To Catch a Rabbit (3 page)

‘Max!’ she called.

Her husband turned. He nodded, gave her a wave.

‘Have you got Ben? Where’s Ben?’ She was at Max’s side.

‘He’s here somewhere.’ Max shrugged, he went to kiss her on the cheek, but she was already turning away.

‘Sophie? Where did Ben go?’

Her daughter was looking down at her phone, thumbs dancing over the screen. ‘Oh, hi Mum. Dunno. He was here a minute ago.’

Karen pushed between clusters of families, swallowing the urge to shout. The lights of the school building only reached the top of the embankment. Here, on the field, the dark deepened towards the river. She spotted a small boy in her son’s class.

‘Do you know where Ben is?’

‘Yes,’ the boy pointed behind her. At the same moment she felt a tug at her sleeve.

‘Mummy, you came!’ It was Ben, his eyes wide in the darkness. ‘You missed it.’

‘There you are!’ She pulled him close and stroked his hair.

‘You missed the Roman candle, it was awesome.’

She tried to calm her breathing, hide her fear from him. ‘How come there’s no bonfire?’

‘Don’t know. Daddy said it was the healthy safety Nazis took it away.’

‘Health and Safety, and not Nazis, not real ones.’

Karen took his hand and they wove through the other families, back to their own.

The next morning, in the boardroom at RAMA, Florence Moyo sat with her elbows on the table and her head resting on her hands, as if it was too heavy to be held by her neck alone. She was a large woman, her eyes heavily lidded and circled by shadows. Karen stole glances at her in between taking notes. Mrs Moyo was five months pregnant and Mr Moyo was explaining to Jaz that they had reached the end of their patience and their hope. The refusal of their claim meant he had lost his right to work and soon they would lose their accommodation too. They had a teenage daughter, settled in a local school. They couldn’t go back to Zimbabwe, even if they wanted to. There were things that were hard to say out loud. A silence grew in the room.

‘Shall I...?’ Karen stood up.

Jaz finished her sentence. ‘Get the leaflet, yes.’

They had a leaflet to help people through the appeal process, step by step. As Karen left the room to get a copy from the shelf, Rudo turned to Jaz Kumar and began to lift his sweater.

‘You see what they did to me in my own country? How can I go back?’

She pulled a chair up in front of the tall bookshelf in the office. As she put one foot on it to test it wasn’t going to wobble, a breath, no more than that, made her turn.

‘Can I help you perhaps?’ Florence Moyo’s voice was low, each consonant clearly enunciated. ‘Maybe I should steady that chair. It doesn’t look very safe.’

‘No. No, it’s fine, really.’ It came out more snappily than she’d intended.

‘You have children?’

Karen nodded.

‘So you understand. It’s a habit. You will do anything to make sure they are safe. You find yourself mothering everyone. I’m sorry.’

Yes, of course, Karen thought, of course you would do anything to keep your children safe. But you can’t always. She pushed the thought away.

‘My daughter is only fifteen,’ Mrs Moyo continued, her hands resting on the chair back, ‘but she has the look of someone twice her age. She has seen too much. Here she can be normal again.’

Karen stood on the chair and reached for a magazine box on the top shelf. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘She works hard in school. Goes to the Girl Guides. She helps out.’

‘Nice. That’s nice.’ Karen took a copy of the leaflet. She hesitated about getting the whole box down and putting it somewhere more convenient, but the office was so tiny, there wasn’t a spare inch. ‘Thank you.’ She stepped down. ‘I wish my daughter would do something like that, but my husband, I mean, we don’t go to church or anything and they seem, mainly to…excuse me.’

Mrs Moyo’s body filled the doorway, as if she wanted to hold Karen there, to forge some connection between them. Later Karen realised that it was to protect her from hearing what the men were talking about in the boardroom. Little did Mrs Moyo know that Karen would be writing it all up for Jaz as soon as they had left and she would soon know every painful detail.

She was reading the paper and flashed him an automatic smile before returning to the page in front of her. He sat down.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he ventured, ‘about that girl.’

‘Have you? There’s a SOCO going down this afternoon to dust for prints. We’ll see if he finds anything, but it’s down as an overdose, nothing suspicious, so don’t hold your breath.’ She met his gaze. ‘There was DNA from over fifteen different subjects on the bed sheet. Semen.’

