by JL Merrow
“You picking anything up?” Phil muttered to me as we established that no, Oliver wasn’t doing a Harry Potter impersonation and hiding in the cupboard under the stairs.
“Uh . . . Thought we’d try it the low-tech way first, right? I mean, he could’ve forgotten his phone when he nipped down the pub, and there’s no chance I’d pick up on that. Or like I said, maybe he didn’t want anyone knowing where he’d gone. Any good old-fashioned cruising areas around here?”
It was daft. I knew it was daft. Just ’cos I was worried what I might find if I listened for it, didn’t mean it wouldn’t still be there if I didn’t. I knew that.
But . . . the last time I’d used my spidey-senses to try to find someone, he’d ended up dead. Okay, not when I’d found him, exactly, but . . .
Didn’t I say I knew it was daft?
Phil gave me a long look. “Cruising? No. Dogging, maybe. But let’s check out the back.”
The way to the back garden was through the kitchen, which was surprisingly well set up for what I’d assumed was a rental property occupied by two young, single men. It was the sort of kitchen you’d expect to see in a family home, although on the cheap and cheerful side. I was beginning to wonder about this place. Not-Oliver’s childhood home? I wondered what had happened to his parents. Hopefully they’d retired somewhere sunny, rather than any less pleasant alternative.
The door was locked, but the key was in the lock so we didn’t have to get Not-Oliver to come and let us out. I’d thought it was cold in the house, but once we got outside I realised I hadn’t known when I was well-off. The stiff breeze blew right through me, and the chances were my hip wasn’t going to be talking to me tomorrow.
Not without a guilty twinge about Oliver’s heating bill, not to mention the planet, I left the door wide open to let as much light as possible spill into the garden.
Which was more of a yard, really, as it happened. It was concreted over, with a few token shrubby things in large tubs looking sorry for themselves. After stubbing my toe on one of them in the dark, I wasn’t too happy either. At the far end—which wasn’t all that far; only around thirty feet, max—I could make out a hip-high brick wall beyond which, I guessed, were the railway tracks.
As if to prove me right, at that moment there was an ear-watering low whistle and a thunderous rattle that got louder and louder until my ribs shook with it, and then just as suddenly, died away again.
At no point whatsoever did I see hide or hair of a train. I mean, yeah, it was dark, but what with streetlamps and all, it wasn’t that dark. And the train should’ve been lit up inside, shouldn’t it?
“Has Herts Rail invested in stealth technology, or what?”
“We’re by a cutting, here,” Phil informed me from the shadows. “The line’s twenty feet down.”
“Huh.” I wandered over to the wall to have a butcher’s. It was actually slightly lower than my hip level, which didn’t seem the sort of thing modern building regulations would allow, although fair dues, there were signs it’d used to have a wooden fence built up on top. Maybe it’d rotted, or they’d taken it down for a better view of the tall trees beyond. “They ought to get that fixed. Wouldn’t want to live here with nippers, would you? I’d be worried sick they’d take a tumble onto the tracks.”
There was a silence.
I looked at Phil, his face ghostly in the secondhand streetlight. “Oh, bloody hell.”
Taking a deep breath, I steeled myself, thought hard about Oliver Proudfoot, and listened.
Christ. It was all I could do not to throw up. The trail was thick and foul, and we were right on top of what it led to. Literally, almost. There was a fetid reek of death surrounding us, a buzzing aura of violence with an undertone of satisfaction that was worse than all the rest. I knew, as if I’d seen it happen, that there was a body on the other side of that wall. Twenty feet down. On the train tracks. For a moment, I felt dizzy and faint, as if I was tumbling over to join it.
“What is it?” Phil’s tone was sharp over his footsteps as he joined me by the wall and slung his arm around me. I’d turned away, and sensed more than saw him peering over the edge. Another wash of vertigo hit me.
“How many trains do you reckon have gone past since we got here?” I asked shakily.
Phil pulled me close, and it was only then I realised that it wasn’t just my voice. I was shaking all over. “Four or five. Maybe six.” He said it softly, into my hair.
