by Caz Frear
‘Nah. But then I’ve never been one of life’s great sleepers.’
She shifts position, briefly energised by this admission. ‘Any ideas why?’
I shrug. ‘I lived above a pub until I was eight – it doesn’t exactly cement regular sleeping patterns. Or maybe I eat too late? And then there’s the cheap, crappy pillows . . .’
Dr Allen stands up and walks slowly towards the door. She doesn’t exactly look annoyed by my flippant response – I’m not sure ‘annoyed’ is licensed for use on the ‘Counsellor’s List of Appropriate Faces’ – but there’s definitely a flash of something human. A silent scream of ‘why do I do this fucking job?’ that we’re all probably entitled to by the twelfth month of a hard year.
‘So, er, the little girl?’ Determined to get an answer, I stall for time, making a huge, almost slapstick performance of buttoning up my coat. ‘Do you think she’ll definitely be affected by it, long-term?’
‘At three years old, it’s very difficult to predict,’ she says eventually. ‘She’s unlikely to remember the details. She might even forget or block out the “event”. But it’s likely she’ll remember the feelings. And she’ll carry those feelings through life, into her relationships, her work and so on. Strong, innate feelings of fear, anxiety and insecurity, that she may never fully understand.’
Spikes of deep discomfort when you least expect them.
The constant low-level dread that taints everything you do.
‘And of course at three years old, she’s not really old enough to understand the finality of her mother’s death. The irreversible nature of it. That concept will add a whole new complexity in a few years’ time.’
I picture my nephew, Finn – six years old and struggling with the concepts of broccoli, backstroke and three-digit sums.
‘I’ve bought her a Christmas present,’ I say quickly, just to stop the flow of her gloomy predictions. ‘One of those Frozen dolls. It’s Anna, I think. They’d sold out of Elsa.’
Dr Allen says nothing. In our fairly limited time together, I’ve come to realise that ‘nothing’ generally means ‘bad’ and that I’ll be held to account for the ‘over-empathetic’ Christmas present at a later date. Probably when I least expect it. But then maybe I’ve got her all wrong? Maybe she just has to get on. Maybe she has another soul to save, or Christmas shopping to do. Maybe she actually doesn’t care once the sixty minutes are up. I have no idea what drives her to do her job. She probably feels the same about me.
‘Merry Christmas, Cat.’ She flicks the catch on the door and a whoosh of relief shoots through me. ‘Look after yourself. You’ll be with your family, yes?’
‘Of course,’ I lie. ‘Twelve hours of rich food and poor conversation, same as everyone. Merry Christmas to you too, Dr Allen.’
The assumption that ‘family’ equals ‘nurture’ seems a little utopian coming from someone who deals in the science of dysfunction, especially after my ‘family mediation’ remark, but then a frosty Christmas week in a twinkly, bustling London can do that to a person and I’d feel mean-spirited not playing along, even though I’m not sure I’ve got the stomach for Christmas with my family.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve got an invite.
2
Fevered and ghoulish, like Satan’s little imps, we sit and wait in darkened rooms, aching for death to bring us to life.
Welcome to a slow nightshift with Murder Investigation Team 4. Where the only crime under investigation is ‘Who ate the last of DS Parnell’s mince pies?’, and the only questions come courtesy of Chris Tarrant on three a.m. reruns of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
You see, when you work for the dead, you work for a notoriously unreliable employer. Sometimes they’re all over you, screaming their need for justice at every cursed turn. Conscripted by tortured ghosts, your need to serve them never goes away, not even when you sleep. It ferments in your stomach like a late-night curry, waking you at godless hours and leaving you queasy and exhausted for days.
But other times there’s nothing. Nothing new, anyway. Just an avalanche of paperwork and quiz show repeats.
They can never prepare you for the down-time, for the sedentary stage that follows the kill. When you’re holed up at Hendon – the Met’s training centre for new recruits – and you’re being dazzled by mock courtrooms and flashing blue lights, you can never quite believe that admin will soon become your god. Data, your religion. I certainly couldn’t anyway, although in fairness I might have been warned. There’s every chance I just didn’t hear it over the sound of my pounding heart every time a murder detective, especially the fabled DCI Kate Steele, took to the hallowed stage.
