‘I’m . . .’ trying to think of something to say . . . ‘planning on shouting at my boss for dragging me out, and being home in time for Cash in the Attic.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ she agreed, and then giggled to herself. ‘Hey, you know what’d be even better?’
‘What?’
‘Tango & Cash in the Attic.’
Ha ha.
I knew I’d be fixed by lunchtime. The cold light of day would see my head straight and my priorities in order in no time. Or at least that was what I thought.
As it turned out, the light of day was already as hot as the belly of Hell when I stepped from my car onto flame-scorched sand, hung my badge from its lanyard around my neck, and entered a world of violence and horror for the likes of which even the most depraved of my many nightmares had left me woefully underprepared.
It was 6.59 a.m. My name is Alisha Green, and this, to the best of my understanding, is the truth about Erica Shaw.
A squirrel darted a stuttering dash along the bough above my head, twitching its velvety grey nose at the edges of the shadows among the leaves and sniffing suspiciously at the encroaching sunlight. In the dense cover high above, a lone woodpigeon flexed its wings and fluttered the sleep from its rumpled feathers. He looked like he’d had a rough night.
I looked worse, if my reflection in the car window was anything to go by. I’d had them both open all the way here, and my undried hair had frizzed up into a bouffant bird’s nest. I slipped the hairband from my wrist and bundled the mess into a rough, damp knot at the base of my neck. If it didn’t improve me, it might at least give the pigeon second thoughts about moving in.
I propped my foot on the sun-bleached picnic trestle beside the car and bent to tighten my shoelace. A pair of wasps buzzed hungrily around the rubbish bin beside me, keeping a respectful distance from one another as they took turns to dive inside for a bite. A third investigated the sticky rim of a Coke can, idly dropped in the grass not three feet away, the silvered peaks of its crushed carcass shimmering thousands of tiny jewels of light across the fixed-penalty warning notice plastered to the receptacle. No Littering. Maximum fine £2,500. The futility of mandatory environmental correctness, summed up in a shiny red aluminium nutshell. I picked up the can and disposed of it properly. The wasp didn’t flinch.
This, right here, is the kind of peace I crave: the earlymorning sun prickling my upturned face; the idle lapping of the river against the pebbles on the bank; the soft quirrup of ducklings perpetually distracted from the arduous task of keeping up with mum; the merest whisper of distant traffic, just there enough to temper the isolation without intruding on the blissful, cossetting quiet of—
‘Oi! Pocahontas! Over here!’
Oh. Right. Kevin.
I took in a lingering lungful of cowshit and pollen.
Geoff Green – no relation – greeted me with an indifferent nod as I slipped between my Alfa and the adjacent patrol car. I’d seen the burly constable around often enough to know his name, but his snakelike eyes and disdainful demeanour had always deterred me from wanting to know much more about him. Whether he perpetually wished he were somewhere else, or simply didn’t like the look of me any more than I did him, I couldn’t entirely tell. Nor did I particularly care.
Geoff had been left in charge of guarding the inner perimeter. It was clearly a hurried affair, the blue-and-white warning tape sagging between posts speared skew-wiff and at random intervals into the sandy earth as it bisected the picnic site. It also seemed a somewhat extraneous measure, given that the access road was barricaded by patrol cars at its inception half a mile back, the car park entrance was itself taped and guarded, and a fourth cordon encircled what seemed to be the object of the collective attention – a burned-out car slumped at the far side of the clearing.
If I’d known him better, I might have accused Geoff of erecting the barrier himself, just to look as though he had something important to do. However, half a dozen years having passed between us without the need for small talk, and with neither of us any more inclined than the other to fix what wasn’t broken, I kept my suspicions to myself and simply returned Geoff’s sulky nod as I ducked under the tape, which he lifted just high enough to garrotte me had I not been half-expecting it.
At the other end of the mood swing, and entirely at odds with his tone on the phone, Kevin McManus was a veritable grin on a stick. He picked through a maze of yellow plastic markers and staked-off squares of sand, sterile suit rustling, teeth flashing, arms wide like he thought he was going to get a hug. ‘You know, for a minute I thought you might blow me out,’ he crowed, his voice sounding hollow and windswept against the squawk and chatter of radios and crime scene techs and the rattle and hum of a diesel generator.
‘Save it,’ I warned him. ‘You’re at the top of my shitlist today.’
‘Well, aren’t we the little ray of sunshine?’ In defiance of the mechanics of the human face, and presumably working on the assumption that I was joking, he broadened his smile to within a whisker of obscuring his own vision. ‘Listen, don’t go shooting the messenger, okay? You know I wouldn’t kick you out of bed without—’
I choked on my own spit.
‘I mean. . . You know, drag you out of—’
‘Where is he?’
‘Who?’
Oh, Jesus Christ, Kevin. ‘Anyone you like. Take your time, I’ve got all day.’
‘John,’ he remembered, with none of the exaggerated embarrassment you or I might affect when caught with our wits down. Instead, he ran a hand through his dark, wiry mop and scratched at the short patch over his crown, a remnant of a recent pistol-whipping. ‘He’s, um . . . in the car,’ he said. ‘I think.’
‘You think?’
‘Well, it’s . . .’ He glanced over his shoulder at the remains of the car and just sort of sighed.
‘What about DC Keith? Any sign?’ John Fairey hadn’t been alone when he’d seemingly vanished into thin air; there was no trace of the freshly minted detective he’d snagged for a dogsbody, either.
Kevin gave me a shrug and a sympathetic smile. ‘I’ll get you a suit,’ he said.
‘Where’s Mal?’
‘The what?’ Kevin dropped a fetching pair of white rubber boots at my feet and handed me the paper jumpsuit he’d retrieved from the back of the nearby CSI van. He’d tried to flirt with Sandra, the duty pathologist, but she was on the phone and had batted him away with an irritable glare. His smile had faded rapidly.
‘Mal,’ I repeated. ‘Mal Lowry. He should be here.’
Kevin narrowed his eyes and nodded with a look that said No shit, Sherlock. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We’ve all got personal problems, right?’
I didn’t know what he meant by that; I just knew it didn’t explain where my DCI was. I flattened the suit out on the ground and slipped my feet into the leg holes. ‘You know what else I can’t see?’ I pulled
