“Okay,” she said, and I realized I’d drifted off midsentence and that Kevin was looking at me sideways and trying to hide his dark expression. “So what are you suggesting?”
“Sorry. I was just thinking that if we can get him on CCTV buying a lot of petrol in cans, then a) we’ll have that, and b) we’ll have a picture of him on CCTV, which is better than anything we’ve currently got for actually finding the cu—”
“That’s a lot of hours of footage,” Kevin cut in, “assuming it even exists.” Which took me aback somewhat, and raised one of Jenny’s eyebrows in a subtle way I remembered from years gone by. I’d only ever seen it aimed at men, funnily enough.
“It is,” I agreed, “and it isn’t. We know when John and Julian were last definitely alive, and we know we’re looking for a big white van you can see from half a mile away, across a fairly small number of stations, starting with the closest one to the burn site. He’s not going to have driven miles out of his way to buy fuel, especially if it was unplanned. And if we can get an ANPR hit, we’ll have a precise route and time, so the window’s only going to be a matter of an hour or so anyway.”
Kevin sniffed and gave a little shrug, which I chose to ignore for the time being.
Jenny nodded. “Alright,” she said. “Draw up a list of locations tomorrow. If we don’t get a hit on the vehicle, just work along a straight route between his home and the airfield and I’ll try and palm it off. I’ve drafted some extra bodies in to lighten the load a bit—start going back over witness statements, reinterviewing, whatever. Donkey work. Clear some of the backlog. I’ll find someone to trawl through anything we can get. But look, as far as John and Julian are concerned, I think we can agree it’s pretty clear what happened and who did it, so I don’t want you to get too bogged down in tedious bollocks that anyone can do. We’ve wasted enough man-hours, so there’s no sense in the two of you sitting around watching telly. We need a positive ID on the remains, and if we can find some CCTV then great, it’s another rivet in the Reed case. But in the meantime, I’m going to ask you to focus on the main lines of inquiry, starting with Erica’s friend, the Abbott girl.”
I glanced at Kevin, expecting him to meet my eye with a look that said Did she just call two dead coppers a rivet? He didn’t; he just nodded slowly at her and said nothing, and so then I felt guilty for thinking she’d be that cold.
I was considering how to respond when she said, “Look, Ali, I know what you’re thinking. It’s tough. You and John didn’t see eye to eye, just like he and I didn’t. And I feel guilty in a lot of ways, because I’ve never been shy about saying what I thought of him, and being dead doesn’t make him any less of a dickhead, but he was a copper, and not a particularly bad one at the end of the day, just a twatty one, and more to the point he was our colleague, and a human being with a wife and a baby, and none of us wanted this to happen. He didn’t deserve to die, however fucking irritating he was, but at the same time, we can only resolve it if we find out who Reed is, and the only way we’re going to do that is by getting to the bottom of all this other shit.” She swept a hand across the pile of disordered crap in front of her, her face falling as though she was seeing the magnitude of the mess for the first time. “So,” she sighed. “That’s what we’re going to do. Right?”
I wished I could share her optimism, however forced it was. But I nodded anyway, and said okay, and we all took a moment to stare at the desk in silence before Jenny ran her hands roughly through her hair and said, “This is shit. Let’s go home.”
* * *
Kevin was still silent as we gathered our things and threw them haphazardly into our respective bags, and as I discreetly wrote the words petrol stations on the inside of my wrist with a biro, below the smudged and faded reminder I’d penned there earlier: Jen act ng SIO.
He waited until we were outside the building before he turned to me sharply and said, “Ali, can I as—”
I walked right into him and my bag slid off my shoulder, plopping onto the tarmac and spilling its contents into the car park.
“Fucksake, sorry,” he flustered, swooping down to gather my things and shove them roughly back in.
“What’s the matter, Kevin?” I said.
He straightened, then stooped back down a little to try to meet my eye, so that he looked even more uncomfortable than I could already tell he was. “Can I ask you a question?”
