since its colour matches the rug so closely. Or perhaps whoever delivered it stood outside my door for a while, listening to my conversation with Brigid? This thought, or maybe my cold, wet arm, sends a shiver through my body.

The internal stairs to this building are tiled and noisy, and my office is the only one on the top floor. The sound of ascending footsteps usually warns me of any imminent client or visitor, but tonight both of the envelopes arrived unannounced. I tap the edge of the new one on my palm a few times, then decide I can think about this later and take up the scalpel.

The second envelope contains a single, small photograph (brownie box-camera type, still around in the seventies). I note this sitting at the desk with my gloves on, holding the snap under the lamp with a pair of tweezers. Now I’m sliding it into position, into the inked square, where it fits perfectly and makes sense of a slickly drawn arrow that comes from outside the square, jags accusingly towards a group of posing teenage girls, enters the photograph, and strikes one fatally on the head.

At the arrow’s tail, a stark caption orders: “FIND THIS GIRL.” I perform a mock salute, endangering my right eye with the tweezers. “Woman,” I say, for this “girl,” this fifteen-year-old with her Last Tango in Paris perm, smacks authentically of the mid-seventies. Which makes her what age now? Thirty? I speak out into the darkness: “Yes, I estimate this girl is now thirty, the same age as me.”

Now there’s a thought, a connection, a thread. I look more closely at the knot of girls, each tricked out in her own individual version of the school uniform, all giggling and leaning towards each other and clutching at each other’s arms. They seem so familiar, they could be my school friends too. I keep looking and see that the girl in question (must find a name for her) is right at the centre of the group, her mouth open in a wide infectious grin, which turns the corners of her mouth up so that you almost don’t notice she’s actually… Yes, she’s not actually looking directly at the camera like her friends; instead she’s focussed on something slightly to one side. I scrabble in the drawer again and pull out a magnifying glass.

Close up, the girl’s expression is cool; her eyes belie her smile. She’s calmly assessing the situation, not fully in this recorded moment but slightly outside it. Her arms are folded protectively over her chest. She looks rather like an old school friend of mine, Hannah Bishop.

That’ll do. I write “HANNAH” in thick black letters down the spine of an empty folder rescued from the floor, into which I put everything, including the money. I’m just tucking in the flap when the telephone rings, again.

“Charlotte Kaye?” A man’s voice, standard English. Except that somewhere in there is a twang. South London? Perhaps—but then, how would I know, Midlands girl that I am? Still, south of the river, I’d say.

“Am I speaking to Ms. Kaye?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“Who is this?”

No reply, just a brief clearing of the throat, and then, “You received a white envelope and its contents at seven p.m.”

A statement not a question, but I answer anyway, “Yes.”

“The amount is satisfactory?”

What can I say except “Yes” and again, “I’m sorry, who am I speaking to?”

“At seven-ten you received a brown envelope.”

“Yes.”

“The photograph has been placed in its correct position?”

“Yes, I’ve done that.”

“Good.”

There’s a long pause. Am I supposed to fill it? I’m tempted to ask a third time for identification, but I’m sure I won’t get it.

I hear some papers being shuffled, and my anonymous caller clears his throat and speaks again. Do I detect a trace of disappointment? I can’t be sure because all he says is, “In future, all communication will be prefaced by the password ‘biscuit.’ Could you please repeat the password, Ms. Kaye.”

“Biscuit.”

And, as the line goes dead, I realise a couple of things simultaneously. One, he knew I was here alone. Two, I’ve made yet another mistake, my third tonight, because the swanky, Japanese telephone-recording apparatus that I’ve just bought, that I’ve spent half the day fiddling with, reading the instructions and laughing patronisingly at the odd way they write English—yes, those instructions, that recording machine, well…it’s not switched on.

The central character of THIS TIME COULD MEAN GOODBYE is Charlie Kaye, a graduate of the American Studies Department at a university in the UK. Charlie now runs a Private Detective Agency, and late one night an anonymous letter is delivered by hand to her office. It contains money, a photograph taken in the seventies of a teenage girl, and a message asking Charlie to “find this girl.” As the novel and Charlie’s investigations progress, we learn that she is adopted and that the woman in the photograph is her sister, Harriet, a journalist currently imprisoned in Spain, where she was investigating their Uncle Ed’s murder.

Charlie also finds out that her mother and father were killed in mysterious circumstances following her uncle’s death, and she uncovers evidence that these family tragedies may be the work of a ruthless South London syndicate, still operating and with a reputation for diamond theft. When Charlie finds some diamonds embedded in two cheap plastic crucifixes belonging to her aunt Kathleen, she realizes that her uncle may have been involved with the syndicate, and that her search for her sister may be putting everyone around her in danger. This is confirmed when a failed attempt to abduct her son, Jack, results in the kidnapping of her ex-flatmate Brigid. 

Harriet is released from jail, and with help from Terry Mitchell, a policeman involved in the original investigation and now Charlie’s lover, she returns to the UK. When the sisters finally meet, Charlie realises that her family and friends are still in danger from the syndicate and decides she must act quickly and decisively. She travels to Malaga, where she finds her Uncle Ed still alive and in hiding. Ed explains that his long exile is the result of a previous, failed attempt to gather evidence against the syndicate. Charlie and Terry persuade Ed to return to the UK to mount a new attempt to convict the criminals. Pursued by the gang, they race for the airport, but Terry is injured en route, and Charlie returns alone.

Part detective novel, part love story, part family saga, THIS TIME COULD MEAN GOODBYE is set in an unfashionable part of the UK in a period when it was suffering from industrial decline and neglect. Charlie is an anti-hero—contradictory, chaotic, sometimes comic, with a tendency to fall for the wrong men. She is also self-aware, moral, courageous, and ironic. 

The novel is economically written in a series of short sections, each with the name of a soul-music classic as its title. The pace, intrigue, and suspense develop as the plot becomes more complex and Charlie’s situation becomes more dangerous.