“Hope whoever comes out likes jigsaw puzzles, then,” I said, and may have giggled although it really, really wasn’t funny. So much for saving the planet.
Oliver hadn’t even been able to save himself.
It’s times like this that a mate on the force is worth his weight in whatever he bloody well chooses. Beer, probably, knowing Dave. Ringing up the boys in blue to report a body on the railway line—when you haven’t actually visually located said body—tends to lead to questions of the And how exactly did you know he was there, sir? variety. Shortly followed by invitations to try on a pair of handcuffs for size and come along to inspect the inside of a cell.
I suppose I could have claimed I’d shone a torch onto the tracks and seen a body part—if I’d managed to get the words out without gagging—but it made for a lot less emotional wear and tear, not to mention suspension of disbelief, to ring up our friendly neighbourhood DCI and say Sorry, mate, I think I’ve found another one.
There were the usual groans, but otherwise he took it fairly well, all things considered. I relaxed into Phil’s embrace. We’d come back into the shadow of the house, where the breeze was slightly less icy and my voice wouldn’t carry the news of murder most foul halfway down the street. Not that anyone was likely to be out in their garden to hear me, in the pitch-black chill of a February evening, but it didn’t hurt to be cautious.
“You all right, mate?” I asked. “You’ve hardly sworn at all.”
Dave muttered something under his breath. Probably making up for the deficit. “Home with the nipper, aren’t I?” he said more audibly. “Jen says if his first word’s a four-letter one, she’ll divorce me after all.”
Ouch. Considering how close they’d come a year or so back, that was a bit near to the bone. “Better hope he doesn’t start with ‘Mama’ then. Or ‘Dada,’ come to that,” I pointed out. “Course, if he did, you’d get to find out who’s more important to him.”
“That’ll be a toss-up between his bottle and his bloody bunny rabbit. Oh, for—” There was further muttering, plus a distant sound of what I was pretty sure was Jen laughing her head off, then Dave’s voice came back full force. “Right. I’ll get the wheels in motion. Despite actually being off duty and enjoying some well-deserved family time. You sit tight and wait for reinforcements. And, for God’s sake, don’t get it into your head to go prancing about on those flippin’ tracks looking for evidence. The other half’s with you, I assume?”
“Yeah, Phil’s here.” His arm tightened around me, and I sent him a grateful glance, not that I could see him that well.
“Thank God for small mercies.”
Huh. I hadn’t thought Dave liked Phil all that much.
“At least he’ll stop you doing anything terminally daft,” Dave went on.
“Oi, I’m not an idiot,” I protested, but Dave had already hung up. After that, there was nothing else for it but to go back inside to fill Not-Oliver in on the grisly not-quite-discovery. It wasn’t like he wasn’t going to find out anyway when Dave sent the boys round to see if it was all in my head, which, believe me, would’ve been my preferred outcome.
Not-Oliver had wrapped himself back up in his duvet and wasn’t looking any less haggard than before. He shot us an anxious glance when we trooped back into his living room.
I tried to find a way to break it to him gently. “Uh, it’s about your mate. Oliver,” I started.
“No. Really? You don’t say.” He’d livened up now: the sarcasm was back.
Sod the gentleness. I was about to give him
both barrels, but Phil beat me to it. “We think he’s had an accident.”
No, we bloody well didn’t.
“What do you mean?” Not-Oliver was wide-awake now.
“We think he’s gone over the garden wall”—Phil made it sound as if Oliver had simply decided to take a stroll and nipped over the wall as a shortcut—“and onto the railway line.”
Now the bloke looked like he was having a nightmare. “You . . . saw him?”
I could tell by his tone he had a fair idea of what the passage of a rush hour’s worth of trains could do to a body, and it wasn’t an image I enjoyed having in my head, either. “Listen mate— Oi, you got a name?”
“Pete.”
“Right. Okay, Pete, I’m Tom and this is Phil, and we’re not certain that’s what’s happened”—fuck me, I’d never been more certain in my life—“but the police are coming over to check it out. So we’re gonna sit tight here and wait for them to do their stuff. You want me to make you a cuppa?”
