LITMIR.BIZ

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It was well awkward. The chain was totally jammed, and he couldn’t get it shifted. It was cutting into his hands when he pulled at it. The man was just watching. It was embarrassing. He was standing too close.

      Deepak, lad, he said; I’d say that chain’s stuck. I’ll get some tools.

      He went back into the house. Deepak wondered who he was. He pulled at the chain again. Time was getting on.

      The man came back out with a toolbox, and budged Deepak out of the way. He said it wouldn’t take a minute. It was all about having the right tool for the job, he said, and gave Deepak a funny look as though he’d told a joke.

      He asked if Deepak was surprised that he knew his name. When Deepak said yes, he said: Well, I’ve seen you around. You stand out a bit around here.

      He did something with a screwdriver and got the chain sorted. It took less than a minute. Deepak said thanks, and went to get back on his bike.

      The man said: Hang on there a minute, let’s just pop inside and get you cleaned up.

      Calling headquarters again: Request guidance. Request backup.

      The guidance was obvious. Going into a stranger’s house was one of the things you weren’t supposed to do. But this man wasn’t exactly a stranger; he knew Deepak’s name, and Deepak had seen him around. But even so. He could basically hear his mum shouting at him as he walked towards the front door: You don’t even know this man, Dee Dee! It’s not safe, Dee Dee!

      She worried too much, though. His dad always said that.

      A real detective would take certain measures in this situation. There would be a colleague waiting in a car farther down the road. A uniformed officer covering the back door. He would be wearing a wire. As it was, he took mental notes. Just in case. A description of the car parked outside, and the registration number. A description of the house. For example: there were piles of junk mail and free papers just inside the front door. The curtains in all the upstairs windows were closed. The man was wearing a waxed jacket, and trousers with lots of pockets. He was old. Sixty, at least.

      Deepak knew he shouldn’t be going inside. But he didn’t want the man to think he was rude, or ungrateful. And anyway, what would he say? I don’t want to come inside in case you’re some kind of massive nonce? You couldn’t go around saying that.

      He felt the man’s hand on his shoulder, steering him through the door.

      Just head through to the back, he said. Kitchen’s straight ahead. Soap’s by the sink.

      It was dark in the hallway, and he had to squeeze past a line of coats and jackets hanging along the wall. Everything smelled damp, and muddy.

      This was definitely a bad idea.

      He went straight to the sink and started washing his hands. The water was cold, and the bar of soap cracked in half as soon as he picked it up. The sink was full of old dishes. The oil wouldn’t come off. It was just making the two halves of soap filthy. He could hear the man doing something in the hallway. The water coming off his hands was black and going all over the dishes, but the oil wasn’t shifting. He was making a mess of the man’s kitchen. He wanted to leave now. He was going to be late.

      He heard the man in the doorway behind him.

      It felt like he was just standing there, watching.

      The water was still cold. He turned the tap off and looked around for something to dry his hands with. The place was a mess. His mum would be horrified. Although his mum would be horrified just knowing he was in there. There were more dirty dishes spread along the worktop, and newspapers and magazines stacked up on chairs, and newspaper spread across the table, and on the table there was a gun.

      He looked a second time, trying to make it look like he wasn’t looking.

      It was definitely a gun.

      He didn’t call headquarters in his head this time. There was no backup. He wasn’t a detective. There was a gun on the table. His chest felt very solid all of a sudden, and he more or less stopped breathing for a moment.

      But, okay, there were cloths and brushes on the table next to the gun, and some kind of grease or cleaning fluid. There were boxes of cartridges. So it was sort of okay. Sort of normal, around here, more or less normal. He’d never seen a gun before but he knew people owned them. It was a shotgun, probably. It was for shooting rabbits or whatever. It was normal. He pretended he hadn’t seen anything.

      The man was still standing in the doorway. He asked if the oil was coming off. Deepak looked. The soap was black with it, and there were oily smears all over the sink. He told the man it was all done, and he’d have to get going. He tried shaking his hands dry. Even if there had been a towel he would have wrecked it.

      He needed to get a move on. He’d be late finishing the paper round. His mum would have kittens. The man was still talking. He wanted to look at Deepak’s hands. He told him to scrub them a bit harder. Deepak said it was fine, and he should probably be getting on. The man came and leaned over him and turned the tap back on.

      You just need to scrub a bit harder, he said.

      Deepak let the water pour over his hands, and looked through the kitchen window. It was light outside, and in the small garden a blackbird was rooting around under a bush. The search party he’d heard people talking about would probably be setting out from the visitor center around now. The girl would be found, if she was still up there on the hill. He wondered what it might have been like, spending the night up there. He wondered what she might have been hiding from. If that was what had happened.

      He had met her, back in the summer. They all had. She’d been all right. He hadn’t told his parents this, before, but now he thought he probably should. The police had said any little detail might help.

      He wanted to go home and tell them now.

      The water poured over his hands, and he kept scrubbing, and the man said he was nearly done.

      He hoped his bike would be okay. He hadn’t locked it or anything.

      4: Graham

      The important thing to remember, Graham always said afterwards, was that no one had actually died.

      There were questions to answer, and lessons would be learned; of that there was no doubt. But those people who had made so much fuss about what had happened would do well to bear in mind the lack of fatalities.

      Vijay wasn’t immediately reassured by this. Shouldn’t they have taken more precautions, he said; shouldn’t they have cut the walk short as soon as the weather turned?

      Everyone had signed consent forms, Graham reminded him. They knew what they were letting themselves in for.

      Graham and Vijay had led these walks for several years without incident. This was another overlooked factor in the subsequent hullabaloo: the number of miles they’d covered without mishap of any kind. In fact, if you were to calculate the average length of walk, and the average number of walkers, you’d be talking about many thousands of miles of incident-free walking.

      But, no. People preferred to accentuate the negative.

      The buck stopped with Graham, unfortunately. He was employed by the Park Authority, and had completed the risk assessment. He had written up the incident report. Vijay had been there in a strictly voluntary capacity, and his liability was limited. Not that there was anything to be liable for, as Graham was able to make clear.

      They operated well as a team, but it would be fair to say that Vijay was the more cautious of the two, the more inclined to worry. This perhaps had to do with his day job, as an insurance broker. Plenty of the old crunching numbers, double-checking the paperwork. Graham had always been more of a seat-of-the-pants man, by contrast; stick a finger in the air and see which way the wind’s blowing was his approach.

      Not that Vijay wasn’t an outdoorsman. Far from it. He was a very keen walker. He had all the gear. This was one of their few differences. Graham was

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