Читать книгу: «Remain Silent»

Davy is squinting at the letters, trying to decipher the handwriting accurately, then down at his phone as he types them into Google Translate. Google comes back with the answer:

The dead cannot speak

Standing so close to the trouser leg, Davy has been assailed by the stink of the cadaver – not decomposition, it’s fresh. Happened last night, would be Davy’s guess. It stinks because his bowels opened when he died and because he is an unwashed eighteen-year-old, or thereabouts. Young men kill themselves more frequently than anyone else, but that note puts the ball firmly in Davy’s court. It’s a threat or a confession. Either way, it smacks of murder as opposed to self-harm.

‘What d’you think?’ Harriet says.

‘That note pinned to the body,’ says Davy. ‘Translates as “the dead can’t talk”. It’s in Lithuanian.’ He gives Harriet a pointed look.

She nods. ‘You’re thinking Wisbech?’

‘Yup. Also, look at his hands.’

They both look at the cadaver’s hands, which are suspended conveniently at head height. They are butcher’s hands – thick fingers, curled, like a pair of well-worn gloves. Dark skinned. The backs of his hands are etched with multiple thin white lines.

‘Think we need to check in with Operation Pheasant,’ Davy says.

He doesn’t want to confess, even to himself, how much he’d like to check in with Bridget on Operation Pheasant (as the Fenland Exploitation Team is known); the feelings this inspires in him. He is spoken for, after all. And not by Bridget.

‘We can’t let this go on,’ Harriet says. ‘This is the third. Makes us look like we’ve got no control. Any CCTV?’

Davy shakes his head. ‘Not as far as I can see.’

‘Were the victim’s hands tied?’

‘It doesn’t appear so.’

‘But if his hands weren’t tied, did he try to haul himself up the rope?’

‘Derry Mackeith will tell us that when he does the PM.’

Davy can see Harriet thinking what he’s thinking. Hard to get a man into a tree with his hands tied. Even harder to hang him without his hands tied. If he was drugged or unconscious, it would’ve been close to impossible to get him into a tree.

‘We’ll need to tell Derry to look out for fibres under the fingernails, burn marks to his palms from the rope, that kind of thing.’

‘Yes,’ says Davy, adding it to his mile-long mental list.

DAY 1
4 P.M.
MATIS

Twelve hours in the darkness of an industrial chicken shed made him forget himself. The stink, the noise, being scratched, being exhausted. Perhaps Lukas is best off out of it.

In the van back to the house, his head lolls against the seat rest and he dozes a blank sleep. When they are disgorged from the van, he looks at the house, sees the prospect of being alone with his thoughts, and starts to shake. He grasps Dimitri’s arm.

‘I can’t go in. I feel sick,’ he says.

‘OK. We’ll get a drink.’

He can see Dimitri is exhausted and would rather lie on his mattress, boots off. He is grateful to him for his companionship.

As they walk down the street, a car pulls up outside their house. Two men, both in dark suits, get out and go to the front door. Some kind of officialdom, Matis guesses. The communist regime had loved officialdom, Lukas’s father told him. Matis admired Lukas’s father enormously. Jűri was a thoughtful, gentle man, in contrast to Matis’s own father. Jűri described languorous men in uniform, standing about pointlessly, feeling important. ‘Puffed up on their petty bureaucracies. Four suited guys to take your ticket at the museum. Welcome to full employment!’

Matis and Dimitri take their bottle of vodka and drink it in the park. The air is soft, the temperature mild.

‘Why don’t you tell the police what you saw?’ Dimitri asks. ‘Let them take care of it?’

‘Seriously,’ Matis says. ‘You trust the police?’

‘It is different here.’

‘Sure it is.’

Suspicion of authority is only a fraction of the reason why Matis won’t talk.

‘You must not say anything to the police,’ Matis tells Dimitri. ‘Promise me.’

Matis wakes to find himself laid out on the tarmac path, where he has fallen asleep. It is nearly dark. Someone has thrown coins at him. They have landed on the ground in front of his stomach. This kindness makes him cry.

DAVY

The ID card, or maybe it was a driver’s licence – Davy can’t tell because it’s in Lithuanian – says the name: Lukas Balsys. A grainy photograph of a man who looks little more than a boy, though he was no less grey-faced when he was alive than after hanging.

‘Davy Walker as I live and breathe. This is a nice surprise,’ says Bridget as he walks into her Wisbech office, the ID card proffered for her to see.

Bridget is a senior officer on Operation Pheasant, whose offices are three rooms in a slope-ceilinged attic close to the town centre. ‘Ah, OK,’ says Bridget, looking at the card. She’s got her hair in a complicated plait affair, two rows on either side of her head, rather like a schoolgirl. She’s wearing a black cardigan over a patterned dress.

His attraction to Bridget is physical, primarily. Also the attraction of what he cannot have: the new and unknown and illicit. When all that is sanctioned is at home, there is a yearning for the unsanctioned. He realises it isn’t deeper than that, and that his fiancée Juliet offers him something real and complex, albeit cloaked in a somewhat pressurising commitment that he himself had wanted and brought on. It is Juliet, not Bridget, who puts up with his constant cancellations and late arrivals home because of work. The date nights postponed. It is Juliet who fights against the peevish feelings his unreliable shift pattern engenders. Bridget is a destructive impulse. Bridget is forbidden, hard to resist. Bridget is lively, bright-eyed. Her face hyper-mobile – with humour mostly. Also – and this is no small factor – Bridget is Up For It. How often does that come along? Davy can hear Manon’s voice saying, ‘Fucking never, if you’re me.’

‘Right,’ Bridget says, after a search on her computer. ‘We don’t have Lukas Balsys on our books. But that’s not unusual. Half these guys are not documented at all. He might be new. If I were you, I’d start at the HMO on Prospect Place. It’s the Lithuanian hub, if you like. But beware of the house spokesman. Someone will be pushed in your face who speaks good English and he’ll feed you a load of hokum about how happy they all are. Yes, yes, very heppy, very nice place.’ She says this last bit in a thick Russian accent. ‘You won’t get a straight answer out of them. Take an interpreter. And try to shake off Edikas. They won’t say a word with him in the room.’

‘Righto,’ he says, wondering if he could depart with something more flirty, but the subject matter of their conversation made this seem distasteful. Murder chat versus flanter (flirty banter). Murder chat wins. The attic room smells really nice – of Bridget’s floral perfume.

‘By the way, Davy?’ she says as he makes to leave. ‘It’s unusual that the note was in Lithuanian. Most of the guys who come over are Baltic Russians. Just thought it might help.’

‘So, not from Lithuania then?’ he asks, confused.

‘Yes, from Lithuania, but Baltic Russians from Lithuania. There’s loads of them, especially in Klaipeda, the town where they’re usually from. They relocated there during the Soviet occupation.’

Davy pulls up outside a red-brick terraced house with plastic windows, front garden piled with rubbish that is escaping its bags. The house next door is immaculate.

‘This must be driving them mad,’ Davy says to the interpreter who is following him up the path. Davy gives him a glance, which is part grimace, intended to say ‘it’s going to be unpleasant in here’.

Initially, no one answers the door. They ring and knock again, Davy shouts ‘Police!’ through the letter box.

Eventually, a sleepy man in tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt opens the door, leaves it open and walks away from them, back up the stairs, without speaking.

They stand awkwardly in the hallway until a rotund, bald man greets them from the back of the house, holding out his hand.

‘Hello, I’m Edikas. How can I help you?’ he says. In Russian.

Edikas arranges for Davy to talk to various residents. It is an awkward business as there is no seating – what would have been a lounge is set with mattresses, and the kitchen is a galley without a table. The house is dirty – smells of microwaved dinners, the kind made from meat of unknown provenance.

Davy stands at the doorway to one of the bedrooms with his notepad. His interviewee sits on a mattress, knees up, back to the wall. He doesn’t make eye contact. Everyone denies knowing Lukas or anything about Lukas.

The interpreter looks uncomfortable as he translates. He can speak both Lithuanian and Russian, as most older Lithuanians can. He casts an anxious glance at Davy, then looks at his notepad and holds out his hands. Davy hands the interpreter his notepad.

Scared, the interpreter writes. The word is underlined. Then he writes, Can you distract him?

‘A word out back, if you don’t mind,’ Davy says to Edikas.

‘When you have finished, we talk,’ Edikas replies, in English this time, folding his arms.

‘What’s this fella called?’ Davy asks, bending to pet the dog. The dog bares its teeth, snarling.

‘Skirta,’ says Edikas. ‘It mean devoted in my language.’

He is glancing into the bedroom where the interpreter is whispering to the interviewee. ‘What are you saying to my friend?’ Edikas demands loudly.

The man who had opened the door to them, the one in tracksuit bottoms, enters the kitchen and opens various cupboards. Edikas shouts at him in Russian, the man protests, but weakly. His face is ravaged with exhaustion. From the exchange, Davy guesses the man wanted food and Edikas told him he couldn’t have any. The man trudges away again up the stairs.

‘They never stop eating,’ Edikas explains.

Davy steps into the bedroom where the interpreter is trying to get blood from a stone. It should be him leading the questioning, not the interpreter, so he intervenes.

‘Did you know Lukas Balsys?’ Davy asks.