I nodded. “Questions are free.”
He was fiddling with his fingers again, his eyes jittering between my own and a point somewhere on my forehead. “I don’t want to be out of order or anything,” he said, “but are you actually alright?”
I could feel my face burning, and a knot forming in my belly, but apart from that and all of the other things, I felt pretty okay, and I told him so.
“Only...” He hesitated, possibly in the hope that I’d shut him down and save him saying something I might make him regret, but I just waited him out until he found his voice. When it came back, there was a hard edge to it. “Ali, you keep zoning out,” he said. “And earlier you gave me a can of Coke, and half an hour later you told me you’d got me a can of Coke but you couldn’t find it. I’m worried about you, mate. I don’t know whether you should be—”
“Occupational Health signed me off,” I said, looking for a tone that conveyed my unwillingness to have this conversation. “I’m cleared to work.”
“Oh, come on,” he groaned. “We both know that’s bollocks. Tell me honestly, how many times have you been in there before and just told them whatever they wanted to hear? You came to work with a broken hand once, remember? You couldn’t even lift your mug.”
I did remember. I’d been standing on an office chair, trying to retrieve a paper plane that had wedged itself under the edge of a ceiling tile. The X-ray showed two fractured bones in the back of my hand, but I told Tim Hopgood it was just a bruise and he let me come back the next day. It was a bit stupid, to be fair. Hurt like all buggery. And now I had a choice to make. I could back down, admit to Kevin what he could already see. I could laugh and tell him I was just finding my feet, I’d had a headache all day, something something hangover, ha ha ha. Or I could shift my weight onto my good leg, stand tall, get in his face. Counterattack. How’s your head, Kevin? How’s that little dent in your skull? You’re not making a lot of sense, Kevin. Your memory’s playing tricks on you again, isn’t it? Why do you keep calling me Helen, Kevin? You’re looking a little bit peaky. Why don’t you sit down for a minute?
I can be as much of a bitch as I need to be, trust me. But, “I’m tired,” I said, choosing to address his worried face rather than the aggression in his voice. “We both are. It’s been a long day.”
I bore the weight of his stare for a moment longer, until he sighed and turned and nodded at the setting sun. “Fine,” he muttered. “Better get some rest, eh?” Then he gave me a thin-lipped smile and walked to his car.
I watched him back out of his space and drive away without another glance in my direction; waited until he was out of the gate before I let out an unsteady breath, shook the heat from my face, and tried to remember what I’d done with my car keys.
* * *
When I got home, there was a car. Just a black Audi like a million others, but it slowed to a crawl as I pulled up onto the driveway, and idled at the curb a house and a half away while I locked the car and fiddled with my house keys. I tried to take in as much as I could without staring, but beyond covertly digging out my notepad and scribbling down the registration number, there wasn’t a lot to deduce. It needled me, though. Whether it was down to familiarity or just plain old cop-brain, there was something about that Audi.
I slipped the little rubber car-shaped fob from my key ring, where it serves as a reminder that I’ve locked the house while I’m out, and hung it on the nail beside the door, then slipped inside with only the slightest glance over my shoulder.
I kicked off my shoes and dumped my bag on the living room floor. Picked up the junk mail from the mat and tossed it straight into the recycle bin. Filled the kettle and switched it on. Peered through the net curtains to see if the Audi was still there, which it was. Fished a clean mug from the dishwasher and spooned in a heap of instant coffee. Dribbled in the last of the milk with a sigh and idly stirred it into a paste while I waited for the water to boil. Then I jumped out of my skin at the first of three slow knocks on the front door.
I stood stock-still for a moment, letting my pulse and my thoughts race and the kettle bubble and click off, and brown milk drip from the spoon in my hand onto the floor. At some point I came to my senses; decided I was simply spooked by the day’s events and that I was in no more sinister demand than I had been yesterday. I’d probably just ordered something on the internet, or...
