I gave in. “Sure. I’ve got the phone charged.”
“I’ll let him know.”
“Thanks, Kate. Bye for now.”
I sat staring at the cold living room for a moment after hanging up, my eyes failing to focus on anything. My mother’s going to die, I thought. She won’t be here for much longer. Surely there were things I was supposed to say to her, things I should be doing?
Frosty didn’t call, and after half an hour of fidgeting I couldn’t stand the wait. I drove in to work and because it was late afternoon I risked parking at the station. There were plenty of spaces, thankfully. I left my permit on the dashboard along with a laminated card I’d made up with my force number and cell phone number on it, just in case someone wanted me to move.
When I got to the office, Kate was still hard at work, hammering away on her keyboard. “Did Frosty get hold of you, then?” she asked, not looking up.
“No. Why are you still here?”
“Why d’you think?” she said, an edge to her voice. “Tactical won’t write itself, you know.”
“Sorry,” I said. My mother is dying, I nearly said. The only reason I didn’t say it was because I couldn’t have dealt with her embarrassment, and the things I knew Kate wouldn’t say that I so badly needed to hear. “Did I miss much?”
“You missed Trigger making the tea,” she said. This was a standing joke. Trigger only ever made the tea when one or the other of us was out of the office. In other words, he didn’t.
“How’s your mum?” Trigger said, ignoring Kate’s barbed comment.
“She’s the same,” I said. “Thanks for asking. I’ll go back to the hospital after this; I just thought I’d come in and see Frosty.”
Kate didn’t speak. I thought about logging on to the workstation but I didn’t have the energy to deal with it. I went to the DI’s office, but the door was open and he wasn’t there.
I went next door to the main Intel office. Ellen Traynor was the only one in.
“Do you know where the DI is?” I asked.
“Probably in the MIR,” she said. “He’s been in and out of there all day.”
The Major Incident Room? What was going on? I took the elevator up to the next floor even though it was only one flight. I was still tired despite the extra sleep, my limbs aching. I was going to knock on the door of the MIR but it was open, a man in a suit propping it with his foot while he shouted across to someone at one of the desks and spoke into the phone he was holding up to his ear.
I squeezed past him, having already caught sight of Frosty, perched on a chair pulled up to a desk just to the left of the door. He looked ridiculously relieved to see me.
“What’s going on, sir?”
He didn’t even notice the “sir” this time, just beckoned me over. “I’m glad you’re here, Annabel. Come and have a look at this.”
I stood behind him and peered over his shoulder at the computer screen. “What is it?”
“It’s the statement made by our mutual friend. The reporter.”
“A statement? What’s he made a statement for?”
He looked at me in surprise, and then obviously realized he was going to have to go back a few metaphorical pages and help me catch up.
“Yesterday, in the early evening, Sam Everett had a phone call from a female who claimed there was another body we hadn’t found yet. She provided an address. He wrote it down. He went off to check it out—as journalists do, of course, although it would have been nicer if he’d thought to notify us first—and at the address he realized that there was a body in there because he could see part of it through a downstairs window. Then he called us out.”
“Was it the next-door neighbor who called him, then?”
“No—that’s the interesting part. We traced the call back to an address in Briarstone, right over the other side from Carnhurst where the body was. No reply. Broke in. Woman called Eileen Forbes lives there.”
“And?”
“Dead. Less than twenty-four hours.”
“Murdered?”
He shrugged. “Got to wait for the PM, but, on the face of it, it looks bizarrely like all the others. No food in the house, no sign of any activity, just the woman on her own. Post neatly piled up on the dining room table, unopened. We got some phone data back already. She only made that one call to the newspaper. It’s the only outgoing call for weeks. Like she was deliberately not contacting anyone. And at the moment we can’t work out any connection between her and the body we found in Carnhurst.”
“So the woman who called—she starved to death?”
“Looks like it.”
“And the body—the one in Carnhurst?”
“Same.”
“So how did this Eileen know the body was there?”
His face lit up. “Exactly,” he said.
I looked around the room, at the people buzzing around setting up desks, on the phone. There were six desks crammed in here already, a small office in the corner, enclosed by a partition with a glass panel at the top.
“So,” I said, wondering if I was just tired or if I was being incredibly stupid. “All this . . . ?”
“They’ve set up an incident room. They’re going to treat it—for a while, anyway—as a proper murder inquiry.”
“Really?” I said, overwhelmed. “You mean it?”
“They want you to be the analyst.”
“Me?”
“Who else, Annabel? You know more about this than anyone.”
“I’ve never worked in an MIR before.”
“Well, now’s your chance.”
I shrank back in my chair, the thought of all this activity being my responsibility suddenly overwhelming.
“Hey,” Frosty said. “It’s OK. You’ll be fine.”
“It’s not that. I’ve got a lot on my plate,” I said, my voice unexpectedly quavering. “My mom—my mother’s been taken in to the hospital.”