The interpreter relays.

The migrant on the mattress shrugs.

‘Is that yes or no?’ Davy asks.

Another shrug.

‘Would you like to come down to the station and talk to us there?’

Edikas enters. ‘You cannot take him to police station unless he is under arrest. What can be for arresting? Nothing!’

‘Do you know what happened to Lukas Balsys?’ Davy asks, deciding to attempt an interview despite the obstacles.

Another languid shrug.

He writes on his pad. Tell him we can protect him if he talks to us. He shows this to the interpreter.

The interpreter writes, I cannot tell him this without also telling the heavy. And he nods at Edikas.

‘Did Lukas have any things?’ Davy asks Edikas. ‘That he left in the house?’

Edikas nods and points to one of the mattresses. It is covered in a sheet that was once white but has a brown, human-shaped stain taking up most of its surface. Beside the mattress is a bottle of vitamin pills, a leather belt, a pair of socks.

‘What about his wallet, his phone?’ Davy asks.

Edikas shrugs. ‘That’s all,’ he says, nodding at the desultory collection of objects on the floor. Davy puts on a pair of gloves and places the objects into evidence bags.

He wants to get out. This isn’t the way to break open this hub. It’s a crime scene. It wants clearing out like a crime scene.

‘We can go,’ he says to the interpreter. He steps quickly around the mattresses and heads for the door.

Outside, Davy’s phone vibrates.

When will you be home Dudu Bear?

He looks at his watch. It’s only 4 p.m. and Juliet’s asking. He texts back, irritably.

Late. Job’s come in.

Can you give me an idea of time? Only it’s really hard to sleep if I don’t know when you’re coming in.

You sleep. I’ll go on the couch.

MANON

She has been bothered by the man in the tree – another thing to add to her sense that the country, nay the world, is going to the dogs. Bothered that Teddy got so close to seeing the hanging man. Bothered that Korea has fired another test missile. Bothered that her bin collection has gone fortnightly and that the streets around her home are rubbish-strewn. Funding shortfalls everywhere she looks. Detectives transfer or retire and don’t get replaced. Police inspectorate warning of grave dangers to the service – poor response times, suspects not being apprehended, calls being downgraded. Calling 999? Yes madam, someone should be with you in the next couple of days.

Everything is so much worse than she ever imagined it could get. And middle age keeps on landing the blows.

‘When I get out of bed in the morning,’ Mark says, ‘my whole body hurts for a moment or two.’

‘Oh I know,’ she says. ‘Especially the feet.’

They are pale, with protruding bellies. Saggy-bottomed. In sharp contrast to their children, who amaze them with their shining, taut skin. Lovely legs. When she holds Ted’s face next to hers and looks in the mirror, it’s like an age-related horror show. Like satin next to Viking-era hessian.

At forty-six, Manon has entered an age of crippling anxiety, a period of her life freighted with dread. Her furrowed brow, never un-furrowed, is a bother to Mark Talbot, she can tell (although he’s no ray of sunshine); her joie de vivre abandoned at the coalface of worst-case-scenario planning. What if Teddy drowns or develops a tumour? What if the people she leaves him with are cruel to him? How will she know? Why won’t he sit quietly with a book for an hour or two? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera as the doomy King of Siam said in The King and I.

And marriage. Trying to keep that shit-show on the road. Not bothering to have the same old arguments because they are boring, but fearful of screwing it up because who else would have her, and also: The Children. Frowning at Mark Talbot while she heaves the bins out in the rain. Because if you miss the bins, they’ll stink to high heaven, they’ll stink as bad as your rotting marriage.

In fact, they are not married, she and Mark, but might as well be (all the tedium, none of the tax breaks); slogging through it like most couples. He is her constant companion, which is no small thing; conjoined in the forge of parenthood, which is 70 per cent delight at the emerging personalities of their children and 30 per cent resentful trudge. Meal preparation, dishwasher emptying, overflowing laundry baskets, Lego underfoot. Underneath, she wonders if there might be something darker brewing – how can one tell? Mark might have someone else. His online life might harbour appalling secrets. But these questions she asks only fleetingly because he is her constant companion and life without him would be a dismantling of unconscionable proportions. He is the conversation, the jokes, the affection, the loyalty, all her warmth. She cannot ask the darker questions because she loves him too much. It is better not to know, to settle down to another box set in a state of blissful and un-disruptive not-knowing. Human beings cannot bear too much reality.

The last couple of Januarys have seen a welter of break-ups among friends, Christmas being the straw that breaks the marital back. Mark Talbot secretly harbouring his midlife crisis, the extent of which she cannot fully ascertain. He looks malnourished, despite his pot belly, and unfit. He’s developed a worrying Rennie habit. She watches him pee and worries about his prostate.

‘You get to a point,’ she explained to her oldest friend Bryony, ‘where you realise his shit is never going to get better. His shit will always be your shit.’

‘Yup. You should come on my school run. They’re dropping like flies. Everyone in couples counselling, not all of it good.’

‘I’m in couples counselling,’ Manon replied. ‘On my own.’

‘Result,’ said Bri.

‘I know. I don’t even have to listen to his side.’

‘Isn’t couples counselling on your own just … therapy?’

‘Don’t be absurd. I don’t need therapy. All my problems are because of Mark.’

‘Course they are. Why won’t he go?’

‘Says it would just be me, wanging on,’ Manon said.

It’s not just the same old row about mental load, about who should be doing the utterly tedious bedtime routine while simultaneously preparing a nutritious dinner brimming with fresh veg, but also the deep chasm over The Anxiety of It All. Who is carrying The Anxiety of It All? Is it the person who is prone to anxiety? Or is it that person because one of you refuses to carry the anxiety and cunningly off-loads it onto the other one? She has her suspicions, which she keeps not very close to her (now shelf-like) chest. They barely touch each other these days, her and Mark. The bed is an icy canyon they cannot cross. Kissing is a thing of the past, unless it’s with Ted. It’s as if the physicality of looking after children, the lovely cheek-to-cheek of the bedtime story, the wrap of chubby little legs about the waist, has usurped the physicality of marriage.

Why does the mental load descend with such force? Is it late middle age? The anxiety has smothered her libido, once as bounding as a Labrador pup. It has smothered lightness. No more What the Fuck, Give it a Go, Devil May Care, C’mon Let’s Have a Laugh et cetera, et cetera.

Where were all the full-blown feelings of her youth? Interrailing around Europe at seventeen, having regular epiphanies in Italian churches. Reading Where Angels Fear to Tread as she pulled into San Gimignano station, Tears for Fears through her headphones. The smell of Vidal Sassoon’s Wash & Go, its green bottle perched in plastic soap dishes of campervan showers. God, everything was miraculous then. Music! Literature! Frescoes! She fancied everyone at seventeen, as opposed to no one at forty-six.

It was the absence of weariness. She could sit on a pew in some preposterously gold-leafed church and think seriously about Lucy Honeychurch, and Isabel Archer, and Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda, so fully engaged with them that they might have been interrailing together in some unwieldy, crinoline-wearing troupe. Why couldn’t she live like that for ever? Why did one have to switch energy providers and set a mobile phone alert for bin day, only to find out you cannot set an alert because your phone storage is full, so you decide to pay for more storage (until you die), only to find you don’t know your password. By the time you retrieve your password, you are sixty-five and howling into the abyss.

It’s the children, she thinks. You can’t jack in your marriage because of the children. You can’t stick two fingers up to your job to go and tend orangutans in Borneo. You can’t forget to go food shopping for, like, three weeks. You can’t think fuck this, I fancy doing an MA in Classical Greek. You have to keep the sodding show on the sodding road. Weetabix at 6 a.m. whether you like it or not. Behind every meal is another meal. And can you imagine sitting across the table from some loathsome Internet date (who hasn’t half the charms of Mark Talbot, even on bin day) with your epic brow furrowed to the max, the Über-Furrow, and then looking at your watch and saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t get pissed and come to your place for a shag because I have to put the bins out tonight, otherwise the council won’t come back for a fortnight.’ Politicians so incompetent she can hardly bear to look.

No one replaces the lightbulbs, so they live in an ever-descending gloom.

It’s either the children or it is Death. It might well be Death: that shadow of a notion that you might be more than halfway through and this is all you’ve got, this is all the powder in your keg. New experiences? You’ve had ’em. Except cancer, and that might well be the one remaining new experience left to try. Each holiday a repeat of a previous holiday: Eurocamp sites where the plastic houses were just a smidgen too close together so she could gaze on happier couples from her Verandah of Bitterness. Doing crosswords on her phone (storage allowing).

The great variable of it all after forty-five: when the reaper might call. Will it be fifty? Sixty-two? Will people shake their heads momentarily, saying, ‘So young’ before going back to their online food order? Or will it be ninety-two, blind, deaf and gaga? Once you’re living after half time, it’s a gamble – when death is going to take you and whether it might be your own fault for not ‘eating clean’. Too many fags, not enough kale. Too much telly, not enough yoga. Sitting is the new smoking. Obesity is the new sitting. A scientist once told her the age of your death is set at your birth. If only we could know, we wouldn’t have to spend so much time worrying about it. Imagine spending your life chowing down on kale, only to find you’ve got ninety years of it to get through? If someone could just inform you, at maybe thirty, that you’ve got until sixty-eight to do everything, love everyone, set your affairs in order, have your affairs. If only we could be taken less by surprise by death. People in the past who went quietly mad losing child after child, lived cheek by jowl with death, less utterly astonished by it. Perhaps if it surrounded you like that, like a terrible, dank lake, you would take less umbrage at its random cruelties.