“Uh. Yeah?”
I popped into the kitchen, located the kettle without recourse to any psychic abilities, gave it a good rinse (nasty scale problem, not that Oliver would be worrying about crunchy bits in his cuppa anymore), filled it, and switched it on. The tea was a box of fair-trade stuff Oliver had probably liberated from the café at the Smithy and the biscuits, which I tentatively put down to Pete, were Asda own-brand chocolate digestives. I shoved the packet under my arm so I could carry them in with all three mugs at once.
I’d made Pete’s tea white, no sugar, which was apparently how he usually drank it, if his lack of reaction on taking a sip was any guide. Course, it could have been shock. Perhaps I should’ve added sugar after all. I gave him a biccie to make up the lack.
Phil let him get halfway through before turning on the pressure. “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to harm Oliver?”
Pete swallowed too quick and choked on a crumb. My beloved expressed his sympathy by tapping his foot until the coughing fit subsided. “No?” Pete managed in the end, his face bright red.
“Was he involved with anyone?”
“Uh, no?”
The bloke really needed to work on that habit of making his answers sound like questions.
“Anyone at work, maybe?” Phil persisted.
Pete roused himself. “Are you trying to imply something?”
“Just trying to get at the facts. Did he talk to you about his work colleagues?”
“No. We hardly see each other. When he’s home, I’m asleep, and when I get back from work, he’s on his way out.”
Phil didn’t correct him on the tense. Fair enough, we didn’t know for sure Oliver was dead, although I knew what my money would be on. “What time do you start work?”
“Ten o’clock. Shit. I’m going to be late, aren’t I?”
Not as late as Oliver.
“And you usually sleep until . . .?”
“Nine.”
“Not great for the social life, that, is it?” I put in. “Wouldn’t it be better to sleep early and have your evenings with everyone else?”
Pete turned to glare at me. “What, and see literally zero hours of daylight at this time of year? That’d be fucking fantastic, that would.”
Phil leaned forward. “You must have talked to Oliver sometimes. Before he went to work, days off, whatever. So how did he seem, lately?”
“I don’t know. The same as he always was.”
“He didn’t seem troubled?” Phil’s tone was steady, almost mesmerising.
“No.”
“Did he talk to you about Mr. Parrot?”
“I can’t remember.” Pete was bright red again, and the coughing fit had been over ages ago. I snuck a glance over at Phil, but there was nothing on his face to say he reckoned Pete was telling porkies.
“Did you ever see them together?”
“Dunno. Look, why are you asking me all this? We don’t even know for sure if he’s—” Pete swallowed.
I huffed. “Jonathan Parrot certainly is.”
“Well, I didn’t kill him.” Pete took an angry gulp of tea.
“I’m not suggesting you had anything to do with either death,” Phil said smoothly. “Just trying to build a picture.”
It didn’t help. Pete’s answers got shorter and shorter, and then dried up completely. We sat there in moody silence.
After a while, I realised I hadn’t heard a train go by for ages. I thought about having a sneaky listen to see if the vibes had gone, meaning they’d found him. But I bottled it. I’d know soon enough, right?
And in fact it wasn’t long after that there was a knock on the door. Phil got up to answer it. He came back in with a bloke in a hi-vis jacket over his British Transport Police uniform. “Tom, this is Sergeant Kapoor.”
“Mr. Paretski?” Kapoor was a youngish lad, early twenties at a guess, with light-tan skin and black hair cut aggressively short, probably to make him look less like a teenage heartthrob and more like a rough, tough officer of the law. With eyelashes like that, he was onto a definite loser there, though. “I understand you’re the person who reported the fatality?”
“You found him?” I blurted out. The sombre expressions had been a clue, but well, Phil had always had a bit of a resting-grim-face thing going on, and for all I knew the sarge had had other plans for his Saturday night than traipsing up and down train tracks combing them for hamburger.
Okay, so I’d been clutching at straws.