“Kate told me. I’m sorry, really. Should you even be here?”
“There’s not much I can do really. She’s unconscious. They said they’d call if anything happens.”
“Andy?”
A man had entered the room, someone I knew vaguely but couldn’t quite place. Well dressed, dark hair.
“Sir?”
“Ah, you must be Annabel. Pleased to meet you.”
“Annabel, this is DCI Paul Moscrop, Major Crime.”
He held out his hand and gripped mine firmly as I shook it.
“Hello,” I said.
“You’re the one who’s been monitoring all the incidents, so I’ve been told?”
“That’s right.” And you’re the one who deleted my e-mail, I thought.
“I’d like to see everything you’ve got. It would really help bring us up to speed. Can I meet with you in twenty minutes or so?”
“I guess so, yes.”
“That’s wonderful, thank you. Top job. Andy, can I see you for a sec?”
The DCI ushered Frosty into the office in the corner and shut the door. I went downstairs. Trigger had gone to a meeting and taken Kate with him. The office was silent except for the whirr of the workstations. I closed the door behind me.
I logged on to the system and went through my documents and files until I got to the one marked, prosaically, “Op Lonely.” All of the stuff the police worked on had an op name, and no doubt this one would, too, now; but in the meantime I’d given it a name of my own.
Inside the folder was the document I’d prepared for the meeting: the slides, and the spread sheets of data I’d kept on all the bodies found so far, which showed names, addresses, further information, which might contain anything linking them to each other, next of kin, approximate date of death, date of discovery, possible causes of death. And now it looked as though I had another two to add to the list.
I printed all the documents and a basic version of the spread sheet, gathered everything together, and was just about to head out of the door again when the phone rang.
I looked at it, as though trying to work out from sight whether it was likely to be important or not.
Then I almost wished I hadn’t answered it, because it turned out to be him. The journalist.
“Is this Annabel? It’s Sam Everett.”
“Hello.”
“How’s your mother doing?”
“All right, thanks,” I said. “The same.”
“I didn’t think you’d be at work, to be honest.”
“Well, I’ve only popped in. I’m going back to the hospital in a minute.”
He hesitated for a moment, as though he’d been expecting me to say more. But what else was there to say? I wasn’t about to go into detail discussing my mother’s medical condition with a relative stranger.
“I wondered if you had any more news—about the investigation?”
“What investigation?”
He sighed, and at last resorted to sarcasm. “You know, the one with all the bodies? The one where I got a weird phone call from a woman who knew where the next one was waiting for your people?”
“There’s no need for that,” I said, shuddering.
“Sorry. Look, I did my part last night; I called the police as soon as I knew I wouldn’t be wasting anyone’s time. Any chance you can give me a bit of news?”
“Like what? I don’t know what it is you need,” I said.
“What about the woman who called me? Have you traced her?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And?”
“And what? She’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“Apparently she’d been dead less than twenty-four hours when they found her today. Same as the others, just not decomposed.”
Silence from the other end of the phone. I shouldn’t have said that I thought; I was going to get into trouble now—and the investigation was barely a few hours old.
“Can you tell me who she is?” he asked.
“I don’t know that yet,” I said. “I don’t know anything, really. I’ve only been in the office for about half an hour. And I’m really not supposed to talk to you about this. I know people who’ve been fired for giving away details of an investigation.”
“Annabel, I’m not trying to put you in an awkward position. I’m sure I can find out her name from one of my other contacts. It’s just that you’re the first person who really gets what I’m trying to do with this story. I don’t want you to give anything away. I just think we could help each other out. There’s nobody else I can discuss this with who really cares about it. Could I meet with you later, perhaps?”
“I need to go back to the hospital,” I said.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
I realized I was being inexcusably mean toward him for no good reason other than that I felt he was putting undue pressure on me to give him information.
“It’s OK,” I said. “Look, if I find anything out that I think might be useful, I’ll give you a call. All right?”
“Oh, yes!” he said, his enthusiasm reappearing. “That would be great. Thank you, Annabel. I really appreciate it.”
When I put the phone down a moment later I gathered up all the paperwork again and headed upstairs to the MIR.
The hospital called me on my cell phone at a quarter to seven. I’d been so busy, my head a tangle of thoughts and proposals and considerations and recommendations, ideas to try and unravel the tangle of people and their lives, that when the phone rang and the woman on the end said the word “hospital” I realized I hadn’t thought of it since the call with Sam Everett earlier.
“Hello,” I said, expecting them to be giving me a list of things mother needed—a nightie? Pants, socks?
“Is this Annabel Hayer?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Miss Hayer, I’m so sorry to be contacting you with some bad news. Your mother passed away about ten minutes ago. I’m so very sorry.”