Must research ISAs, renew contents insurance, remember Thursday is ‘wear green to nursery day’, and take in a panoply of exotic fruit. Which diet to follow as she hurtles towards matronly? Embark on daily seven-minute fitness? Seven whole minutes though SO BORING! Which new holiday idea might be the least Not Fun, and just as they decide on a place and a date after approximately three years on the Internet, they check in with TripAdvisor, which shits on all their dreams with close-up shots of moulding shower trays.

Bring back the high street travel agent. Get rid of estate agents, but bring back travel agents. Someone out there ought to be a purveyor of joy rather than a peddler of worry.

She thinks of the song ‘Age of Aquarius’, but substitutes Anxiety.

At the GP they tested her iron levels.

‘I’m tired all the time. Like, I wake up tired,’ she told the nurse.

‘Forty-six-year-old women generally are tired because they’re doing everything,’ the nurse said, seemingly unable to summon much interest in her case.

She’s been out of the office most of the day on some dull cold-case interviews that yielded close to nothing. Still, it was an outing. Manon squints into the brightness, wrapping her scarf around her neck. It’s that time in the year when the coat has been dispensed with but, frankly, it’s freezing, hence the scarf. Her mobile starts ringing before she’s even at the end of the path. Bryony.

‘All right?’ says Manon.

‘You on your way in?’ asks Bri.

‘Yup, why? D’you want a coffee?’

‘No, McFuckface wants to see you.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t ask me.’

The new detective superintendent in charge of MCU and hence Manon’s über-boss, above Harriet but below the commissioner (replacing the regrettably deceased and thoroughly discredited Gary Stanton) is, drumroll, Glenda McBain.

Glenda McBainofMyLife.

Glenda McBlameGame.

The promotion had taken place during Manon’s maternity leave and according to pretty much everyone in the major crime unit, it was an over-promotion. What McBain lacked in policing acumen, she made up for in buzz words, trotting out references to social media, digital presence, and ‘blue sky thinking’ until the panic among the ageing interview panel was palpable. So the story doing the rounds in the canteen went, anyway. These senior officers, with their shiny buttons and epaulettes, were men of an age to smooth a physical newspaper across a kitchen table in order to keep abreast of current events. Word was that Glenda McPersonalGain had mentioned Facebook and Twitter, sticky content, and clickbait sufficient times to have them reaching for the Gaviscon. So terrified were they by her Internetty lexicon, that they ended up spluttering, ‘Well, she seems to have it covered,’ in relieved tones, hopeful they might never have to discuss it again.

Manon’s first run-in with Glenda McBain was her return to work interview, it being never too soon to fall out with your new boss.

Manon was returning to cold cases three days per week – a very feasible pattern in a department that was not driven by round the clock ‘live’ investigations, their victims usually having been dead for decades, so another few weeks wasn’t going to hurt. There was no middle-of-the-night responding, no sleepless first seventy-two hours like there was on MCU. Cold cases was the force’s cultural backwater, thick with officer plankton, and Manon was more than happy to be swimming in it. Pottering in, coffee in hand, and logging on for a spot of Internet shopping was precisely what she had in mind when she thought of work–life balance. Admittedly, however, the work lacked a certain grip. Excitement couldn’t be listed as part of her daily experience.

It made no discernible difference which days Manon worked, so she naturally chose Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Long weekends a go-go, much of it spent in bed with Teddy, cuddling, kissing his face and reading Dr Dog on a loop. These mornings would be all the more delicious in contrast to the workday scramble; sleep-deprived if Teddy had been up in the night. Trying to shower/blow-dry her hair, feed and dress him, feed and dress herself, deal with the inevitable nearly-out-the-door poo he could muster at will.

Glenda McBain, however, had pretty randomly decided that Manon should work Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This, Manon was sure, was mindless sabotage from a boss she soon realised was … well, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. She might know Internet words, but Glenda McBain was, as Bri put it, ‘thickety thick thick, stupidy stupidy’.

Subsequently, when Manon and Harriet were in Glenda’s office discussing the complex mechanics of a case or some element of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, she could see Glenda struggling to keep up: the tiny flicking of the eyeballs combined with physical delay. It was as if Manon could see Glenda’s brain saying, ‘Hold up lads! We’re going to have to suspend arm and leg movements for a minute while we process this convo.’

Harriet knew it too, but was too institutionalised to use the full panoply of McFuckface monikers, in sharp contrast to Bryony, who was at the very vanguard of Glenda ribaldry.

‘Something’s happened. Something disastrous,’ Bri had said recently, marching through Manon’s front door, past her and into the kitchen, her beetle-like movements saying panic.

‘Go on.’

‘I called her … I called her— I can’t.’

‘Yes you can.’

‘This was in a MEETING. And I blame you Manon, because you’re always egging me on, encouraging me to be juvenile.’

‘Come on, out with it.’

‘I called her McFlurry. It was kind of quiet, and I corrected it mid-speak, so …’

Manon started laughing, so much she had to bend double.

‘It’s not funny.’

‘Stop it, I’m doing a wee. Did you go for the full Det Chf Supt McFlurry? Or the more informal CE McFlurry?’

Bri frowned. ‘CE?’

‘Creme Egg.’

‘Can I come and work on cold cases?’

‘Only the finest minds on cold cases, Bri. Our best and finest minds.’

Manon had wondered what on earth Glenda was even doing in her back to work interview, it being well below her pay grade.

‘Can you manage the workload in three days a week?’ Glenda demanded, all brusque and challengey, as if this is what powerful women can do. Thank you, feminism.

‘It’s cold cases,’ Manon answered. ‘I’m not heading up counter terrorism.’

Glenda, Manon reasoned, was meddling for the sake of meddling. Glenda was saying ‘I want it pink’ just because she could. Glenda fell into that group of people who seemed to believe that if they stretched their tentacles into the very far flung corners of existence – corners that didn’t even concern them – they would Achieve Ultimate Control.

She agreed to McBain’s preposterous working pattern, and then, a few weeks later, when McBain’s laser gaze was focussed elsewhere, quietly shifted her working week to the way she wanted it.

On her way into HQ she wishes she had her M&S mackintosh, which she can picture in a rumpled heap on the floor beside the front door of their house. The coat hooks fell off the wall three weeks ago and they’ve been ‘storing’ their coats on the floor ever since. There is no prospect of anyone dealing with the coat hooks. It is beyond their skill set, and she’s too embarrassed to get a handyman in for such a piddling job. Her sexual fantasies, such as they are, generally involve men performing minor DIY while retaining their emotional equilibrium.

Knee twinges climbing the stairs to McBain’s office. She glances behind her, to see if anyone’s on the stairwell, so she can go up on one leg giving it maximum elderly hobble, but there are young uniformed coppers bringing up the rear, so she has to fake full mobility. She wonders what McBain wants. Is she going to lambast me for my footwear, or my use of stationery? Ask me to livetweet an arrest? Hashtag police! Open up!

‘Ah, Manon, come in,’ McBain says. ‘I’m seconding you to team two, the Lithuanian job.’

Manon is about to protest about hours and her sacrosanct days at home with Teddy, but Glenda puts her hand up. ‘You’ll be SIO, but continue on your Monday, Wednesday and Friday shift pattern.’

Manon experiences a stab of heartburn at this.

‘If developments occur on your days off, Davy can step up. He’s more than capable. You might have to take the odd out-of-hours phone call. Is that a problem?’

Manon shakes her head. She’s searching for the downside, literally rummaging about for a grievance in this scenario, but can’t find one. She’s been desperate for a sniff at this case, been turning it over in her mind, nearly called Davy with her list of investigative avenues he ought to go down, and now she gets to lord it about while still working three days a week. It’s as if feminism has actually come through for her. There simply must be a downside, some horrific personal yet invisible cost that she must suck up while making a casserole and refreshing her patio pots. Is someone going to throw in the care of an octogenarian? Potty training a Retriever pup?

And yet all she can think is: Back on the road with Davy Walker.

‘What about my cold case team?’

‘Your team can carry on with their case load, update you when something shifts.’

I.e. never, Manon thinks.

‘What about Harriet? Isn’t she SIO on the Lithuanian job?’

‘Yes. Harriet’s taking some time off. Um, I don’t know how much she wants the office to know … but you’re her friend, so. Harriet has discovered a lump on her breast. She’s having a mastectomy this week.’

‘Oh no!’ Manon says, hand over her mouth.

Not feminism then.

At the door, Glenda says, ‘Bit late to start today, and anyway Davy’s still at the migrant house conducting interviews. Best you hit the ground running when you’re next back in.’

Come evening, Manon storms into the kitchen where Mark is feeding Teddy, flings her keys onto the counter, and says, ‘Guess what Griselda McFuckface did today?’

‘I assume you mean Glenda McBain,’ he says mildly.

‘Oh right, you’re her bezzie these days, are you?’

‘What did she do to anger you, Oh Great One?’