The slack-jawed child swooning over the prima ballerina.
‘OK, for thirty-two thousand pounds, who is the patron saint of chefs?’
DS Luigi Parnell – nightshift’s lead imp, and incidentally about as Italian as a bacon sandwich – jabs his Arsenal mug in my direction and winks at me like we’re old allies from the trenches, even though it’s less than six months since he alighted the Good Ship Gang Crime and took up with Murder. ‘Come on then,’ he says, ‘You and Seth are supposed to be the brains around here. Enlighten me and Renée?’
DC Seth Wakeman looks up from a textbook, surreptitiously brushing pie crumbs off his jumper. ‘No idea, Sarge.’
‘Nor me,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll Google it.’
Parnell looks pseudo-disgusted and swivels back to the TV, muttering something about private-school educations and Google being the death of independent thinking. DC Renée Akwa laughs and offers me a crisp. I mindlessly grab a fistful even though I’m not keen on the flavour and it’s only been an hour since we stank out the squad room with a garlicky pizza.
Awesome Renée Akwa. Twenty-five years a DC and as constant as the sun. I’d have sneered at that once, back when I had notions of progression but it’s amazing what a flip-out in a prostitute’s bedsit can do to pour concrete on your glass ceiling.
I squint at my screen, too lethargic to reach for my glasses. ‘So St Lawrence is the patron saint of chefs. St Michael’s the patron saint of coppers, if you’re interested. He’s the patron saint of the sick and the suffering too.’
Parnell doesn’t rise to it, choosing to nag Seth instead. ‘Here, Einstein, are you ready for another test? Fat lot of use Google will be when you’re trying to remember “Revisions to PACE Code G” for your boards next month.’
Seth groans, pretends to hang himself with a strip of tinsel, and the laugh that breaks out goes some way to dissolving the twisted ball of angst I’ve been ferrying around since I left Dr Allen’s introspection chamber earlier this evening. Later, as Parnell argues with Chris Tarrant that the Nile is definitely longer than the Amazon, and Seth gives us his rugby-club’s slightly un-PC rendition of the ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’, the urge to do a Miss Havisham, to bolt the doors and stop the clocks and cocoon the four of us in our cosy-as-fleece squad room forever, overwhelms me.
And then a desk clerk clutching a Lemsip spoils everything.
‘Luigi, you’re wanted,’ he croaks from the doorway. I struggle to hear the details as they huddle together – Parnell’s shot-putter bulk blocks out all soundwaves – but I get the gist.
A body. A woman. Leamington Square, by the entrance to the gardens. Just at the back of Exmouth Market.
It looks suspicious. Islington plod have secured the scene. DCI Steele has been notified.
Exmouth Market.
Not strictly our patch, but when the other two on-call Murder teams are up to their eyeballs in bodies and you’re just sitting around eating crap and procrastinating about paperwork, you don’t start quoting boundaries and grid references. I don’t anyway. Parnell gives it a try.
And with a creeping sense of unease that strips away all the notions of sanctuary I held just two minutes ago, I think to myself that it is my patch really. In the umbilical sense, at least.
I spent the first eight years of my life there
.
Last I heard, my dad was back there, running our old pub.
Mixing with his old crew again.
Living the Bad Life.
*
At ten p.m. every evening, as punctual as a Swiss clock, Dad would excuse himself from whatever bar-room brawl he’d been refereeing and walk the few hundred yards up to Leamington Square Gardens to smoke his solitary cigarette of the day. Whether he was dodging Mum – an evangelical ex-smoker – or whether he did it for reasons of solitude and sanity, I never really knew, but I’d watch him most nights from my window, quickly throwing down whatever book I’d been reading by the light of my Glow-Worm as soon as I heard his steps crunching across the gravel. Eventually he’d become just a dot in the distance, a flash of a phone or the flare of a lighter, but I felt comforted by it somehow. Happy that he had five minutes’ peace.