“Oh, God.” I sat still on the chair, mouth open and gaping with shock. I hadn’t been there. I should have been there. “Thank you,” I said, at last, as though she’d phoned to offer me a voucher for some double glazing. “Do I need to do anything?”
“You should come in, when you can,” the woman said. Was she a nurse? Had she told me? I couldn’t remember how the conversation had started. Had she called me, or had I called her? “You might want to bring someone with you, so you’re not on your own.”
That almost made me laugh. Who could I bring? There was nobody at all.
“I’ll come in a while,” I said. “Thank you again.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “We’ll see you later. Take care.”
I replaced the phone and looked around the office. I was sitting in the MIR at one of the spare desks, and all around me conversations were going on; people were on the phone. Some man standing in the doorway was laughing about something with another person standing on the other side, out of my line of sight. None of them had the faintest idea what had happened. None of them knew.
I stood up and sat down again as my legs felt as though they might not hold me up.
“Are you OK?” said the DC who was sitting at the desk next to mine. Was his name Gary, or had I just made that up?
“My mother died,” I said.
I think he thought I was joking, at first, or maybe he thought he’d misheard, because he smiled at me. Then he must have seen from my face that I wasn’t joking at all, and he said, quietly, “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. Was that your dad on the phone?”
“No, the hospital.”
I tried to stand up and this time my legs felt better, so I mumbled something about getting my coat and said a curt “excuse me” to the two men standing in the doorway sharing jokes with each other. That was just not appropriate on a murder inquiry, and anyone would have been irritated even without the added distress of having just heard about the death of your parent—the end of your family.
The hospital had a bag with all my mother’s things in it, which didn’t amount to much because I hadn’t had a chance to take anything in for her.
One of the uniformed women on the ward—possibly a nurse, maybe some kind of health-care assistant or whatever they are—took me down to the Chapel of Rest. Everyone I saw spoke to me in hushed, gentle tones. I suppose that was their training, their way of avoiding me spiraling into hysteria. But, despite the tumultuous rush of events that had led up to this point, I did not feel hysterical. I felt calm, almost detached from it all. I had a job to do now, a list of things I needed to work my way through until I could get on with my life.
Number one, go and see Mum.
Collect form from someone. They’d made an appointment.
Take form to registrar to get death certificate.
Go to see Mum’s solicitor and get temporary power of attorney over her effects.
Check that her house is OK.
Contact funeral director.
Arrange funeral.
Pack up Mum’s things.
Put the house on the market.
There were hundreds of other steps that would fall in between these, but focusing on the milestones ahead while I was sitting in the chair beside my mother’s body in the Chapel of Rest was really the only way I could cope.
I wondered if I should talk to her. What could I even say?
I was so tired it was hard to think straight. My mind was wandering, searching around for her, for a sense of her, the way I felt for the angels when I needed them. I might ask and get an answer, feel a supportive hand on my shoulder, feel a breath or hear a whispered word of love. I closed my eyes and tried to feel her presence, even though she was next to me.
Mum, I thought, help me. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.
I could feel nothing, nothing at all. It felt as if she had gone.
I opened my eyes again. There was music playing in the background, something classical without being spiritual. It was probably Classic FM’s Top 20 Chapel of Rest Hits,
and the thought raised a smile that threatened to turn into a most inappropriate giggle. And something else struck me then. I’d nearly made it to the end of my thirties without having ever seen a dead body, and now in the space of a few days I’d seen two.
I stood up. I looked at her one more time, thinking I should touch her, I should kiss her good-bye, I should do something—but I could not. Instead I left her lying there with the white sheet up to her chin, turned my back on her, and left the room, shutting the door firmly behind me.
I collected the form, which needed to be taken to the registrar as soon as possible. “I could go now,” I said to the woman who’d handed it to me.
“It will be closed now,” the nurse said gently. “I think you might need to leave it until tomorrow.”
My first thought was that I had work tomorrow, but they were probably expecting me to take some time off. I would call Bill, find out what they wanted me to do. After all, it wasn’t as if I didn’t have stuff to do at work. They were finally starting the investigation I’d been pushing for. How much time was I supposed to take off?
A few minutes later I was heading back down the hall to the main entrance, thinking of my list of what I had to do and mentally ticking some things, rearranging others, and adding more tasks to it.
“Annabel!”
I looked across the crowded reception area and to my dismay it was him again. Sam Everett. I continued walking toward the door, hoping he was here for some other reason and not because he was stalking me.
“Hey! Annabel!”
He touched my sleeve and then I supposed I could no longer ignore him.
“Sam. Hello again.”
He looked at me closely. “Are you all right?”
I realized I must be behaving oddly. “My mother died,” I said. “I just came to collect her things.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said. He looked as if he meant it, and as if he had been expecting something like that. “Come and have a drink with me.”
“No, thank you, I have lots of things I need to do.”
“Just a quick coffee. Over there,” he said, indicating the WRVS café, which was still full of people. “Come on.”
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