‘She wants me to lead a live murder investigation. The Lithuanian job.’

‘And that’s terrible because …’

‘We’ve got no clean pants.’

‘Sorry, what’s the connection between pants and awfulness of being promoted, nay valued, by your boss?’

‘Right, so we’ve got no clean pants,’ she says, bending down her fingers with each point. ‘The phone’s been broken for weeks – we never fix anything. There isn’t a single item of food with any nutritional value in our kitchen, and don’t bring up tinned sweetcorn again; we are incapable of booking a decent holiday, we eat too many takeaways, our furniture is ugly. And there are no clean pants. So I can’t think about complex investigations because, my darling perpetuator of the patriarchy, my mind is full of pants.’

‘Don’t think about the pants,’ he says. ‘Ignore the pants. Right, it’s true what you say, but a) the only people who ring the landline are relatives and cold callers b) I love takeaways and so do you c) ignore the pants. You can reverse pants or put on swimwear d) we are good at booking shit holidays and e) who gives a fuck about ugly furniture? We sit on it, we don’t look at it.’

‘I do.’

‘Well, stop.’

He doesn’t, she notices, say, ‘I’ll do the pants.’ (And even if he did, it wouldn’t last more than a week.) Instead, he says, ‘I think she’s right. Heading up this case will be great for you.’

Mark sidles over to her, hands on her hips then up and under her top.

‘How about, y’know … later,’ he says, eyeing Teddy and winking at her. ‘To celebrate. What d’you think?’

‘Again?’ she says. ‘Seriously? Oh fine, Thai or Indian?’

In fact, he says he feels too sick to eat anything at all – practically unheard of for Mark.

‘You look … yellow,’ she tells him. ‘Your eyes are the colour of urine.’

‘You say the loveliest things.’

In bed that evening, as they are falling asleep, she says, ‘I want you to get us some porn to watch. Liven things up a bit.’

‘Righto,’ Mark says.

‘But nothing weird. Conventional stuff for people like us. Nothing … out there.’

‘Middle-aged chubster porn,’ says Mark.

‘No, I don’t want to see chubby people doing it. I can get that at home. No animals or anything alarming.’

‘Middle-aged animal-free porn, got it,’ says Mark.

‘Is that a section in a porn shop?’ she asks.

‘Probably. Next to “clergy”.’

‘I wouldn’t know where to get it, you see,’ she says. ‘Does John Lewis do porn?’

‘If it did, it’d be exactly the sort of porn we’d like,’ he says.

‘Oh yes. John Lewis porn. That’s exactly it. No surprising or unpleasant orifices. Nice table lamps in the background should the mind wander.’

DAY 2
8 A.M.
DAVY

The cordon has gone, SOCO and the scene photographer having got what they needed.

‘How did they get him up there?’ Manon asks, looking up into the tree. ‘If it was murder, he must’ve cooperated. Pretty hard to get a fella up there if he doesn’t want to. Not like they built a scaffold.’

‘Ladder maybe. Could’ve kicked it away.’

‘Any indentations suggesting the feet of a ladder?’

‘Nope, but they might have scuffed the ground to cover it. What if they threatened him?’ Davy says. ‘Had a gun to his head?’

‘I’d say, so shoot me. Rather be shot than hanged, any day. Can take an age to die if your neck doesn’t break.’

‘He might’ve been coerced into the tree,’ says Davy.

‘Tricky thing to do though, isn’t it? I mean, if I were a serial killer, it wouldn’t be my first choice of MO.’

‘Serial killer?’ says Davy, who had just now felt as if his murder was being taken away from him, not just by Mrs Big Boots clod-hopping all over his scene, but by her suspicion it might in fact be suicide after all. And now she’s bandying the words serial killer about?

‘Well, this is the third hanging in as many months. They were all hung with the same rope. The rope is everything Davy. We need to be all over the rope.’

He wants to say, Do you think I haven’t thought of that? Do you think I’m not all over the rope?

The two previous victims, one man and one woman, were deemed to have taken their own lives following an investigation by local officers. He reminds her of this.

‘Why didn’t they refer it up to us?’ Manon asks.

‘Thought they could handle it themselves,’ Davy says.

‘Could they though? Could be murder. We could be talking about our third victim in a serial homicide.’

‘I think you’re getting a bit over-excited.’

‘I think we need to reopen those other two cases.’

‘Good luck telling Wisbech plod that.’

‘I’m not going to tell them,’ Manon says, smiling at Davy. ‘You are.’

She doesn’t let up as they walk to the car. Did they leave notes, these other victims? Were there witnesses to the deaths? Were there statements about the deceased’s states of mind in the run up to the deaths. CCTV? ANPR? Yes, yes, he wants to say, I’m on it. Give me a sodding chance, it’s only day two. And he is so, so tired.

‘You look tired,’ she says.

‘Thing is,’ he says, ‘you’d hang them to make it look like suicide, not murder.’

‘Yes, but it didn’t look like suicide, though. That note made sure it didn’t. Something just doesn’t fit about it. It’s a suicidal method, not a murder method, and yet the note just knocks it out of the park. Also, if I were coerced into a tree, with whatever threats, I’d just keep climbing – out of reach.’

‘There was a belt,’ Davy says, ‘next to his bed in the migrant house. A leather belt. If I wanted to top myself, I’d use my belt and the nearest bannister. No need to trek all the way to Hinchingbrooke.’

‘Yes, it’s very effortful,’ she concedes.

Then she’s back to her nagging. Locations of the bodies, how did they get to those locations, did they have help getting to those locations – they were quite remote, weren’t they Davy? Naggedy nag nag. It’s only day two, he wants to shout in her face. Back, the fuck, off.

‘If we were on TV,’ she says, the breath in her lungs pumped and lively, ‘we’d be in an office with some kind of glass screen with a giant interactive map on it and I’d stroke my finger across it to triangulate the locations. And we’d be wearing tonal outfits, Davy.’

‘Yeah, well, we’re not on TV, so I can offer you a biro and an Ordnance Survey map.’

MANON

‘Who’s this fella we’re going to see then?’ she asks, while Davy pulls away from the kerb. They are going to Wisbech police station for the interview.

‘Edikas. He’s the fixer. He runs the migrants on behalf of Vasil the Barbarian, the gangmaster. Tells them what’s what when they get off the bus. Vasil gets the cash. Bridget says salaries are paid into the migrants’ bank accounts, so it looks like there’s a paper trail, but their bank cards are taken off them when they arrive, so they don’t have any access to the money. Vasil uses their accounts to launder his funds.’

‘And why hasn’t he been cleaned out by Op Pheasant?’

‘No one will testify against him. Biggest problem Pheasant has is that the minute the migrants get away, they want nothing more to do with it. They hotfoot it back to Klaipeda and that’s that. Wall of silence, Bridget says.’

‘Oh, Bridget says, does she?’ says Manon, gurning with Carry-On innuendo. Trying to nudge-nudge him, without causing an accident. ‘How is Bridget?’

‘She’s fine,’ he says, flushing.

‘And what about Edikas’s own situation. Wife? Kids?’

‘Back in Klaipeda. He sends money back to them each month.’

‘What’s Klaipeda like?’

‘Baltic sea port, Lithuania’s third city. Lots of Russians, lots of jobs on the docks.’

‘OK, so it looks to me like Edikas has the worst of all worlds. Doing all the dirty work for Vasil but not living in the lap of luxury like Vasil’s lot. Where does Edikas live?’

‘In a rental, but by himself.’

‘Do we need an interpreter for this?’

‘He says not. Says he speaks English just fine.’

‘Hmmm, I’ve had that before. No interpreter, then you find there’s lots of convenient misunderstanding when it comes to the detail. Lots of no comprendo, DS Walker.’

They drive in silence through the Fens for a time.

‘And anyway,’ she says, ‘there are lots of ways of making it look like it isn’t murder. Pills. Push ’em in a river, car accidents. Easy peasy. It’s got an old-fashioned quality, hanging – makes me think of medieval times, or highway men at roadsides, or lynchings, the American Civil War, y’know? They hung slaves from the trees.’

‘Yes, but this is Wisbech,’ says Davy.

‘Oh yes Davy,’ Manon says, clasping an imaginary handbag mid-air. ‘This is Wisbech, the last bastion of civilisation.’

She reaches out to turn on the radio. Immediately says, ‘Oh fuck no, not him again, I can’t stand him,’ as Shane Farquharson comes over the airwaves, his voice immediately recognisable – the everyman twang combined with stockbroker belt well-to-do. ‘How can you listen to this awful crap, Davy?’

Out from the radio comes Farquharson’s tell-it-like-it-is voice: ‘Any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Lithuanian people suddenly moved in next door.’

‘Not any normal people I know,’ says Manon. ‘What the fuck is he talking about? It’s not fair-minded to be worried about someone’s nationality! It’s the opposite of fair-minded. It’s Being a Big Bigot.’

‘He’s just a disrupter,’ Davy says. ‘None of it means anything.’

‘Think it’s worse than that,’ Manon says.

Farquharson, whose primary job is media rent-a-gob, is of above average intelligence and articulate – he can express what his angry troupe are feeling, making sense of their futile fury, making their impotence seem momentarily like purpose. And though he has never won a seat in parliament, he dominates radio airwaves, a favourite of talk show phone-ins like the one currently polluting Davy and Manon’s air. ‘Urgh, he’s invited onto Question Time every single week,’ Manon says. ‘Just gives him a platform so he can feed more crazy to the base.’

