LITMIR.BIZ

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You know I wouldn’t kick you out of bed without—’

      I choked on my own spit.

      ‘I mean. . . You know, drag you out of—’

      ‘Where is he?’

      ‘Who?’

      Oh, Jesus Christ, Kevin. ‘Anyone you like. Take your time, I’ve got all day.’

      ‘John,’ he remembered, with none of the exaggerated embarrassment you or I might affect when caught with our wits down. Instead, he ran a hand through his dark, wiry mop and scratched at the short patch over his crown, a remnant of a recent pistol-whipping. ‘He’s, um . . . in the car,’ he said. ‘I think.’

      ‘You think?’

      ‘Well, it’s . . .’ He glanced over his shoulder at the remains of the car and just sort of sighed.

      ‘What about DC Keith? Any sign?’ John Fairey hadn’t been alone when he’d seemingly vanished into thin air; there was no trace of the freshly minted detective he’d snagged for a dogsbody, either.

      Kevin gave me a shrug and a sympathetic smile. ‘I’ll get you a suit,’ he said.

      ‘Where’s Mal?’

      ‘The what?’ Kevin dropped a fetching pair of white rubber boots at my feet and handed me the paper jumpsuit he’d retrieved from the back of the nearby CSI van. He’d tried to flirt with Sandra, the duty pathologist, but she was on the phone and had batted him away with an irritable glare. His smile had faded rapidly.

      ‘Mal,’ I repeated. ‘Mal Lowry. He should be here.’

      Kevin narrowed his eyes and nodded with a look that said No shit, Sherlock. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We’ve all got personal problems, right?’

      I didn’t know what he meant by that; I just knew it didn’t explain where my DCI was. I flattened the suit out on the ground and slipped my feet into the leg holes. ‘You know what else I can’t see?’ I pulled it up to my waist and realised I had it back to front.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Any bodies in that car. Where are they?’ Did I turn the suit once or twice? It now appeared to be upside down.

      ‘I was getting to that.’ Kevin eyed the jumpsuit curiously as I attempted vainly to pass it behind my back without reversing it. ‘Do you want a hand?’

      ‘Could you?’ I don’t know how many of these godforsaken things I’ve had to clamber into over the course of my career, but it’s one of those tasks – most of which, come to think of it, seem to involve items of apparel – for which practice will never make perfect. I will never be able tie an apron behind my back, and I will never be able to get into a front-fastening one-piece paper jumpsuit without the assistance of a third party. Fact of life.

      ‘Don’t worry about Lowry,’ he said, which seemed strange, because I wasn’t. ‘Just enjoy the peace and quiet while it lasts.’ He turned me around by the shoulders, scrunched the suit up in his hands and squatted behind me, tapping each of my legs in turn as he wanted them lifted and lowered. ‘’Scuse fingers.’

      ‘Keep them below the knee,’ I laughed. ‘Geoff’s watching.’

      The constable looked casually away as Kevin yanked the suit up over my hips and said, ‘I think he’s got the hots for you, you know.’

      I stifled a chuckle. ‘Well, he all but pulls my hair every time he sees me,’ I said.

      ‘Boys are always mean to girls they like,’ he agreed, standing to guide my arms into the appropriate holes and slide the shoulders of the suit up onto my own. ‘You can manage the zip on your own, right?’

      I gave him a withering look and said, ‘Ha bloody ha. Who called us?’ as I fumbled hopelessly with the zip and Kevin pretended not to notice the trembling in my fingers.

      ‘The usual,’ he said, handing me a full-face particulate mask. ‘Dog walker. Said his dog wouldn’t stop barking at it, so he took a peek. Watches a lot of true crime shows.’

      ‘Him or the dog?’

      ‘Not sure.’

      ‘What time?’

      ‘Five thirty-five.’

      ‘Where is he?’

      ‘I sent him home. He’ll come in this afternoon if we need him to.’

      ‘You talked to him yourself?’

      ‘Yep.’

      ‘How did he seem?’

      ‘Genuine.’

      I nodded and snapped the mask over my head and Kevin did the same. ‘Ogay,’ I said, waving to Sandra and getting a thumbs-up in return. ‘Ned dayg a nook.’

      There was no denying it was my old partner’s Mondeo. I’d spent a lot of hours staring pointedly out of the window of that car, or gripping the sides of my seat, or instinctively thumping my right foot onto an imaginary brake pedal. I was in it when he creased the wheel arch against a bollard, and I was standing right where I was now when he kicked the dent into the front wing in anger at some humiliation or other. My seat was gone, just a buckled metal frame remaining. The worn carpet in the footwell was gone, too – in fact everything was gone; it was just a ravaged shell. But those dents were as good as a fingerprint.

      It wasn’t blue any more. It was orange and black and brown, rust and soot and death. It sat sadly on its sills in the sand, one back door hanging limp on twisted hinges. The roof sagged from front to back, the tailgate bent on its frame so that the lid reared up, arched like a mouth shrieking in horror. And in that mouth was what I could only assume were the remains of my two former colleagues.

      Bone is bone. It doesn’t really look like anything else. I suppose I could have convinced myself it was coral, or pebbles at a push, but I didn’t bother to try. It was a grey rubble of bone, fragmented, cemented with splatters of rain-pasted ash. To my untrained eye it could have been anyone, or anything. Sure, I know all the words; I read the same books you read. Skull sutures. Pubic symphysis. Phalanges, which just reminds me of Phoebe from Friends. I could even tell you what they mean, and relate the most reliable method of estimating the height of a person from their skeleton, or of determining the gender and racial profile of a skull. But I’m no more than an armchair expert; my opinion isn’t worth the calories I’d expend merely forming it, and the jigsaw puzzle in front of me now was far beyond my understanding of how a person could even begin to make sense of it. And so, knowing in my gut that this was the final resting place of Detective Inspector John Fairey and Detective Constable Julian Keith, I resisted the urge to plunge my hand into the ashes, pull out a shard of calcined something-or-other and shout ‘Aha’, and I walked away from the car.

      ‘Okay, first screamingly obvious things first,’ I said, once I’d flicked the mask off my face and could breathe again. I pointed at the square of blackened grass beneath my feet; one of a dozen I could see, evidence of a summer of careless barbecuing. ‘There are burn marks just about everywhere except under the car. Who’s out looking for the crime scene?’

      Kevin looked from me to the car and back again, and scratched the back of his head. ‘Not organised that yet,’ he said, which I had to concede was an accurate if inexhaustive statement. ‘Been a little bit busy on my own here. I haven’t even had a cup of tea yet.’

      Signed off till Monday. Not going to feel guilty for having breakfast. ‘You’ve done a good job,’ I said, although I knew Sandra had probably beaten him here and taken control of the scene herself. ‘We haven’t got the whole car here. The bumpers, the tyres, all of the plastic and rubber bits that have melted off. They’re not here. We’re missing a debris field. Plus there are no drag marks, but there’s a trail of mud and oil at least all the way back to the top of the road. See?’ I indicated a set of thick, wide-treaded tyre tracks printed in clods of earth and clay, leading

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