Three more knocks, closer together this time, and quieter, not louder—fading in confidence.
Finally, shaking the last ringing alarm bell from my head, I dropped the spoon back into the mug and went to the door.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t mean it,” Edith said, wincing at the surprise I clearly couldn’t keep from my face, and at the bottle of Prosecco in her hand. “Oh God, that’s awkward.”
I could only guess at what she might be referring to, but whether I’d meant it or otherwise, I was glad she’d turned up, because I suddenly and urgently needed a drink.
Chapter 9
Annie was trying not to panic, and the vodka was helping with that to an extent, but equally, it wasn’t much helping her to figure out what to do.
She wasn’t an idiot; she knew deep down that the e-fit on the television, the one from all those posters, was the man she knew as James, however laughably generic it was. She knew it was the man she’d met flat on her back on the path beside the river, her jeans unbuttoned, the late Mark Boon struggling to tug the waistband past her hips. She knew it was the man to whom she’d felt indebted enough to answer his call for help. The man about whose movements Detective Sergeant Fairey had so awkwardly and sensitively questioned her without recording a single word she’d said. The man who’d taken care of her when she was sick. The man she’d slept beside, willing him in vain to touch her. The man with whom she’d felt safe enough to give him the key to her house. The man who’d made her feel, for once in her life, something more than plain old Annie Average.
She’d told the truth about that man, more or less, when Fairey had come to ask. And yet the evidence at that house in the woods told a different story, one she couldn’t reconcile even now, as she sat staring at footage of a burned-out car and the anchor’s words echoed through her head: The bodies have not yet been formally identified, but the families of the missing officers have been informed.
Annie shuddered in her seat and gripped her glass so tightly that she thought it might break. Her cigarette had burned itself out in the ashtray. Her head swam. He’d been alright, John Fairey. Understanding. Gentle. He hadn’t judged her, at least not openly. And, it seemed, for whatever reason, he’d kept her name to himself.
But this: this changed things, didn’t it? For every night that changed nothing—every night she’d come home expecting to find a killer hiding in the shadows, expecting to have her silence brutally, terminally guaranteed—this one night turned all of that on its head. This...this mug, which now stared back at her from the coffee table in her unlit lounge, where that man had once rested some other mug—the one with the pink bands around it, she thought. She’d sat in this chair and hidden her blushes as he’d casually flirted from the sofa opposite, his face as clear in her mind as if it were still right there, right below that framed photograph of her mother as a skinny child, scowling her disapproval from before the dawn of color just as she undoubtedly would be now from beyond the grave.
Annie presumed to know enough to be sure that he’d cleaned this mug beyond any forensic usefulness. But it was real enough, and that meant he was real, and that ever-present tingle among the hairs on the back of her neck was real, too. The nagging feeling that he was close by, that he was watching. He wasn’t just a figment of her imagination. That man was here.
* * *
When the incident room number had finally disappeared from the screen, and the pictures of John Fairey and Julian Keith and the footage of their burned-out car had been replaced by scenes of Sheriff’s deputies combing the scene of a mass shooting somewhere in Middle America, Annie silenced the television and deep-throated her vodka and watched her glass jitter and spin and settle where she’d all but thrown it onto the table. She dug her hand down the side of the seat cushion and pulled out her phone; listened to the voicemail instructing her to report to head office at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow. She’d listened to it four times already, but no amount of replays changed the instruction or its meaning.
She’d had meetings at head office before. She’d bowed her head before her boss and promised to attend those other meetings, the ones with steps and sponsors and admitting you have a problem. She’d even gone to a couple, though mostly she just said she’d gone. This time, though, she knew it would be a different kind of “meeting.” The kind where she just quietly nodded, acknowledged that she’d been given every chance to change, and made an appointment to go collect the contents of her desk.