Manon is aware she has descended into one of her diatribes and suspects Davy may have switched off, thinking instead about Big-Bosomed Bridget, while she pontificates about anger and neglect in the air, meted out at polling stations. The misinformed holding sway. Anger in the pages of newspapers, anger on radio airwaves, anger that pushes to one side solid information. There are no facts any more. Instead, ‘all the feels’ and ‘we’ve had enough of experts telling us what to think’ and ‘the elite have always run things, it’s time for change’ and drain the swamp and make Wisbech great again.

‘Anyway,’ Manon says, turning off the radio. ‘How are the wedding preparations going?’

DAVY

He flushes, reminded of the adultery in his thoughts about Bridget.

Things have happened very quickly with Juliet because they were both so enthusiastic about the trappings of coupledom: the moving in together, the holidays, weekend walks, cushion choosing, casserole making, box set watching, less and less hot sex having; the whole insulation from loneliness a project in itself. This hunkering down, which in many respects is a closing off of the wider world, a narrowing of their circle down to two, but a sure-fire dependable two. Closing the curtains on the world’s diverse riches – riches like Bridget and her snarky sense of humour and lively expression. While wanting to hunker very badly, Davy can feel the loss of his interactions – solo interactions – with the world at large. The way he used to say yes to every invitation in case he met someone, the way he would force himself to go to a thing alone, a force of will when every fibre of his being wanted to watch telly with a ready meal. He has been all too ready to give up the strains of moving through the world alone, but cannot help noticing the way he feels blunted by the seclusion he and Juliet are gathering about them like a thick wool blanket.

Not all his interests are contained behind the drawn living-room curtains, with the telly on and the heating a smidgen too high, comfy though it is. It is also boring.

No, he tells himself, Bridget can’t be right for him because Juliet is The One, and Juliet has put her salt and pepper mills in the dental surgery starkness of his Sapley rental. And once you’ve pooled salt and pepper mills, there really is no going back. Also, Juliet has been soaking up the neglect and disappointment the job creates: the way investigations kick off at no notice, holidays postponed. She has greeted these disappointments with barely suppressed aggression. This complex interplay between them cannot (should not) be compared to the breezy clean sheet with someone where no guilt or recrimination has built up at all (aka Bridget).

MANON

‘Do you know Lukas Balsys?’ Manon asks after the long beep has sounded on the recording machine and she has informed it that she is in the room with Davy and Edikas, who has not been offered a brief because he is not under arrest. Yet.

‘Yes,’ Edikas says.

‘What was your relationship with Lukas?’

‘I find him work. Agricultural job.’

‘He came over on the bus from Klaipeda, is that right?’

Edikas nods.

‘For the tape please.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it true you took away his passport and bank card when he first arrived?’

‘No! Why would I do this? I have no need of Lithuanian passport. I have my own. I just help my peoples. When guys come from Lithuania, I help them. That is all.’

‘Did you pay Lukas a wage?’

‘Of course.’

‘Can I see evidence of this wage?’

‘Yes, we have document showing payroll. And you can look in his bank account.’

‘If he had his passport and bank cards, why were these not among his possessions? We retrieved only a belt, some vitamins.’

Edikas shrugs.

Manon allows a silence to linger. Time for everyone to ponder this situation. Silences reveal much, she finds, if only you refuse to take responsibility for them. When she was younger, she was a frantic silence-filler, feeling the onus was on her to make the moment smooth out, no matter how socially inept her companion. This led to plenty of absurd situations in which she deployed sexuality to fill in the gaps. Sit a younger Manon next to some chilly, pinched-lipped, public school boy type and she’d prostrate herself to make it go well. Gabbling away, hot-faced, to put at ease someone she didn’t even like; often someone who palpably didn’t like her. Sometimes she’d get into a relationship with them that lasted years.

No more. These days, she has got in the habit of mentally briefing herself before any social event. Just hang back. Observe. Don’t fill the gaps. Let other people do the running. It’s not your responsibility.

And the power of this, the way it releases her, still helps to this day. She has learned that awkwardness no more belongs to her than does the weather. She can observe it, like an interested bystander, rather than frantically trying to make it shift.

Not so Davy, who is a mass of easily-pricked embarrassment.

‘Where were you on the evening of Monday May 14th, the night before last?’ Manon asks.

‘In my home,’ Edikas says.

‘With anyone?’

‘No, just me. And Skirta, my dog.’

‘When did you find out about Lukas’s death?’

‘Today. Yesterday was day off.’

‘And what was your reaction to his death?’

Edikas shrugs, turns his mouth down. ‘This was gloomy person. Very negatif. I’m not surprise he kill himself.’

‘What makes you think he killed himself?’ Manon asks, eyeballing him.

Edikas looks at her, shocked. ‘I thought … I thought he heng hisself.’

‘So?’

‘It is not easy to hang another person.’

‘You sound like you’ve tried it.’

Edikas doesn’t respond.

‘Who was Lukas closest to in the house?’

‘Matis. He come from Klaipeda with Matis.’

‘All right, we’d like to speak to Matis, then. Can you give us his number?’ Manon asks.

Once again, Edikas turns his mouth down. Pats his pockets. ‘I don’t have my mobile phone.’

Manon nods, while sliding her own mobile phone under the table. While Davy supplies some questions about Matis’s location, she locates Edikas’s mobile number from an internal email and calls it.

Edikas starts ringing.

‘That mobile phone, you mean?’ Manon asks, smiling.

Unruffled, Edikas scrolls through his mobile phone. ‘No, I don’t have Matis number.’

‘Well, perhaps you could locate it for us. Or him. It’s important we talk to him. Anything else about Lukas?’ Manon asks.

‘He was having sex with the neighbour. Mrs Tucker.’

‘Right,’ says Manon, clipping down her seat belt outside Wisbech police station. ‘Mr and Mrs Tucker then.’

They drive in silence, Manon reminded of the pleasure of being with Davy Walker – so comfortable, they know each other too well for pleasantries, though she is worried, she thinks, glancing at his pale face. He looks shattered.

‘D’you want to stop for a break?’ she asks him. ‘We could get a sandwich.’

He doesn’t say anything but pulls up to park so they can walk to Greggs in Wisbech’s pedestrianised shopping precinct.

Looking in the chiller cabinet, stomach growling, she peruses starchy baguettes filled with creamy mayonnaise-slathered chicken or tuna. This is exactly what I need to stop eating – a thought that makes her want it all the more. She takes a baguette as long as her forearm and an accompanying bag of ready salted crisps to the till. Because the combination is on offer in a ‘meal deal’.

‘What are you getting?’ she asks Davy.

He is holding a sandwich (half the size of hers) and she takes it off him and pays for it along with her own, while he wanders outside. The smallness of his lunch compared to hers reminds her of the time she’d employed a nutritionist to assist her in the battle of the bulge.

‘And do you eat the same as your partner at meals?’ the nutritionist had asked.

‘I’ll say!’ Manon had replied, appalled at the idea she should have less.

Back in the car, she says, ‘So why wasn’t Edikas at work as usual yesterday? Busy night murdering Lukas?’

‘Might just be his day off,’ Davy says, yawning.

‘Time for him to do his Ocado shop and put a wash on, you mean? I don’t think Edikas looks the type to take days off.’

They pull up outside two adjoined red-brick homes – identical, though the contrast couldn’t be more arresting.

‘These could be before and after photos,’ she says to Davy.

‘I know, poor bastards,’ Davy says.

On one side, the Tuckers’ side, the window frames are newly painted bright white. The lower bay window gleams. The path is creamy York stone slabs that look newly laid. Not a crack, not a weed. They are so clean Manon wonders if she should remove her shoes before walking up the path.

The front door is grey-blue with a stainless steel oversized door knob and matching house numbers. Window film with a tiny star design frosts the front door’s glass panels, where she can see a figure approaching to answer the bell. These are the sort to hoover their garden with one of those deafening leaf blowers. The sort to file a bill the minute it comes in. No ‘storing’ their coats on the floor for these two.

Next door, the lower windows have been closed up with particle board. The frames are rotting and grey. The rubbish in the front garden is so high that it reaches the sill of the bay window. The front door is uPVC with rippled glass. On the step is a collection of tottering beer cans.

The bags of rubbish that have been tossed out front have been raided by foxes so that debris – crisp packets, banana skins, fag ash, ready meal trays, teabags – spill over the path. It smells. Stinks, in fact, like the open back end of a bin truck.

As the front door opens, Manon and Davy raise their badges.

Both at home during the day, Manon thinks, stepping over the threshold into an immaculate hallway with pale beech laminate flooring. Wonder how that’s going. The house smells of polish and Glade.

‘Come through,’ says Mrs Tucker. ‘Can I make you a tea or coffee?’

‘I’m all right, thanks,’ Manon says, following her into a gleaming white gloss kitchen while Davy and Mr Tucker disappear into the front lounge. ‘No work today?’