He swore under his breath and saw her smile. She’d meant to shock him and she’d succeeded.

‘The prints on the needle were hers.’

‘So.’ He blew on his coffee, squinting through the steam. ‘We’re looking at an accidental overdose by a woman who was, what, on the game?’

‘Pretty good.’

‘What are they dusting for?’

‘Rule out foul play,’ she said. ‘Mind you, I had to push to get Burger to agree.’

‘Why was she outside?’

‘There’s another question you need to ask first.’

‘How long had she been dead?’ he offered.

‘Good question. Twelve to eighteen hours. It’s not easy to be exact, especially at this time of year. One day can be sunny and the next freezing; decomposition can be slowed or accelerated, depending.’

He thought back to the weather on the day before they found her.

‘It was sunny.’ He’d helped his nan peg out the washing in the back garden; a good drying day, she’d called it. ‘Maybe the girl sat on the step to shoot up and enjoy the last of the afternoon sun.’

‘You’d make a great detective.’ Lizzie’s smile seemed genuine.

Sean took a sip of coffee and occupied himself with the little plastic stirrer. He wasn’t going to tell her that he didn’t think he could pass all the tests. It wouldn’t have crossed her university-educated mind.

‘I never thought…I don’t know, that I’d be doing that sort of work, as a support officer I mean.’

‘Yeah, well. It looks like our friend Burger doesn’t exactly follow procedure.’ Lizzie folded her paper and stood up.

‘Who was she?’

Lizzie shrugged. ‘We don’t know. She had no ID. Burger says she’s not known to the police. She was in her mid-twenties, Chinese, and her clothes were all from British shops.’

‘I wonder if anyone will come for her?’

‘Don’t hold your breath. Unless someone in Vice can ID her. A drug-addicted prostitute from the Chinese community isn’t likely to have stayed close to her family.’

He shook his head. Chasebridge wasn’t just his beat; it was where he grew up. He’d played all over the estate, crossed the potato field behind the lay-by with his mates, and gone off exploring in the woods. Who would have thought there’d be a brothel in a snack bar trailer, right under his nose?

That evening he was on duty at the Doncaster Rovers Community
Fireworks display. It was supposed to be a perk to be rostered for events like that, but as his feet turned numb, he longed for the boredom of his first job, night-time shelf-stacking at Pets At Home. At least that had been warm.

He had a surprise at the Keepmoat Stadium. Up in the VIP box, a familiar face was looking down at him, although it took him a moment to recognise her, fully made-up and with the collar of an expensive camel coat pulled up to her ears. It was Lizzie Morrison and she actually waved. Later, as the spectators were leaving, milling around in front of the ground, she detached herself from a group and came over.

‘Fancy meeting you here!’ She smiled broadly and Sean was taken aback. Maybe she’d been on the champagne.

‘I bet you were a sight warmer up there than we were down on the pitch,’ he said, taking in how pretty her face looked with a spot of lipstick. ‘How did you wangle a ticket?’

‘My dad,’ she nodded over her shoulder to a cluster of men with Doncaster Rovers scarves tucked into their dark coats. ‘He’s on the board.’

‘Fancy that.’ Sean thought he might have frostbite in his toes.

Back home in front of the gas fire, his rubbed his feet in his hands. He’d been planning to drop into the pub for a game of snooker on the way, but didn’t think he’d stop shivering enough to hit the ball straight. His nan had waited up for him. Maureen, his mum’s mum, had looked after him since he was twelve and still hadn’t got used to the fact he’d grown up. She offered to run him a bath, but he settled for a can of lager and a packet of crisps.

He stared at the telly, a nice flatscreen he’d got on instalments when he started the job, trying to make out the flavour on his tongue. Worcester Sauce, maybe. He washed it back with a mouthful of lager, cold and fizzing in his throat.

‘Carole popped round with them. A whole box was only three pound. They’re a bit too spicy for me, but I thought you might like them.’

‘Carole?’

‘From bingo. She gets them wholesale.’

