Human Remains (19 page)

‘… but I don’t work like that, I mean, it’s nice if people do tell me things, but they don’t get that the information I need is usually something really specific. Even if they give me a quote, the chances are I’m only ever going to use a few words of it. It’s just a job, after all, like any other job…’

The traffic moved again and I drove through the town centre and out the other side, heading for the estate where all the roads were named after poets, my mind on other things.

‘It all gets easier when you’ve got proper contacts, though – people who know you and trust that you’re not going to make them look like an idiot in print. I just like talking to people, making new friends… you probably noticed…’

We drove along the main road, the side streets one after the other named after people I’d learned about at school about a hundred years ago. Longfellow Drive. Wordsworth Avenue. Keats Road…

‘It’s this next one,’ he said.

I turned left. We drove along a wide road: semi-detached houses, big bay windows, neat front gardens edged with low brick walls. It was starting to rain.

‘Just after this blue car,’ he said. ‘This one.’

I pulled in. It was a normal-looking house, bigger than mine, with a porch. For a moment I thought it was quite big and maybe journalists earned more than I thought they did, and then I realised he probably still lived with his parents, like lots of young people these days who couldn’t get a foot on the housing ladder.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘you want to come in for a coffee? You look as if you could do with one. I could make you some lunch?’

‘Thanks, but I really need to go home.’

He made no signs of undoing his seatbelt or leaving my car. For a moment I had a sudden spark of fear, and wondered if he’d invited me in for something more than coffee. I was so bad at reading situations like this: my default position was always that nobody found me sexually attractive and therefore anyone who showed an interest in me was probably dangerous.

He half-turned in his seat towards me. I shrank back a little towards the door.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘can I give you a call later? Just to see how you’re doing?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘My battery’s nearly out.’

‘Oh, right,’ he said, looking at me as if he wanted to ask if I’d ever heard of magic things called chargers. At last he unclipped his seatbelt and opened the door. ‘See you soon, then,’ he said, leaning in. ‘And thanks for the lift.’

‘Bye.’

As soon as he’d slammed the door shut I pulled away from the kerb.

There was nowhere to park, of course, anywhere near the house. I walked back from Howard Street, head down, thinking about my mum. It was all I could think about now. Whatever he’d said – Sam – it had failed to register.

I could see the cat standing at the corner, her tail flashing from side to side, in greeting or petulance, it was hard to tell. When I got closer she stood and waited for me as though she’d reached the edge of her known universe and to cross the road was beyond her, sliding her body affectionately against the greasy metal pole of the street-light, territory marked by a hundred dogs before her.

‘Hello, puss-puss,’ I said quietly, and she meowed in response, rubbing against my ankle as soon as she could and then running in front of me, rolling on the ground and running again, showing me the way home. As we got through the door she scampered joyously towards the kitchen.

But it turned out she’d got a takeaway. A dead mouse, neatly dissected with the most succulent innards, tail and feet left for me to enjoy.

I woke up completely disorientated. I was on my bed, fully dressed, and the cat was asleep in the crook of my knees. It was ten past three and the daylight was fading already. I sat up quickly, and checked my mobile phone, which I’d left charging by my bed. There were no missed calls.

I rang the hospital from my mobile, and when I finally got through to someone on the Stroke Unit they couldn’t tell me very much beyond that my mother was ‘comfortable’; there was ‘no change’. I said I would come in as soon as I could, and the nurse – or whoever she was – told me to take my time.

I asked again if they would call me if anything happened. Even though she claimed to have my mobile phone number on file, I gave it to her again and she repeated it back slowly enough to be writing it down.

After that I sat still for a moment, wondering what was coming next. The central heating had gone off and the air felt chilly, a little damp. It was as though the house didn’t want me to be here either, was pushing me towards the door, a phantom hand on my back trying to restore order to an environment where there was none.

Downstairs, the cat was in the hall, meowing at the kitchen door and pulling at the carpet with her claws. I creaked my way down the stairs, yawning, and when I opened the door the cat shot in ahead of me, mewling at me over her shoulder as though she hadn’t eaten in weeks. For a treat I squeezed a sachet of expensive wet cat food into her clean bowl even though it wasn’t technically anywhere near her usual feeding time, and boiled the kettle while she went at it delicately, licking at the gravy and then picking the morsels off one by one.

While I was waiting for the kettle I called work, using Kate’s direct dial number to bypass the switchboard.

‘Intel, Kate speaking.’

There was an official Media Services-sanctioned greeting to use when answering the phone, but neither of us could ever remember it when put under the pressure of a ringing phone. More often than not I was so distracted when I picked up a call that I would just say ‘Hello?’ and hope it wasn’t someone too official on the other end of the phone.

‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Annabel.’ In case she’d forgotten who I was.

‘Are you OK? How’s your mum?’

‘She’s still unconscious.’

‘Do you need me to talk to Bill?’

‘No, I need to get on with stuff. They said they’d ring me if – you know, if there was any change.’

‘Frosty was looking for you earlier.’

‘Oh?’

‘Wouldn’t tell me what it was about. Said could you go and see him as soon as you get in. Want me to tell him you won’t be in for a while?’

‘No, I should be in… um… soon. I’ll let you know.’ I didn’t want her to think I was slacking. I didn’t want to give her any cause to complain about my work ethic, or for that matter to start taking over any of my responsibilities.

‘Something’s definitely going on with your rotting corpses, you know. There’s been people coming in and out all day looking for you.’

‘Really?’

‘They don’t tell me anything.’

I had a sudden memory of the reporter – Sam – telling me about a phone call he’d received, and I was about to blurt it out to Kate when I realised I wasn’t supposed to have been talking to a reporter, never mind giving him a lift home. What was it he’d said? Some woman had phoned him… ‘Have they found another body?’

‘Well, there’s one on the Chief’s Summary this morning. Shall I get Frosty to ring you?’

I gave in. ‘Sure. I’ve got the phone charged up.’

‘I’ll let him know.’

‘Thanks, Kate. Bye for now.’

I sat staring at the cold living room for a moment after ringing off, my eyes failing to focus on anything. My mum’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 on the station. There were plenty of spaces, thankfully. I left my permit on the dashboard together with a laminated card I’d made up with my force number and mobile 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 mum 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 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 lift 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, then obviously realised that 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 journos do, of course, although it would have been nicer if he’d thought to notify us first – and at the address he realised 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 neighbour who rang him, then?’

‘No – that’s the interesting bit. 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. Incoming calls all unanswered. 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 about 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 enquiry.’

‘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 mum – my mother’s been taken in to 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 ring if anything happens.’

‘Andy?’

A man had entered the room, someone I knew vaguely but couldn’t quite place. Smartly 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 emai
l, I thought.

‘I’d like to see everything you’ve got – it would really help bring us up to speed. Can I meet up 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 took myself off downstairs. Trigger had gone to a meeting and taken Kate with him. The office was silent apart from 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.