‘I work from home. Jim lost his job recently.’ Mrs Tucker gives Manon a weary smile as if she is tolerating a great deal. ‘A husband is for life but not for lunch! It’s driving me mad, to be honest.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘He didn’t much like his job, to be fair. But now …’

‘What did he do, for work I mean?’

‘Housing officer, Fenland Council. Cuts to local authority budgets are beyond savage at the moment, well, as I’m sure you know. They must be cutting police budgets.’

‘They are, yes. It’s a very thin blue line right now.’

They wait in silence for the kettle to boil.

‘Right,’ Mrs Tucker says, holding a laden tray, ‘let’s go through.’

In the lounge, Mr Tucker is telling Davy about his predicament. He has an intense look on his face, as if he can’t unburden himself quickly enough.

‘I put everything into this house, every penny I had. I wanted to leave it to the kids. We were going to be mortgage free in about ten years except since they moved in, it’s worth nothing at all. Nothing! Who’d buy this off us with that going on next door? We can’t fucking leave.’ At the word ‘fucking’ he kicks the skirting close to where he stands.

‘Jim!’ says his wife. ‘Calm down.’

‘I won’t calm down. Don’t fucking tell me to fucking calm down!’

Mr Tucker clenches and unclenches his fists, his jaw protruding.

Manon glances at Davy, who is ashen, as if frightened. Perhaps he fears Mr Tucker might turn the fists outwards, there is that much pent-up aggression in the room.

Mr Tucker continues, not quite shouting, but spitting out the words, ‘This house, it’s like a stone around our necks. Who’d take this house off us? All that rubbish out front, the noise, the smell. They come in at all hours, banging about, arguing, fighting. The drinking! Everything was all right before that lot came. We’ve complained that many times to the fella in charge over there, Edikas or something, he doesn’t pick up my calls any more. I’m at my wits’ end, I really am.’

While Mr Tucker talks, Manon takes the couple in. Mrs Tucker wears a billowing shirt dress, black, and weighty black-rimmed spectacles. She has a look – makeup free, her hair short and practical, statement earrings. Knows how to shop, Manon thinks admiringly. Mr Tucker wears old jeans and a half-zip sweatshirt. He is not fat, but has the classic male shape – round belly, pipe-cleaner legs. He has lost his hair. On his wrist is a Fitbit, and Manon wonders if he is a man beset by resolutions: to be better. At which he fails.

Mrs Tucker, seemingly unable to take any more of her husband’s tub thumping, leaves the room.

Manon says, ‘It’s all right, Mr Tucker. I can see what a difficult situation this is. Have you talked to the police or the council about what’s happening? An antisocial behaviour order—’

‘No one’s listening,’ Mr Tucker says, sitting at last. ‘I’m powerless.’

Mrs Tucker re-enters and sits on the sofa next to her husband. She’s sick to the back teeth of him, Manon thinks. He needs a job. He needs to go out each day to a job and come back tired in the evening and watch some telly. We all need that. Or perhaps he needs to rent, instead of own property. We used to be a nation of renters like the Germans; more mobile, less vulnerable to this kind of hurt.

‘Lukas Balsys,’ Manon says.

She watches the name settle between Mr and Mrs Tucker on the sofa; watches the discomfort that name causes the married couple. What do you tell yourselves about Lukas Balsys? she wonders. Fucking hell, I thought my relationship was shaky. We’re the Waltons compared with these two.

‘Yes,’ says Mrs Tucker. ‘What about him?’

‘Are you aware that he has died?’

‘Yes,’ says Mrs Tucker. ‘Very sad.’

‘Did you know him well?’ asks Manon.

Davy shifts – with discomfort, Manon thinks – in his seat.

Mrs Tucker looks at Mr Tucker, who doesn’t return her gaze.

‘Um … not well,’ Mrs Tucker says, ‘I wouldn’t say well. He came here to fix some things – some plumbing. He was good at plumbing and we’d complained that many times to next door’s landlord, Edikas was it?’

‘He’s not the landlord, but he is their boss.’

‘Right, well I think he felt he owed us a favour. Perhaps he thought we’d stop complaining. So he sent Lukas around to look at our boiler because the pilot light kept going out.’

Edikas, Manon recalls, hadn’t put it so delicately.

‘Banging the wife,’ was how he’d described it. ‘Everyone know she very into it. Very. Lukas could not force her, not that kind of man. Maybe Lukas kill himself for love. Anyway, we hear them through the wall.’ Edikas gave a filthy chuckle at this, then a bad impression of female orgasm, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ Then another phlegm-bubbling dirty laugh. ‘They always complain, this neighbour, so I think, I send Lukas round – Lukas plumb her hole!’ Edikas had shouted, laughing.

‘Yes, all right. I get the picture,’ Manon had said. ‘That was fast work from the two of them.’

‘Ask me, this wife would do it with anyone I send. Even Dimitri.’

‘What’s up with Dimitri?’

Edikas had screwed his face up and tapped his temple with a finger. ‘Mental problems.’

Manon had looked at Davy, without having to say ‘we should look into this Dimitri fella’, because Davy was already writing it in his pad.

She looks now at Mrs Do-It-With-Anyone Tucker, sitting next to Mr Probably-Hasn’t-Done-It-In-Years Tucker.

‘Got any outhouses – shed or garage, that kind of thing?’

‘A shed, in the garden,’ says Mr Tucker.

‘Mind if I take a look?’

She follows him out to a garden with an oval lawn surrounded by flower beds, bisected by a washing line fashioned from blue plastic rope, the same kind that tightened around Lukas Balsys’s neck.

Manon stands beneath the washing line. The pegs are rusted onto it. The coils at the house end, around a post, are webbed with mud or spiders’ webs or algae, or whatever it is that welds things together, brownly, outdoors. Bits of the rope have faded to yellow. It doesn’t fit with the immaculate nature of the rest of the house.

‘Were you planning to replace this?’ she asks, one hand hanging from the line.

‘Oh,’ says Mr Tucker, ‘at one point we were. Can’t see the point now. I’m not putting a penny into this house, not now. Been up donkey’s years, that. It’s not very clean to put clothes on.’

‘So, did you buy the rope to replace it?’

She glances into the shed while Mr Tucker holds the door open. No spare coils of new blue rope.

‘Not yet, no.’

The sky is impossibly bright, and they squint, though the day isn’t warm. Neither of them makes to move inside.

‘Look, sorry about in there,’ he says. He seems calmer, sadder, away from his wife.

‘You don’t like immigrants,’ she says to him.

‘Is that a question?’ His tone right up to punch level again. ‘I couldn’t hear a question. Do I like the migrants next door? No, I don’t. Do I hate all migrants? No, though I think we could do with less of them. We’re being flooded.’

‘So you’re anti-immigration?’

‘Isn’t everyone?’

‘Certainly feels that way,’ Manon says. ‘If we can go in, I just have a couple more questions for you and your wife.’ And she heads indoors.

‘Can I ask where you were the night before last?’ Manon says, sitting in the living room again. The Tuckers are on the sofa. Davy is taking notes in a corner chair.

‘Here,’ says Mrs Tucker. ‘Trying to watch telly over the din.’

‘The din?’

‘Well there was a lot of disturbance next door. There was that anti-immigration gathering. I hesitate to call it a march because there weren’t that many of them. One Wisbech, Dean’s lot.’

‘Dean?’

‘Dean Singlehurst, he’s their main guy. They came past here with their placards and banners, very noisy, and there was a kerfuffle with the people next door.’

‘Kerfuffle?’

‘Yes. There was the usual banging about next door, we’re used to that. Then the marchers came up the street, chanting. There weren’t that many of them – maybe two dozen – but they were trying to be loud about it.’

‘Wait, the One Wisbech march came up a small cul-de-sac like Prospect Place?’ Manon asks.

‘Yes, we thought it was strange,’ Mrs Tucker says.

‘What sort of thing were they chanting?’

‘Oh, you know, English jobs for English people. Stop the flood. Foreigners go home. They stopped outside here. We didn’t see what actually happened – we had the shutters closed.’

‘How did you see how many marchers there were then?’

‘When they first started coming up the road, I went and opened the front door to see who it was. Shane Farquharson was with them, at the front. Then I came inside to the living room, where we couldn’t see anything, but we could hear everything,’ Mrs Tucker continues. ‘Some marchers came up the path next door. Then there was shouting.’

‘English or Lithuanian?’

‘Both. We don’t know if they went in or not, or if the migrants came out. The noise just receded eventually.’

‘What could you hear being shouted in English?’

‘Well, one of the marchers said, “Wanna ask you something!” and then “Oi! Oi!”’

‘What time was this?’

Mrs Tucker turns her mouth down. ‘Ten, ten thirty? The news was on, not that we could hear it.’

‘You didn’t think of calling the police?’

Manon eyes up the tea tray to see if any biscuits are on offer. She is crestfallen to see an empty, crumbed saucer. Davy has snaffled the custard creams, damn him.

‘There wasn’t anything to call the police about. Just people gathering, a bit of shouting. We didn’t know about Lukas, of course.’

Manon glances at Davy, but he’s way ahead of her, writing it all down. He stops, mid-scrawl, and says, ‘So it’s Jim Tucker? That’s your full name?’

‘Actually, it’s Jerome Wilberforce Tucker.’

‘Wow,’ says Manon. ‘Shall we just call you Wilberforce – keep it nice and informal?’