He didn’t know why she bothered with bingo. A bunch of old women staring at a set of numbers. She’d be seventy next year and she said it kept her young, said he ought to give it a go, but he wasn’t tempted.

The living room table was covered in home decoration magazines and she’d marked several pages on wallpapers. That was going to be their next project together. She directed; he did the labouring. She entered competitions on TV makeover programmes, but she hadn’t won yet.

‘Any trouble at the fireworks?’ she said and passed him another packet of crisps. The writing on the back looked foreign. Arabic or something.

‘Not really. Had to ask a feller to put his sparklers out, but he wasn’t too fussed.’

‘It’s been like World War One round here, some of these bangers they’ve got now, sound like they could take your head off.’ The cat jumped up on to her lap, turned a few times before he settled. ‘He’s been right funny all night, but at least he’s indoors. Better when they do it properly, organised, much less bother for everyone.’

The feeling was coming back into his feet. A thousand pinpricks of returning blood made his eyes water and he wished he’d been less distracted when he spoke to Lizzie Morrison. He should have asked her how the SOCO got on taking prints at the trailer. On his bedroom wall, above the chest of drawers, was a sheet of flipchart paper that he’d taken from one of the conference rooms at the station. He’d helped himself to a set of marker pens too. It wasn’t stealing; it was just bringing work home. The bosses did it all the time. In the centre of the sheet of paper was a photograph. It wasn’t very good quality. Sean had taken it on his mobile, not at the scene, he hadn’t thought of it then, but later, when the girl’s picture was on the incident board. He’d given her a name, Su-Mai, which sounded sort of Chinese, and written it underneath in green. Then he’d used different colours to draw lines out from the picture in a clock pattern. At the end of each line he was going to write all the information gathered so far. Right now, all the lines were empty.

The following morning, Sean was glad of a late start. At the station he went straight to the canteen for a cup of coffee. Standing in the queue, he was aware of an argument going on at one of the tables. DCI Barry ‘Burger’ King was tucking in to his lunch, or possibly his second breakfast, when a middle-aged man in a navy boiler suit, carrying a heavy, black case, approached him. The man’s epaulets said Scene of Crime Officer.

‘Donald mate!’ Burger waved him over. ‘Donald the Duck. How did you get on, any good prints?’

‘Next time, give me the right bloody address. I’ve been up and down that stretch of road all morning and there’s no snack bar van or catering trailer, or whatever you want to call it. Not there, not anywhere. No trailer means no prints.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ a gobbet of something flew out of King’s mouth across the table in front of him. He studied a map that was thrust under his nose and jabbed at it with a ketchup-covered fork. ‘Right there, bit of a hedge, broken fence, just inside the field. You’d have to slow down to see it. What speed were you doing?’

‘Very funny. I pulled up at every single lay-by along a three-mile stretch. There are six in case you’re interested. Then I went back and checked them all again. There’s nothing.’

King caught sight of Sean and beckoned to him.

‘Here, take Percy with you. He knows it. He’s a native.’

The SOCO looked less than impressed when Sean asked if he could go and transfer his coffee into a disposable cup.

As they pulled out of the car park, the SOCO broke the silence.

‘Chaplin, Donald. No jokes about the name if you don’t mind.’

Sean wasn’t about to make one. ‘Denton, Sean. Not Percy.’

Chaplin flicked on the radio. Classic FM. It was loud, but he turned it up louder.

‘Helps the stress,’ Chaplin shouted. ‘Blood pressure, you know. Not helped by arseholes like our friend King.’

‘How come you didn’t go yesterday?’

‘What?’

‘Lizzie Morrison said you were going yesterday.’

‘Violent burglary in a house at Bessacar!’ Donald shouted back. ‘And a nasty knife crime the day you found the body. Stretched resources, mate, it’s a sign of the times. Smack ODs just don’t cut it.’

Not a priority. Poor Su-Mai. They drove the rest of the way without speaking, listening to some tune like a film score blasting out of the speakers. Sean showed Chaplin where to stop and they pulled up on to the gravel of the lay-by. Sean twisted round in his seat and stared back through the gap in the fence. There was nothing there, just a space where only three days ago there’d been a mucky old snack bar trailer with the word
Refreshments
peeling off its side. He got out of the car.