the buzz, needing the lift, because there hadn’t been a chance for a run that morning, either.
He tolerated the flack he got about his thing for exercise. If it made his colleagues feel better about themselves to call him vain, call him a poser, that was their business. But to Ben Mae, exercise had never been optional. Without a run in the morning, without an hour of circuits or weights or anything else in the evening, the noise in his head got too much and he knew where that ended. These days, he could trust himself to recognize that inevitable build-up of whatever-it-was and burn it off in the gym. But age as he might, those years after his dad died of finding himself prowling, angry without provocation, skulking around for a fight or a fuck never seemed that far behind him.
Objectively, he thought, as he slowed for the barrier and flashed the fob at the reader, it was doubtful that coffee helped. Objectively, the right thing to do was to deal with the anger, understand it. Go right back to that dark six months when he changed from a normal teenage boy and into a thug, to the point where his life could have gone either way. Tear the thing out by the root.
But who would he be then?
Leaning back in his desk chair, Mae transferred the phone to the other ear, then rubbed the stubble on his head up and down hard with the palm of his hand. Around him, the office was already in the full throes of post-briefing activity.
‘But he’s still missing,’ the woman at the other end of the line was saying, her voice rising towards the inevitable crack. ‘He’s still gone. We can’t cope with this not knowing. My poor kids—’
Her name was Charlotte, wife of Damien Hayes. Widow, almost certainly, of Damien Hayes. Mother of his four kids. Six months previously, Mr Hayes had left the final shift of his job at the vehicle plant just outside Uxbridge, driven his car half the way home, abandoned it, and disappeared. He left no note but, as it unravelled, it was a tale that told itself. The poor bastard had been in the red by almost forty grand, had defaulted on his last half a dozen mortgage payments and then, just to kick the man while he was down, the plant had laid him off. Mrs Hayes had only discovered in the weeks following his evaporation that he left behind no savings, no pension, and no insurance.
‘Mrs Hayes I promise you we’ve done everything we can—’
‘Done? Done?’
Mae winced. ‘Doing. We’re doing everything—’
‘Are you? Like what? What have you done, since you made this call a month ago? On our last weed date,’ she said, bitterness curling at the term.
He lifted the top sheet of the stack of paper in front of him and stifled a sigh. Four more calls exactly like this one, scheduled for today, but there was no news, no concrete developments in a single one of them. Thing was, in this business no news was bad news, even if – especially if – it wasn’t the kind of bad news that had an event attached, a clear and obvious trauma that could at least heal cleanly. In the majority of the cases he had the misfortune to head in his current role, the misper was there and then they were not. No stages of grief to work through, no ritual to mark the end of the life. The family around them remained in stasis until eventually, secretly and ashamedly, they started to long for news of a body being found.
‘I’m afraid without new information, there’s really not much else—’
‘So you’ve given up?’ And right on cue, the sob. ‘If you had any idea of what this is doing to us.’
Mae pressed closed his eyes. They always said that. Every one of them, and not just in Missing but in everything he’d ever been assigned. Murders and rapes and robberies, beatings, the lot. Nearly always, they were right. No, he’d never been sexually assaulted. Hadn’t suffered the violent death of someone he loved. Since he’d been leading Missing, though, the accusation that he didn’t know how it felt had been harder to take. But he never let it out, never put them right, not even to McCulloch when she’d given him the gig. Especially not then.
He was going to need that run, he decided.
‘Look, Mrs Hayes,’ he said, quietly. ‘Charlotte. I’ll put some calls in to the charities again, OK? See if there’s anything new there. Sometimes there are delays with them putting stuff through to our systems. I’ll see if I can extend the hospital checks a bit. I’m not promising anything,’ he added as he heard her intake of breath, but the hope had already returned to her voice.
‘Yes. Please.’ She paused to delicately blow her nose. ‘Anything you can do.’
A red light started blinking on his desk phone. Mae straightened, dispatched Mrs Hayes as sensitively as he could, and answered it.
‘Should I send down a written invitation?’ The gentle Hebridean lilt of DCI Colleen McCulloch.
Mae glanced at the time. Shit. ‘Sorry, ma’am. On my way.’
He bombed it up the back steps and made McCulloch’s floor in about thirty seconds flat. He slowed to a stroll as he passed her glass-fronted office for the sake of some semblance of cool, then went in.
‘Sorry ma’am,’ he muttered, ‘difficult call to a—’
‘Spare me,’ she said, nodding over her glasses to the door, which he dutifully closed. Standing at ease the other side of the room was a statuesque, stony-faced uniform, a woman. He nodded an acknowledgement: he’d seen her swinging kettlebells around in the basement gym. She had cropped, bleach-blonde hair and had to be a good 180 lbs and rising six foot. The kind of woman who occupied every inch of herself. Lot of tattoos, he’d noticed: not that they were visible now.
McCulloch cleared her throat. ‘How’s it been going downstairs these past few weeks, Ben? Haven’t seen you since I went to Egypt. Ooh, talking of which,’ she said, turning to dig something out of a drawer, ‘got you one of these. From the pyramids.’
He caught the paper bag just before it struck him on the head – she was nothing if not a good shot – and opened it. Inside was a small, stuffed camel, made from some kind of felt. He closed the bag. ‘Uh, I’m honoured?’
She shrugged. ‘Don’t be, it’s cursed. Paid the extra, thought why not.’
The uniform bit back a grin.
McCulloch had arrived on the force six months after Mae: they’d both started out in Sussex, albeit at very different levels of seniority. She’d been a hard sell to the whole department, straight in from civvy street to detective inspector, leapfrogging not only a whole generation of CID sergeants who’d been waiting in the wings – some of them – for literally years, but also sprinting past the two long years of uniform service. She was part of a new Philosophy of Recruitment, they’d been told, which recognized outside skills and combatted red tape. Translated: stuffed suit. Decoded: clueless leg-up wannabe. The entire team had been rooting for her to fuck up her first major job, but she’d steered the investigation to a solve with the cool, effortless ease of a seasoned skipper. Those who still remained unconvinced waited, hoping for a trip up to ratify their prejudices. It never came. Problem was, she might have come from some woolly sounding NGO background, but she was also bulletproof. She was bright as a supernova, knew her PACE back to front, her Murder Manual inside out and recited her CPS guidelines with her eyes closed. She bit only when antagonized, and she called every single decision with blistering speed and perfect judgement. What made all of that worse was that she was the most eminently likeable boss any of them had ever had.
And after Brighton, when his immediate superior had been sacked and Mae himself had been given a month’s suspension, she’d moved to the Met to take the helm at Brentford and had been in the role ever since. It was McCulloch who’d encouraged him to relocate, to come and work in the capital with her, and with nothing on the coast to stay for, he’d eventually relented.
McCulloch pushed aside the wireless keyboard to make room for her tailored-shirted forearms and took a sip from a steaming mug of her ubiquitous mint tea.
‘Detective. Ben.’ She gave him a broad smile that pushed the plump