‘You can call me Jim. I know it’s a ridiculous name. My mother had … pretensions.’

‘Ambitions,’ interjects Mrs Tucker.

‘Look, I’m called Manon, so I’m in no position to judge.’

‘Not that that’s ever stopped you,’ mutters Davy. ‘And your name?’ he asks Mrs Tucker.

The best names, Manon is thinking, have rhythm. Maxim de Winter. Engelbert Humperdinck. Dante de Blasio. Fly is currently mooning over a girl at school called Temperance. ‘I already love her,’ Manon told him, ‘for her name.’ Perhaps she should change hers to Manon de Bradshaw.

‘Elspeth. Elspeth Tucker.’

Outside, in the car, Davy is overcome.

‘It’s shit for him,’ he says. ‘What’s he s’posed to do? He’s paid for that house, blood sweat and tears, and now it’s worth nothing because of them. I don’t blame him, coming over all UKIP. I’d want shot of them, too.’

‘Yes, but did he do anything, that’s the question? Or her? There’s no rope lying around.’

‘And he’s got an alibi. Both have.’

‘Yeah, but their alibi is each other. So we have to view that with some scepticism. Lukas got around, didn’t he? We need to chat to the residents next door.’

‘Trouble is, they clam up if Edikas is about. Aren’t you going to ask Mrs Tucker about humping our victim?’

‘I will, but not yet. There’s nothing that puts her in Hinchingbrooke on the night Lukas died, even if she had the strength to get him into a tree, which I doubt. We need to go back into the migrant house now that we have powers to search and seize – question everyone in isolation. It’s part of the crime scene. Doesn’t matter what Edikas wants, or his dog. Can you call in an interpreter? Also, we need to chat to these One Wisbech marchers. And we need to catch up with Demented Dimitri. Also, Davy?’ She wonders if that’s a tiny eye roll she sees, as he pulls away from the kerb. ‘Have we tried to match the handwriting on the note? Might be something in the house that matches it. So that should be a priority in the search – anything with handwriting on it.’

MATIS

His path to the bedroom has been blocked by Edikas.

‘The police want to talk to you,’ Edikas says. ‘I am not going to take heat from police for you.’

‘I can’t—’ Matis says.

‘You can. You can talk to them without telling them anything. This is easy. You forgot this, you don’t know that.’

Dimitri, who is increasingly man-marking Matis like a concerned nursery maid, has joined them, towering over squat, fat Edikas.

‘Hey, he doesn’t want to,’ says Dimitri.

Edikas says, ‘What’s it got to do with you?’

‘He’s my friend.’

‘Urgh, I’ve had enough of all this friendship bullshit. This was the problem with Lukas. Useless! You’re here to work.’

‘Leave him alone,’ says Dimitri, almost shouting.

‘It’s all right,’ soothes Matis. He notices Edikas fiddling in his pocket, and before he can react, Edikas’s fist comes up and out, a heavy metal fitting over his knuckles as he punches Dimitri in the face.

‘You come with me,’ Edikas says, pushing a stunned Dimitri towards the bedroom. He orders the men who are lying about on mattresses to leave. Just before closing the door, Edikas puts his head out and whistles, and the dog comes bounding up the stairs and slinks into the bedroom.

Matis hears Dimitri shout ‘Please! No!’

Hears growling, snarling, a cry of pain, then Edikas whistles and says, Enough, calling the dog off.

The door opens. Edikas walks down the stairs, the dog trotting alongside him.

Matis enters the room to find Dimitri on the floor, clutching his leg. The trousers are torn and there is a gash on his calf, bleeding profusely.

DAVY

Armed with a warrant to search the migrant house, his officers can control what goes on in there and have removed Edikas from the scene. Consequently, the conversations with migrants take a more relaxed turn. Up to a point.

There was an argument, one of the residents tells Davy and Manon, between Mr Tucker and Lukas, on the afternoon before he died. Mr Tucker came looking for him.

‘This argument, was it in English or Lithuanian?’ asks Davy.

‘Both. Mr Tucker shouting in English, Lukas shouting in Lithuanian.’

‘What was Lukas saying?’

‘“It’s not my fault. This is your business, not my business.”’

Davy is momentarily confused and wonders if the migrant is actually saying this to him, but his interpreter confirms these are Lukas’s quotes.

‘Any idea what Mr Tucker was saying?’ asks Manon.

‘Ne.’

‘Was it about Mrs Tucker do you think?’ Davy asks, aware that he’s going beyond facts and into conjecture.

The man nods.

‘What sort of a person was Lukas Balsys?’ Davy asks.

‘Depressive. Very. Always looked sad. A little bit on the outside, you know? Pessimistic.’

Davy nods, feeling affinity with the dead man. What a waste of a good depressive. ‘You think he killed himself?’ Davy asks.

‘Oh no. This was his nature. Nothing to kill himself over. I mean, he was quite cheerful about being sad. Matis said so.’

‘Where is Matis?’

Shrugs. Every time he asks about Lukas’s friend Matis, he gets a downturned mouth and a shrug. People say, ‘Out maybe, he likes a drink.’

When he asks each in turn what happened on the night Lukas died, there are furtive glances to one another, partial sentences, pinched lips. They know, but they’re not saying, Davy thinks. Either they’re protecting someone, or they’re too frightened to talk.

‘Was it unusual for Edikas to not be working yesterday?’ Davy asks a chap who has given his name as Audrius.

‘Yes, I never saw Edikas take a day off before.’

‘And how was Lukas’s relationship with Edikas? Did they argue?’

Audrius grimaces, as if short-tempered with Davy’s stupidity. ‘Edikas is not some kind of friendly uncle. He works us. He fights with all of us.’

‘They know, but they’re not saying,’ says Manon, heaving down into the passenger seat.

Davy is in the driver’s seat, checking his emails on his BlackBerry. ‘This is interesting,’ he says. ‘Previous incident involving Mr Tucker.’

‘Oooh, really? What? Pushing someone up a tree?’

‘Altercation with a motorist. Mr Tucker reckoned this motorist cut him up, so at the next traffic lights, he got out of his car and leered over the chap’s windscreen and bashed on the bonnet with his hand.’

‘Quite threatening,’ says Manon. ‘He’s certainly got a temper. Never underestimate the anger of the overlooked white middle-aged man, Davy Walker, and I say that as someone who lives with one.’

‘Has Mark been overlooked?’

‘Not really, but lots of men who are very invested in their careers feel short changed when they get to middle age and things are no longer … going as well as they thought they would.’

‘Whereas women?’

‘Ah, you’ll make me seem like a throwback. Women have other things to worry about, like being thin. Being thin and looking young, essentially.’

‘Should we talk to the victim of the assault do you think?’ Not that he hasn’t got enough to do.

‘Could do,’ she says. ‘Not sure it was an assault. I mean, having your bonnet thumped and having your head kicked in are not one and the same. Also, what do we learn? That Mr Tucker has a temper? I think we know that. Also, what does it tell us about Lukas’s murder? I mean, his death is not a flare of rage kind of crime, is it? Someone took a rope to a tree with a plan.’

‘Could’ve been an angry plan,’ says Davy.

‘Really? It’s quite a ball-ache of an angry plan. My kind of angry plan would be to push him off a building or under a train. Grab the nearest kitchen knife …’

‘But Tucker’s motive is whopping. Out of everyone, his motive is really … being humiliated like that. And Lukas living next door, and the squalid migrant place wiping the value off his house. I mean, he had grounds and the temperament, from the looks of it.’

‘Yeah, but that lot,’ she says, nodding at the migrant house, ‘they’re proper scared. They’re not scared of Tucker, are they? I think we need to work out some kind of protection set-up with Op Pheasant so they start talking.’

‘Also,’ says Davy, still reading his emails, ‘the trace on Tucker’s car has just come in, and it’s negative.’

‘Wait, which car?’ asks Manon.

‘The Beema.’

‘Ah, that’s Mrs Tucker’s car. Mr Tucker drives a Nissan Micra.’

‘OK, I’ll put a trace on that as well.’

‘Separate bank accounts too. And look how happy it’s making them.’

‘How do we track down Matis?’ Davy asks.

‘Maybe it’s time to seize Edikas’s mobile phone. Also, let’s see if that row between Lukas and Tucker escalated. Police could’ve been involved without a formal charge.’

‘Why is Dimitri supposedly demented? Seems perfectly normal to me, in fact easier to communicate with than the others.’

‘I think it’s just that he’s built like a double decker.’

DAY 3
DAVY

‘Have you seen this?’ DC Kim Delaney asks, in front of her computer screen. She leans back to give Davy a look. ‘Facebook page. One Wisbech – the anti-immigration lot. This post, here,’ she points at the screen. ‘On the day Lukas’s body was found, someone posted saying It’s time – time to get rid of the lawless vermin in our town!’

‘Charming,’ says Davy. ‘Who posted that?’

Kim squints at her screen. ‘You need some reading specs,’ adds Davy.

‘Doesn’t say. I’ll get the tech team to trace the IP address, shouldn’t be a problem. These crazies are usually super active online but kind of inert in real life. Or should I say IRL.’ Kim snorts at her own joke.

‘Except they weren’t inert on the night of Lukas’s death. Don’t show Colin this site, he’ll want to join.’

