by Will Carver
He screams the name of his friend.
Still, he doesn’t move. He doesn’t react. Adrenalin does not force him to vault the fence and take a closer look or dig through the mud with his hands. He becomes a grotesque statue of an inconsequential, drunken life. His hands drop to his side, his flaccid penis drips between his legs, his eyes fixate on the excavated-by-gin-sodden-kidney-waste foot.
He can see it is a foot.
A child’s foot.
And he assumes that she is already dead.
At no point does it occur to him that this was recent and that he could still help in some way, that the last time he evacuated his bladder he stood next to the man that buried this body.
He is the one to call the police and he waits behind the fence gazing at the dead, porcelain foot until they arrive.
So forget about Alan Barber. He is not a suspect. He has a witness to corroborate his actions. You can forget about him too; he’s an idiot. There is CCTV footage of Alan at the pub he admitted to drinking at with his friends. It is time-stamped to confirm his story. He is just a man who was on his way home and found a girl who was never expected to be found.
This is what Paulson and Murphy have been missing.
What they have been waiting for.
This is the front line.
January
Wednesday
HAMPSTEAD, 23:59
I SAW MY sister.
I saw Cathy.
She was standing in the corner of my living room, her head bobbing slightly as she faced the wall; it looked like she was counting. I knew it was her. Her hair was the same. Her manner the same. She was wearing the same polka-dot dress she had on the day she went missing.
That spring in ’85.
When everything withered.
And then she just disappeared.
It has been just over six weeks since I saw her. Since I have slept well enough to dream. Since I was last at work. My democratically enforced sabbatical has afforded me the opportunity to arrange the journals my mother left to me after her death, and gain insight into the intuition we seem to have shared. I drink less. The dark shadows under my eyes are ever-present, whether I am rested or not. I’ve had time to reflect. And I’m ready to go back. Return to my job.
To lie.
I will admit to my superiors that my drinking had escalated on the last case, the hunt for Celeste Varrick, and I won’t use the excuse that both of my parents had died and my wife had left me after sleeping with a fucking serial killer. I’ll explain that I was exhausted when returning home the night I solved that mystery, that everything had conspired too abruptly, that I must have been hallucinating or projecting as a result of the alcohol level in my body and the emotional fatigue.
That it was a shadow or a trick of light. A wind-blown curtain.
That, whatever it is that I think I saw, it could not have been my sister.
I will lie.
Because everyone but me thinks my sister is dead.
And these are the things they want to hear.
I know what I saw. I know Cathy. And it is time that I return to lead my team. Chief Inspector Markam needs to bring me back in. Not because a man named Alan Barber has numbed himself with gin and will foolishly trail an innocent girl through Camden in the early hours, unaware of his impending discovery. That is not my case. Not yet.
I just need to work. That is who I am. It is all I am now. My parents are gone. I accept that the unresolved issues with my father will remain unresolved; I can bear the slow erosion of unanswerable questions. I have locked Eames in a box in my mind; Audrey’s compartment has been placed in the opposite corner of my memory.
A point of equilibrium has been reached. The sabbatical I never wanted to take has worked in the way that nobody truly expected it to. I’m ready. Ready for work, for the next case. Ready to dream.
But, if that is so, I must also prepare myself to experience nightmare. And nightmares have the power to unlock the chambers of grief and torment and misery and murder that a person like me hides in the recesses of his mind.
They can bring back the very incidents you have been trying to forget.
I have been ignoring Eames. I’ve overlooked Audrey. And said goodbye to their infidelity.
It will soon be tomorrow.
And The Smiling Man wants me to remember.
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Epub ISBN: 9781473505278
Version 1.0
Published by Arrow in 2013
Copyright © Will Carver 2013
Will Carver has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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