He took me with him once. I was only six. Mum was at Auntie Carmel’s so Dad warned me it was ‘a special treat’ which generally meant ‘secret’, along with everything else that happened when Dad was left in charge (crisps for dinner, a very loose diktat on brushing teeth, and illegal poker nights in the back room with the men Mum didn’t like). It was the first time I’d been to the gardens at night – I’d been there often during the day, playing shops in the bandstand, hopscotch on the path – and after we’d been there a while and we’d chatted about Toy Story and my new puffa jacket, Dad asked me if I was frightened being out so late. He said most kids my age would crap themselves and start bawling to go home.
I told him I wasn’t scared of anything when he was with me and he’d ruffled my curls and said that was right.
Tonight I feel scared though, and even with Parnell at my side, as solid as the plane trees that line the perimeter of Leamington Square, I can’t seem to shake the feeling that no good will come of being back here.
Not quite a sense of doom, but one of nagging disquiet.
As soon as we’re parked up by the outer cordon, I walk over to Parnell’s side and let his genial grumpiness soothe me.
‘Forty lousy minutes and it’d have been changeover. Some other sod’s problem, and a hot shower and a cuddle with the wife for me. Jinxed we are, Kinsella, bloody jinxed.’
‘Doesn’t bother me,’ I lie. ‘No one to cuddle up to or switch the hot water on. Might as well be freezing my arse off with you.’
If I say this enough times, I might convince myself. Then I might also be able to convince myself to tell Parnell and Steele that I grew up less than a football pitch away from here. That my dad runs a pub so close you can hear the jukebox on a warm summer’s day when the main doors are open. That I lived above that pub until I was eight years old.
Before everything changed.
But I can’t give Steele any more reasons to ship me out of Murder, not after Bedsit-gate. Not that this is the same, mind. There isn’t anything procedurally wrong with having once grazed your knee on the same spot as a dead body. But then you don’t get to DCI level, with no fewer than four commendations under your belt, without knowing how to exploit an opportunity, and therefore any admission that I’ve got the slightest personal connection to this case and Steele will have me counting beans with the Financial Intelligence crew before I can say ‘Excel spreadsheet.’
As Parnell continues his mournful dirge, I weigh this up one final time, staring at my reflection in the car window. All I see is someone who needs her job in MIT4 as desperately as she needs a fringe-trim and a big dose of vitamin C.
It’s simple. I’ll say nothing.
Steele’s here already, forensic-suited and booted, chatting to two SOCOs as they bob up and down placing evidence markers on the floor.
‘Jesus, she got here quick,’ I say. ‘Doesn’t she live over Ealing way?’
Parnell rummages in the boot, his voice is muffled but the square is convent quiet. ‘I keep telling you, she’s not human. She doesn’t have a shower and get dressed like you and me. She regenerates, like the Terminator.’ He straightens up and waves over to Steele, tossing me a pair of shoe covers and a protective suit with the other hand. Steele signals for us to hurry up, pointing at a hunched figure standing by the entrance to the forensic tent. ‘Oh brilliant. Is that the back of Vickery’s head?’
‘Not in the mood for being patronised in sub-zero temperatures, no?’
Joking aside, I don’t have an issue with Mo Vickery. Hats off to anyone who can stand in a ditch for eight hours collecting maggots and call it a vocation. And when you’re twenty-six, rosy-cheeked and you’ve hitched your wagon to one of the most hierarchical organisations in British society, being patronised is kind of par for the course, really. A rite of passage you can either embrace or ignore.
We suit up in silence. Parnell struggles with his zip while I scrape every last strand of my hair into a bun before Mo Vickery tells me again that she’d sooner I ‘piss on her porch’ than come anywhere near her crime scene with my thick Celtic thatch.
‘So what do you reckon?’ I say, nodding towards Steele. ‘Must be bad to get her out of her jim-jams.’
Parnell grabs his e-cig out of the car door and takes a fast, deep draw, his face etched with longing for a big-boy cigarette. ‘Chief Super gets twitchy around Christmas,’ he says. ‘Joe Public doesn’t like the idea of someone’s presents going begging under a tree while they’re being carved up in the morgue so he always brings the big guns in.’ He blows out a plume of something sickly, apricots maybe. ‘Although it could be a tramp for all we know. Some old dosser who’s shuffled off to the great cardboard box in the sky, right at the end of my bloody shift.’
