The Long Call

Jen Rafferty is Matthew’s sergeant. She is an attractive, red-headed single mother who joined Matthew’s unit after getting herself out of an abusive marriage. Matthew is initially judgmental of Jen, noting that she is “[h]ard partying and hard drinking; if she’d been a man, you’d have called her predatory” (8). Following her divorce, Jen longs for the sexual and emotional companionship of a male partner; she yearns for “a good man to hold her hand when they were out walking, to stroke her neck when she’d had a bad day, to lie next to her at night and screw her senseless as the dawn came” (87). Jen struggles to find companionship for much the same reason that she sometimes struggles in her detective work; she is quick to judge and often jumps to conclusions that do not serve her well.

An example of this tendency comes in Chapter 16 when Jen questions Kate Dickinson, Simon Walden’s ex-wife. Jen initially struggles to imagine how the “[c]ool and polished” Dickinson could ever have been with Simon (154). She even allows herself to begin to fill in the details of Kate’s life story based on her own impressions of Kate, imagining that Kate was eager to leave Simon for her new partner. After Kate finishes telling her story, Jen realizes that “maybe she should be more tolerant” (159), and over the course of the novel, she learns to mitigate her biases. Sometimes this process manifests as greater tolerance of others, such as when she tells Edward Craven that she doesn’t hate him; she only hates the pain he has caused. In other instances, she learns to show greater tolerance for herself as she finally comes to accept that she cannot always be the perfect mother but must try her best and accept her failures.

Jonathan is Matthew’s husband. He is also the founder and administrator of the Woodyard Centre. Jonathan’s activism in starting the Woodyard (prior to the events of the novel) transformed him from a laid-back man who had “drunk beer and sat in the sun” into someone “passionate, consumed, organized” (75). Jonathan is outwardly confident in a way that Matthew both envies and admires; he is the one who proposes to Matthew, and Matthew is shocked that someone like Jonathan could ever want him. Interactions between Jonathan and Matthew suggest that the two men have spent much of their relationship learning how to reconcile various small differences that make it difficult for them to live with each other. For example, when Jonathan invites friends over on a Friday night because “Fridays should be shared and celebrated” (273), he immediately apologizes to Matthew for the fact that they stay over; he knows how introverted Matthew becomes while he is working on a case. This interaction illustrates how attuned Jonathan is to his husband and suggests that he is a highly empathetic man who knows how to forge meaningful connections.

The Woodyard represents Jonathan’s ability to craft such connections between disparate community groups as well. His character development begins when all the work that he has put into the Woodyard is threatened when the community center’s reputation is tarnished by the events surrounding Simon’s murder. Jonathan is the bookkeeper for the Woodyard, and this task, as Colin Marston points out, is not Jonathan’s strong suit. The questions surrounding Simon’s potential financial ties to the Woodyard force Jonathan to confront the aspects of running the Woodyard that he is worst at—and to question who he will become if his life’s work is unraveled by Simon’s murder. The emotional burdens posed by these struggles cause Jonathan to depend on Matthew for emotional and psychological support, and although their relationship is tested over the course of the novel, the two men emerge all the stronger for it.