“We’ve confirmed there’s been a fatality. It’ll take some time before we’ll be able to positively identify the victim.”
Meaning, they were still picking up the pieces and working out which one went where. My stomach lurched. Phil swallowed.
Our host Pete was nursing his mug of tea in a clear state of shock and, if he had any sense, anxiety for his own potential treatment by the coppers. After all, he had to have been here when it happened, even if he had been dead—pun very definitely not intended—to the world. Had he heard a noise? Half woken up, then rolled over and gone back to sleep?
Was he torturing himself now with knowledge that if he’d only done things a little bit differently, he could’ve saved Oliver’s life?
He wasn’t the only one.
“Sir?”
I realised I must have missed a question or something. “Sorry, mate. Uh, say again?”
Kapoor was staring at me like I’d sprouted an extra head. Great. Another copper who’d refuse to believe in anything he couldn’t see for himself. “I understand you had a . . . premonition about the incident?”
I grimaced. “Sort of. You, uh, you want to check with DCI Dave Southgate. I’ve worked with him before.”
The bloke was nodding, but still seemed uncertain. “Yeah, I got the memo. I was just wondering . . . What’s it like?”
“What?”
“See, my great-gran, she always used to know when people in the family were going to die—is it like that for you? Did you see it happen in, like, a vision?”
Even worse. Not a sceptic. An enthusiast. “No. I don’t get visions. I get . . .” Christ, I wasn’t sure how to describe it. “It was really bright. And, uh, thick.” The worst thing was, there had been a sense of smugness about it. Like, That’s you disposed of. “Unpleasant.”
Kapoor was rapt. “My great-gran, she used to see them wrapped in a white cloth, like a shroud, a few days before they died.”
Lucky her. “I didn’t know in advance.” Christ, if only. That might actually have been useful. “I just knew where he was, once I’d started looking.”
He frowned. “You were looking for remains on the track?”
“No, I was looking for Oliver. Well, not exactly looking. More sort of listening. For the vibes.” Shit. I’d only been speaking to him yesterday. He’d shared—all right, scoffed—my carrot cake.
I was never going to eat carrot cake again.
“I thought you’d been briefed,” Phil put in impatiently. “What’s with the twe
nty questions? If you’ve got an issue with Tom, take it up with DCI Southgate.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Kapoor’s face fell. “Yes, that’s all—”
“Is it like a Hindu-tradition thing? Your gran’s visions, I mean?” I blurted out, both because I’d started to feel bad for the bloke and because Christ knew it’d be nice to think I wasn’t the only one with a so-called gift he’d like to return.
“What? Nah, Great-gran was Scottish Presbyterian. From Aberdeenshire. She met my great-grandad when—” He broke off at a glare from Phil. “Sorry. I understand DCI Southgate knows how to get in touch with you?”
“Yeah.” I wouldn’t have minded hearing a bit more about Great-gran, actually, but Phil was probably right. It wasn’t the time.
“Then you’re free to go.” Kapoor turned to Pete, who’d been busy staring at me like I had three heads, and one of them was David bloody Blaine’s. “Mr. Steadman? We’re going to need to ask you some questions.”
Pete looked like he wished he’d never come out from under his duvet.
I was glad it was me who was driving us home. There’s something about being a passenger in a car, especially when it’s dark, that always gets my brain working on overdrive. Maybe it’s the lack of visible scenery, coupled with the lack of anything to bloody well do. It’s not the same when I’m at the wheel, thank God, but even so, by the time we got back to St. Albans, my thoughts were coming thick and fast. And I didn’t like the direction they were coming from.
“We should’ve gone straight there,” I muttered to Phil as we finally staggered through our front door sometime after midnight. “Soon as the shop shut. Sod it, we should’ve waited for him outside the Smithy.”
“We didn’t know what was going to happen,” Phil reminded me.
“Yeah, it’s not like murderers ever kill more than once, now is it? Christ, how can you be so calm about this? We practically threw him to the fucking wolves. There we were in the pub having a laugh about peas and eating our fish and sodding chips, and he was here getting murdered.”