five-button jacket with matching skirt to just below the knee. Her legs stretched beneath the table, her ankles – slender, lightly tanned – crossed comfortably beside my own. Chestnut hair lowlighted in black, thrown up into a loose ponytail. Sunlight, splayed and rainbowed by the flowers and antique bottles on the windowsill, playing on the triangles of her neck, settling in the hollow of her collarbone where it peeked from behind her shirt. The swell of her breas—
‘You okay?’ See anything you like?
I looked up, startled. Felt my face flush. ‘Hmm?’
She folded the paper and tossed it aside, slid her coffee close to her and spooned in sugar from the bowl in the centre of the table. ‘You don’t look very well,’ she said, circling the spoon handle at me as though casting a spell. ‘You’re not going to throw that back up, are you?’
I realised I had a mouthful of lukewarm milk and soggy Rice Krispies which, somewhere along my train of distraction, I’d somehow forgotten to swallow. I did so now. ‘I’m fine,’ I said, flatly.
She gave a cynical snort. ‘Oh, really?’ Stirred her coffee. ‘I’ve seen you looking fine, and it didn’t look like that.’ Raised it to her lips, blew primly across the surface before taking a sip. ‘You’re not upset with me, are you?’
I dropped my spoon into the half-empty cereal bowl and pushed it away, my appetite lost. ‘Of course not.’ Mortified, yes. Confused, bemused and deeply, shamefully embarrassed, but not upset.
‘Good, because . . . you know . . .’
Doesn’t mean I want to talk about it. ‘I know.’
‘I mean, it’s not like . . .’
‘No, I know.’
‘I mean, I had a great time last night, but—’
I choked on my coffee. ‘But now I have to go to work,’ I smiled.
She smiled back, and thought for a moment and then looked at the table and nodded firmly and said, ‘Yeah. Me too.’
‘Only I don’t know where my car is.’
‘Ah,’ she chuckled. ‘You left it at the pub, remember?’
No.
‘I’ll drop you off,’ she said. ‘Ready in five?’
I nodded. I didn’t know what else to say, really, so I just blurted out, ‘I borrowed some knickers. Hope you don’t mind.’
She gave a snort and a sideways look. ‘No, that’s fine,’ she laughed. ‘Just . . . have a good day, okay? Be careful, and don’t work too hard.’
‘Oh, I don’t intend to,’ I laughed. Riding out on a shudder of relief at the rapid change of subject, it was a laugh I would have found disproportionate and vaguely chilling were it directed at me. Fortunately, Edith either didn’t notice or at least had the good grace not to raise an eyebrow. ‘I’m . . .’ trying to think of something to say . . . ‘planning on shouting at my boss for dragging me out, and being home in time for Cash in the Attic.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ she agreed, and then giggled to herself. ‘Hey, you know what’d be even better?’
‘What?’
‘Tango & Cash in the Attic.’
Ha ha.
I knew I’d be fixed by lunchtime. The cold light of day would see my head straight and my priorities in order in no time. Or at least that was what I thought.
As it turned out, the light of day was already as hot as the belly of Hell when I stepped from my car onto flame-scorched sand, hung my badge from its lanyard around my neck, and entered a world of violence and horror for the likes of which even the most depraved of my many nightmares had left me woefully underprepared.
It was 6.59 a.m. My name is Alisha Green, and this, to the best of my understanding, is the truth about Erica Shaw.
A squirrel darted a stuttering dash along the bough above my head, twitching its velvety grey nose at the edges of the shadows among the leaves and sniffing suspiciously at the encroaching sunlight. In the dense cover high above, a lone woodpigeon flexed its wings and fluttered the sleep from its rumpled feathers. He looked like he’d had a rough night.
I looked worse, if my reflection in the car window was anything to go by. I’d had them both open all the way here, and my undried hair had frizzed up into a bouffant bird’s nest. I slipped the hairband from my wrist and bundled the mess into a rough, damp knot at the base of my neck. If it didn’t improve me, it might at least give the pigeon second thoughts about moving in.
I propped my foot on the sun-bleached picnic trestle beside the car and bent to tighten my shoelace. A pair of wasps buzzed hungrily around the rubbish bin beside me, keeping a respectful distance from one another as they took turns to dive inside for a bite. A third investigated the sticky rim of a Coke can, idly dropped in the grass not three feet away, the silvered peaks of its crushed carcass shimmering thousands of tiny jewels of light across the fixed-penalty warning notice plastered to the receptacle. No Littering. Maximum fine £2,500. The futility of mandatory environmental correctness, summed up in a shiny red aluminium nutshell. I picked up the can and disposed of it properly. The wasp didn’t flinch.
This, right here, is the kind of peace I crave: the earlymorning sun prickling my upturned face; the idle lapping of the river against the pebbles on the bank; the soft quirrup of ducklings perpetually distracted from the arduous task of keeping up with mum; the merest whisper of distant traffic, just there enough to temper the isolation without intruding on the blissful, cossetting quiet of—
‘Oi! Pocahontas! Over here!’
Oh. Right. Kevin.
I took in a lingering lungful of cowshit and pollen.
Geoff Green – no relation – greeted me with an indifferent nod as I slipped between my Alfa and the adjacent patrol car. I’d seen the burly constable around often enough to know his name, but his snakelike eyes and disdainful demeanour had always deterred me from wanting to know much more about him. Whether he perpetually wished he were somewhere else, or simply didn’t like the look of me any more than I did him, I couldn’t entirely tell. Nor did I particularly care.
Geoff had been left in charge of guarding the inner perimeter. It was clearly a hurried affair, the blue-and-white warning tape sagging between posts speared skew-wiff and at random intervals into the sandy earth as it bisected the picnic site. It also seemed a somewhat extraneous measure, given that the access road was barricaded by patrol cars at its inception half a mile back, the car park entrance was itself taped and guarded, and a fourth cordon encircled what seemed to be the object of the collective attention – a burned-out car slumped at the far side of the clearing.
If I’d known him better, I might have accused Geoff of erecting the barrier himself, just to look as though he had something important to do. However, half a dozen years having passed between us without the need for small talk, and with neither of us any more inclined than the other to fix what wasn’t broken, I kept my suspicions to myself and simply returned Geoff’s sulky nod as I ducked under the tape, which he lifted just high enough to garrotte me had I not been half-expecting it.
At the other end of the mood swing, and entirely at odds with his tone on the phone, Kevin McManus was a veritable grin on a stick. He picked through a maze of yellow plastic markers and staked-off squares of sand, sterile suit rustling, teeth flashing, arms wide like he thought he was going to get a hug. ‘You know, for a minute I thought you might blow me out,’ he crowed, his voice sounding hollow and windswept against the squawk and chatter of radios and crime scene techs and the rattle and hum of a diesel generator.
‘Save it,’ I warned him. ‘You’re at the top of my shitlist today.’