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 read the DNA results four times and I didn’t understand. The victim, Mark Boon, was a twenty-five-year-old convicted sex offender. He was one week dead, his neck snapped, his face slashed with a knife as an afterthought. His apartment, a grim, barely furnished sweatbox on a council estate north of the city, had been a mine of bodily secretions, hair, fibres, fingerprints. But none of it made sense.
His bed had been made up on the sofa, the stains all his. Though he ostensibly lived alone, the bathroom had been littered with women’s clothing and beauty products, and the one bedroom had reeked of perfume.
There had been three distinct DNA profiles in that room. One, naturally, had belonged to Mark Boon, and its make-up had been fairly repulsive: specks of blood on the skirting board, traces of vomit on the carpet, fossilised tissues under the bed.
The second had belonged to Erica Shaw, twenty years old, missing from home for three months by then but known to be very much alive. I’d seen her with my own eyes, two days before Boon’s murder, in That Man’s home – that man who, at the time, despite circumstantial evidence linking him to a disappearance, I suspected of being little more than an arrogant prick.
Erica seemed to have been sleeping in the bed; hair and other traces on the sheet and pillow, and her underwear strewn about the place. There was no indication that she’d shared the bed with Mark or with anyone else, or, crucially, that she’d touched anything but her own belongings. And that’s where it began to baffle me.
The third profile had been that of Erica’s best friend. Sarah Abbott had vanished on the same morning as Erica, and by all accounts she hadn’t been seen or heard from since. But there’d been a thong with her DNA on it stuffed behind the bed, and a hairbrush in the bathroom wrapped in strands of her hair. And yet there’d been only one batch of her prints in the entire flat, on a pack of cigarettes and a lighter with her initials engraved on the side. And for however long they’d sat in the centre of the chipped old fake-pine coffee table, nobody else had laid a finger on them.
‘It’s horseshit,’ I said, to no one in particular.
‘What’s that?’
Kevin had emerged from the building, having done whatever it is he spends so long in the toilet doing, and he was standing behind me, just far enough away not to give me any of the benefit of his umbrella.
‘What are we supposed to believe?’ I asked him. ‘That Erica’s been shacked up with a rapist for three months, and now she’s killed him, and what? That she’s on the run with Sarah? Or that Sarah was with them, but Boon did something to her? And that’s why he’s dead? She did it in self-defence? In which case, where is she? I don’t get it. Why now?’
Kevin gave me the side-eye and said, very slowly, ‘Well, that’s what we’re meant to find out, isn’t it? That’s what detectives are for.’
I ignored his sarcasm, for now, because actually it was Kevin who was being a bit thick. ‘You’re missing my point,’ I told him. ‘It’s bollocks. Sarah Abbott hasn’t been living in that flat, for a start. A few strands of hair and a packet of fags is hardly proof of residence. They could have come from anywhere. She might have been there at one time, but if that’s the case, where else has she been? She’s been nowhere. So if Boon killed her, he did it back in February. In which case, why was Erica still around? We know Boon wasn’t keeping her hostage. So did she plan Sarah’s murder with him, or just choose to carry on living there like nothing had happened? And in either case, why were those cigarettes still on the table?’
He thought for a long moment, and then shrugged out a ‘Dunno’.
‘Can we talk about this in the car? I’m getting soaked.’
A glimmer of mischief flashed across Kevin’s face, but he followed me into the Focus anyway.
‘Think about the one other place we know she’s been,’ I said. ‘Which, coincidentally, happens to also be the home of someone I questioned myself because we suspected him of being a killer. Is this making any sense to you?’
‘Not really. It all seems a bit . . .’ He shrugged again.
‘Far-fetched?’
Nod.
‘Exactly. It’s horseshit.’
‘So what do we actually think?’
Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? ‘Christ knows, but someone’s been playing us for idiots. We’ve been told a story that makes no logical sense, and the only part of it that’s demonstrably true is that Erica is still alive, or was a week ago, and the only reason we know that is because I saw her.’
I didn’t bloody realise I’d seen her until after the fact; she wasn’t even my case then, and by the time I’d notified the Major Investigation Team, and we’d secured a search warrant, and Mal Lowry and Eli Diaz and John Fairey and I had piled into a couple of cars and sped out to the forest in the south of the county and searched every square inch of that house and questioned That Man, whom we knew at the time as Thomas Reed, all knowledge was plausibly denied and the trail had run cold.
‘So,’ Kevin said, stifling a yawn. ‘Now what?’
‘Simple,’ I said. ‘We start again, at the last place Erica was seen alive.’
‘Reed’s place?’
I nodded. ‘Happy with that?’
‘Makes sense to me,’ he said. ‘Can we stop and get a McDonald’s on the way?’
‘If you’re pay—’ I was interrupted by a startling thump on the window. Kevin jumped in his seat. I gave Eli Diaz a smirk as I slid the glass down a crack. ‘You made one of us jump,’ I said.
Diaz laughed. ‘Sorry, Kevin. Ali, you haven’t seen John Fairey this morning, have you? He was meant to be taking the new guy out canvassing toms last night and they didn’t check back in. Their phones are off and apparently no one’s heard from them since lunchtime. Any ideas?’
Knowing John, they were probably locked in a pub somewhere, but my blood ran cold of its own accord. ‘Can you not track his car?’
‘What do you think?’