waited for him to tell me that we wouldn’t have bothered coming, that the council wouldn’t have been interested in removing a burned-out car from a private field. And he’d have had a fair point, but he didn’t go there; he just shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Relax. Don’t worry about it. Just how about you show me the spot, okay?’
He took a moment to breathe, and then nodded and said, ‘Sure. Okay.’ Then he took a heavy bunch of keys from his pocket and unhooked the gate and opened it a crack and said, ‘You won’t need your car. It’s right over here.’
It was barely inside the gate, on a barren patch of clay off to the right of the track, shielded from the road by a grassy bank and from the rest of the farm by a clump of trees and overgrown bramble bushes. A twenty-foot black square, dotted with lumps of twisted, melted stuff, identifiable only by guesswork and its relative placement; a bumper here, a tyre there.
The ground was hard, but two months ago it hadn’t been; there were wheel tracks leading to the burn site, until this morning cast into the earth but now crumbled and flattened by Giles’ tractor, its hefty tyres overlaying them with a patchwork of deep chevrons. I tutted at him quietly, although it made no real difference; this was quite evidently the crime scene, however much he’d trampled on it.
And more than that, Giles had approached and retreated from the spot in a straight line, and hadn’t strayed around the edges of the square, and this, I realised as I surveyed the scene, might be very good news indeed. I turned to him as he stood awkwardly beside the Range Rover, picking at the skin around his thumbnail, and pointed at his car and asked him, ‘Giles, did you drive that over here at any point?’
He took a few steps towards me and shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. Why?’
I indicated the patch of ground between the scorch marks and the road. ‘You didn’t pull up alongside the car to have a look?’
‘No, definitely not.’
I nodded thanks, and looked back to where a second set of churned up tracks splintered off from the rest and curved around the burn site at the foot of the roadside bank, coming to an abrupt end a few yards beyond where the car had sat. As they straightened, they became clearer, and where they ended they were very clear indeed.
They were perfectly preserved, the tread pattern pressed into soft clay and then baked in the persistent sun, this heatwave of which the Great British Public had grown weary within a matter of days, but for which I now offered up a silent prayer of thanks.
‘So you’re telling me,’ I called, ‘that there’s no reason you know of for anything to have been parked here?’ He shook his head. I nodded mine, and took out my phone. Still no signal. I stood, gritted my teeth through a twinge in my hip, and joined him beside his car. ‘Next question,’ I said. ‘Have you got a phone on you that works? I need to make a call.’
I surveyed the scene as he mumbled and fumbled in his jacket. I didn’t know the circumstances. I didn’t know whether John and Julian had died here, and if so, whether they’d come of their own free will. But common sense told me this would be a strange place to arrange a meeting, especially with the kind of man who’d shared their final farewell.
Because, yes, as much as I didn’t know the order of events, I sure as hell knew who was responsible.
Sort of.
I can’t remember his name, or what he looks like. However many times they tell me, or show me his picture, it’s always the same: within minutes, I’ve forgotten.
I’ve all but given up trying. His picture is only an e-fit anyway, and no one really knows his name; he went by so many that in the end they just picked one and stuck with it, even though they knew he’d stolen it from a baby’s grave. I tend to just call him That Man. That man who hurt me. That man who took away my memories, my hopes, my future. That man who all but killed me with his bare hands.
It’s not just the forgetting. There’s the falling down, too. Some days I can’t walk very well because the nerves to my right leg are fused, or snagged, or . . . something. I’ve got it all written down. In any case, I might be in the street, or in the supermarket – never anywhere soft like the garden or a bouncy castle – and oh! There it goes, folding under me like the bolt just fell out. It happened in the car once, and I couldn’t get to the brake and had to swerve into a hedge to avoid a cyclist. I didn’t tell anyone in case they stopped me from driving, but I’m scared sometimes.
Often, I feel like I’m not entirely inside myself, like I’ve fallen out of my body and haven’t quite slotted back in right. It’s like there’s a satellite delay between my body and my senses, like having a fever but, most days, without the cold sweats and the nausea. It’s surreal and a bit frightening, and when it happens it’s often accompanied by a little shock, like when something makes you jump. I used to pay good money to feel like that of an evening. I miss having the choice.
But it’s not every day. Some days I can walk and grip and find things funny. And there are a lot of things I can remember, too. Most days I can think of my own name, which comes up more often than you’d guess if you’ve never had to write it on your hand in biro.
I can remember liking broccoli, which makes me gag on sight now.
I can remember my wedding day, looking at my ridiculous cake of a dress in the mirror and wondering how I’d ever let him talk me into it. I can remember holding my decree absolute in my hands and trembling under the sudden weight of my freedom.
I can remember sunshine and walks in the park, watching other people’s children hurtle down the slide and boing around on those spring-mounted wooden horses, and wishing not to be among the throng of parents standing by with pride or impatience or overprotective anxiety or idle indifference, but to dare to come back when they’d all gone home and play on the rides myself.
I can remember our family Keycamp holiday in France, a hundred degrees, me at eight chaining Calippos in my mini bikini, my sister Reena at thirteen head-to-toe in black and wincing through cups of bitter coffee, trying to impress the pool boy with the 750 Suzuki. I can remember him offering her a ride to the beach on the pillion seat, and Dad’s face turning from brown to purple at the very idea. I can remember the sirens blaring past the caravan site when he roared off on it alone and died under a farm truck.
I can remember my first day at school, screaming for my mum while the other kids stared at me blankly, and I can remember my last day, laughing off my A-Level results and wondering how I was going to break the news at home.
I can remember all of my first days as a police officer; my first day of training, my first as a probationer on the beat, my first dead body, my first arrest of a blushing teenage shoplifter who didn’t run, struggle or even argue but just sat sadly in the back of the car, crying over the trouble he was in. I can remember my first day as a detective, my first incident room, my first post-mortem. And, clearest of all, I can remember the first time I knew I was going to die.
It was ten twenty-five, Tuesday morning, nine weeks ago. Twenty-six degrees C and pouring with rain. I was standing in the car park behind the constabulary’s headquarters, watching it bounce off the tarmac and soak through the canvas of my shoes. I was wearing a twenty-year-old pac-a-mac from Gap, which in the heat was keeping me as wet inside my clothes as out. I was confused.
I’d