And so Annie knew what to do. At her lowest ebb, with no job left to lose, with no way to feed herself or to pay her mortgage, and with a killer circling at the periphery of her vision, stalking, threatening, reminding her that she’d never be free of her complicity, she had two choices: curl up and die, or tell CID everything she knew. And Annie was too young to die.
She had two packets of cigarettes, four pints of milk, three quarters of a bottle of vodka and a wedge jammed tight under the front door. For the next twelve hours, Annie was going absolutely nowhere.
But tomorrow morning, at ten o’clock, she’d pay a visit to Acting DCI Jennifer Riley of the Major Investigation Team, and draw her a proper picture, and let the chips fall where they may.
Chapter 10
I lay awake but silent and still, listening to the clock and watching the flutter of Edith’s eyelashes as she dreamed. The room was hot, her liquid-smooth skin glistening in the rising sunlight shafting through the blind. I wanted to touch it, but I didn’t dare wake her.
Eventually, she stirred a little and reached for me, laying her arm across my waist and nudging her feet between mine. Still I didn’t touch her.
When she finally opened her eyes and smiled and said, “Hey,” and hooked my hair behind my ear, I longed to do the same, but I couldn’t.
Even as she dozed contentedly and idly stroked my body; even as a comet-tail of goose bumps chased her fingertips over the ridge of my hip, all I could do was watch her face, taking in every tiny detail, from the single freckle on the right side of her chin, to the three healed piercings above her intricate pink crystal flower earring, to the sprinkling of gray roots in her hair. If I stared long enough, I thought—if just one of those things stuck, even if it was just the loose eyebrow hair threatening to fall ticklishly onto the bridge of her nose, then at least I’d have made one new happy memory.
Then the phone was ringing, and I sighed the sigh of a lost moment as Edith opened her deep brown eyes again, and rolled them, and laughed.
* * *
It was Jenny on the phone, and she got straight to the point. “We’ve found Mal Lowry,” she said.
Her tone told the pit of my stomach that it wasn’t good news, but I tried to remain optimistic for as many more seconds as I could. “Cool,” I chirped, tickling the bottom of Edith’s foot with my big toe. “How is he? Alright? How’s Wales?”
She was silent for a moment, just as I knew she would be. Then, “It didn’t work out for him.”
I didn’t know what doom-laden answer I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that. “Right,” I said.
> “Fishing boat picked him up on Sunday,” she said, “about five miles out from Three Cliffs Bay. He’s probably been floating around in circles since the last time we heard from him.”
I didn’t know what that meant, or how to process it. Deep down, I suspected I didn’t want to know. “We’re sure it’s him?” I tried.
Edith had narrowed her eyes by now and was watching me with grave concern. She mouthed You okay? and went back to chewing her lip when I didn’t know how to respond.
“Dentals check out,” Jenny said, her voice level, professional. I wondered if mine sounded the same. “Tattoos check, or what’s left of them. It’s definitely him.”
I let the sadness in then. I couldn’t pretend Lowry was a great friend; I knew him as a colleague, and we’d been in the pub at the same time once or twice, but I’d only worked closely with him for a couple of weeks. I didn’t know his wife’s name, or his children’s, or whether he even had any. Maybe he’d been a cat person. Maybe he had a boyfriend. I had literally no idea, I now realized as I lay there in my bed, looking through Edith to the picture forming in my head, of a bloated and greenish corpse, its fingers and face nibbled off by whatever monsters lurk in the cold, gray shallows of the North Atlantic. And yet I could feel on my face what Edith could plainly see as she tenderly touched my arm and gave me a reassuring smile. “Cause of death?” I muttered.
“Not yet. He’s, um...” She hesitated, and I knew it was because she was trying to be delicate, but I couldn’t find the words just then to tell her it wasn’t necessary. It’s just her way, after all. Touchy feely. “You know, propellers and whatnot.”
“You mean he’s cut up?” I said. Edith wrinkled her nose and snatched her hand away, and then immediately looked remorseful and gave it back. I took it in mine and squeezed her fingers and smiled.
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