‘All life is sacred, Sarge.’ I grin the grin of the lapsed Catholic.
‘Yeah well, so are my testicles, and Mags will be using them as baubles if I end up working another Christmas.’
He slams the car door and the noise has a finality to it, like the hammer at an auction. We walk across the square and duck down under the inner cordon. Parnell’s knees click loudly and he groans even louder.
I suppress a laugh, almost.
‘Yeah, all right, never get old, kiddo.’ I nod towards the tent, a reminder that not everyone gets the chance. ‘OK, never get fat then,’ he adds, sheepish. ‘And take your cod liver oil every day – the liquid, though, not the tablets, there’s more vitamin D in the liquid, it’s better for your joints.’ He looks satisfied, his good deed done for the day. ‘Don’t say your Uncle Lu doesn’t teach you anything . . .’
‘Masks,’ booms Vickery, not bothering to turn around. ‘He’s already handled her. We can do without any more contamination, thank you.’
I aim a sympathetic look towards ‘he’, the young PC manning the cordon, but he doesn’t look fazed.
‘Preservation of life was my priority,’ he says, in a way that must make his mum really proud. ‘I had to check for a pulse, I’m afraid. The witness was a bit . . .’ He makes a drinking gesture with his right hand. ‘Well, she wasn’t sure she was actually dead.’
Vickery shoots a deadpan glance towards a young girl perched on the back of an ambulance wearing stripper heels and an emergency foil blanket, and then looks back at our unmistakably dead body. I want to point out that there’s a whole world of difference between being politely informed of a body over the telephone and literally stumbling over one when you’re brain-fried from Jagerbombs and panicking about train times, but I keep my own counsel.
Steele flicks her head towards the ambulance. ‘Have a word afterwards, Kinsella. You’re more her age. You might get more out of her.’
I nod and we step into the forensic tent. Vickery leads the way.
Outside it’s about as pitch-black as London ever gets but inside, with the all the LED lights and flashing cameras, the full Technicolor horror of this woman’s last hours takes centre-stage. I hesitate to look down for a few seconds, silently counting one, two, three, in small sharp breaths before I clock Steele looking at me – irritated or concerned, I’m not sure. It’s usually a blend of both. On
the count of four I give in to the inevitable and lower my gaze to see something you couldn’t really call a face anymore, more a tawdry Halloween mask – blood blanketing the head, hair completely matted, apart from a few blonde tufts that seem to have survived the flood, throat scored with long thin slashes as if someone was sharpening a knife. I crouch down and closer to the body I smell something. A fruity, floral perfume that must have been sprayed in the not-too-distant past, and a whiff of something like fabric softener on a well-cared-for coat.
Scents of a recent life.
More depressing to me than the acrid stench of death.
My stomach revolts and I stand up quickly. Too quickly. I try to cover myself by pretending to offer Parnell my slightly better vantage point but Steele sees through me. I’m not usually that deferent.
She slips her mask down. ‘You OK?’
Define OK. I haven’t cried, vomited or momentarily passed out, which is more than can be said for what happened at Bedsit-gate but OK? Far from it.
A stint with the Bean Counters flashes before me.
‘I’m fine, Boss.’ I even manage a small smile, hope that it reaches my eyes.
‘Do we have an ID?’ asks Parnell, cocking his head this way and that, trying to make sense of her face.
‘No, but there’s a receipt in a pocket so we’ve got that photographed and sent over. Renée’s onto MISPER already but frankly they’re going to need a bit more than “female” and “blonde” to go on.’ Steele wafts a hand in front of her face. ‘And with all the blood, it’s hard to give them anything approaching a precise age at the mo. Hands look young-ish but then so do mine I’m told, and I’m no spring chicken.’
‘She might not be a missing person as far as anyone’s concerned,’ says Vickery, peering closely at the woman’s neck. ‘She hasn’t been dead that long.’
I swallow hard, will my voice to come out normal. ‘So how long do you reckon, Mo?’