Colin Brierley, the team’s civilian investigator and tech nerd, is the Ukipper in their midst. They tolerate his slightly uncertain brand of prejudice with mild annoyance tinged with affection. ‘Bigots have feelings too,’ Manon was fond of warning them. Davy harbours a suspicion that Colin doesn’t really hate foreigners, not deep down. He’s just a man who hasn’t found his tribe or his stride, and the wilderness in which he founders intersects with other marginalised white men of a certain age with whom Davy is starting to feel a certain affinity.

These men are equally wrong-footed by clever young women, clever young Muslims, clever young gay men – anyone who appears to have access to the crucial information they lack. Information about modernity, how to live, how to prosper, how it all works.

Colin is like the office pet; sometimes he blows off, ideologically speaking, and it smells revolting, but mostly he is just there, and if he weren’t there you’d miss his rather stolid presence.

‘Right,’ says Davy. ‘Briefing everyone.’

‘Shouldn’t we do this when Manon is in?’ asks Kim. ‘She is SIO.’

‘Can’t wait for that,’ says Davy, aware that he is taking advantage of her working pattern. But he wants to press on, to take back some control for himself.

Take back control. Christ.

Forensics and SOCO have come back with DNA and fingerprints from the rope and around the scene, but for these to mean anything, the matches have to be on the database. Half the migrants in Wisbech aren’t even documented, let alone listed on databases alongside fingerprints and DNA. Of course Lukas Balsys’s DNA is everywhere, but that’s to be expected.

To Davy’s mind, there are several possible motives worth examining. One, Lukas was killed as a warning to other migrants not to snitch, to work harder, obey out of abject fear. Edikas is right in the frame on this count. Two, he was killed by other migrants in some kind of argument over money or drugs (he wants to pull local dealer Talcy Malc in for a grilling) or a girl. There was a culture of fighting in the houses of multiple occupation (HMOs) inhabited by migrants – a way of establishing the pecking order among hard nuts. Also, Bridget says, (Oh, Bridget says does she? he hears Manon say in his head) there is a higher than average level of mental health issues among the migrants, hence why they’ve got into this mess. Three, had Mr Tucker had enough of being cuckolded? Four, did Lukas get on the wrong side of the anti-immigration lot? Did he kill himself? Was he so ground down by the work, the hours, the lack of pay, the awful conditions, that he just wanted out? Davy is reluctant to go down this last road, not just because he wants a collar, but because he wants Lukas’s mother to get the compensation he feels she deserves, compensation his own mother deserves by way of rent, for not deserting him age ten. Juliet, of course, doesn’t know about that direct debit.

‘Where are we with the rope?’ he asks his team.

‘Right,’ says Kim, ‘so we know it is polypropylene rope, blue in colour, which costs £12.77 for a big roll of the stuff. And we have Edikas buying a roll of it from Homebase on Westlode Street in Spalding.’

‘Why would he buy rope in Spalding?’ Davy asks. ‘When there’s a B&Q five minutes from his house?’

‘P’raps he was in Spalding on other business?’ offers Kim. ‘Or he prefers the Homebase shopping experience.’

‘Well, which of us doesn’t? I’m just wondering if he bought it in Spalding so that he wouldn’t be caught, or remembered by the staff.’

‘Actually, chap in Homebase remembers Edikas buying the rope because the dog was foaming at the mouth, and he remembers worrying that the dog was on a not very secure rope, and he said to Edikas, “Hope the rope’s for the dog”, and Edikas kind of harrumphed like he didn’t understand a word.’

‘Good. OK, good, so Edikas bought the rope.’

‘Yes, and thanks to that staff member’s recall, we were able to look at the right date on their CCTV and we have got shop footage of Edikas making said purchase.’

‘Good. And did we ask Edikas about buying the rope that hung three people?’

‘Yes. He said some of the women wanted washing lines in their back yards, so he supplied washing line rope to three of the houses. I quote: “How will I know they heng themselves viz vashing line? Zis is not my fault. Lithuanians are sad peoples.”’

‘Very good work, Kim, and excellent accent by the way,’ says Davy. ‘Who is going over the files for the other two hanging victims?’ he asks, praying it isn’t Tired Nigel, whose work is at best slapdash, at worst incompetent.

Nigel raises his hand. Of course, thinks Davy.

‘It’s … well, I haven’t finished reading the files yet,’ Nigel says.

‘Seriously?’

‘They’re quite big files,’ says Tired/Incompetent Nigel.

Davy pauses. I can’t give it to Kim, otherwise Kim is doing everything because everything you give her, gets done. And done well. But if I leave it with Nigel, it’ll never get done.

‘Perhaps Kim could help you out with it, Nigel,’ Davy says.

‘Yeah, great,’ Nigel says, smiling broadly. Davy’s biggest problem with Nigel is he has no problem being thought of as lazy and crap. No professional pride.

‘Colin, I need you to trace Mr Tucker’s car please on the night of Lukas’s death. We’re looking for travel from Wisbech to Hinchingbrooke and back, obviously.’

‘Righto,’ says Colin.

‘And I want you to check for CCTV around the other two hangings, maybe once Kim has looked at the case files and can give you location parameters.’ He has written off Tired Nigel, they all have. He might as well be off the team. ‘I’d also like you to Google Dean Singlehurst, Colin, see what he’s been up to online. And get me an address for him, while you’re about it.’ He is surprised to see Manon walk into the room. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks, prickling with embarrassment at being caught briefing the team.

‘Couldn’t stay away, so I bunged Ted at the childminder’s. I think we need a meeting with Bridget from Op Pheasant asap. Can you call her in? And what are you doing holding a briefing?’

Davy flushes. ‘I … I just wanted to keep things moving, that’s all. I wasn’t taking advantage of your day off—’

‘It’s not a “day off”, Davy, it’s a day at the brutal coalface of childcare.’

The team has gone remarkably silent as they earwig this exchange.

‘Right, well, I wasn’t taking advantage of your working pattern.’

He hears Nigel say, ‘Awkward!’ in a high-pitched whisper.

‘Yeah, sure you weren’t. You can fill me in while we wait for Bridget.’

MANON

They are in something called a ‘break-out zone’ – a shabby common room with a worn sofa and tub chairs. In the old days it would’ve been a smoking room and it still has that nicotine-yellow tinge.

Davy is fixated on Bridget when she is looking elsewhere, but the minute she looks back at him, he’s eyes to the floor. She is wearing an impressively tight long-sleeved tee.

‘Thanks for coming in, Bridget,’ Manon says. ‘The problem we’re having is breaking open the Lithuanian hub.’

‘Welcome to my world,’ says Bridget.

‘We need them to talk about the night Lukas died, but they’re scared rigid.’

‘Yes. This is our primary problem. They won’t snitch on the gangmasters, and when we break open an HMO because we’ve got other evidence, they can’t get out of the country fast enough. Makes prosecutions very difficult.’

‘I’m not clear whether they’re terrified of Edikas or of whoever killed Lukas,’ Manon says.

‘Might be one and the same,’ Davy points out.

‘Also,’ says Bridget, ‘Edikas may have used the murder retrospectively to threaten them. You snitch, you’re next, type thing. Even if he had nothing to do with it.’

‘So what can we do?’ Manon asks. ‘Move them out of the HMO into safe accommodation?’

‘Most won’t go,’ says Bridget. ‘Even though they’re effectively slaves, in terms of payment and conditions, they are there by choice. No one is locking them up. Often they have mental health issues, shady pasts, alcoholism. They think it’s work, so they get on and do it, but don’t get paid for it. They are locked up by the language barrier, by their mistrust of authority, their dependence on the gangmasters for their basic needs. They get petty cash to buy deodorant or a packet of crisps, but no wage.’

‘What’s your view of Edikas?’ Manon asks. ‘Could he murder?’

‘Oh yes, in a heartbeat. Edikas is the hard nut to end all hard nuts. So cold he’s almost reptilian.’

Davy sticks his tongue out while crossing his eyes, presumably some extremely lame impression of a lizard.

Bridget titters.

Christ, thinks Manon. If there’s one thing she can’t stand, it’s sexual tension where she’s not remotely involved. Like the pensioner she feels, she heaves herself up out of her chair, saying ‘Get a room, you two. Oh, and Bridget? Is it always agricultural work, chicken catching, that kind of thing?’

‘Mostly. That’s where there’s a labour shortage. Also picking fruit and veg. Vasil has a sideline in block patios. It’s run by a guy called Jonas. Essentially, anything that’s really hard graft, the Lithuanians are all over it.’

Manon’s phone is going, unknown number. Her first thought is that something has happened to Teddy or Fly.

‘Hello?’

‘Manon Bradshaw?’

‘Yes.’ Nerves rising.

‘This is Hinchingbrooke Hospital.’ Oh Christ, no, please no, don’t let this be the moment. ‘We have admitted Mark Talbot with abdominal pain and he has requested that you come in. Is that OK?’

She feels a guilty relief that it’s not one of the children.

‘Yes, yes, I’ll be right there.’

Having taken the ten-minute walk from HQ to the hospital at a run, her mind full of worst-case-scenario planning, she pants over the reception desk, only just huffing out the words, ‘I’m here for Mark Talbot.’

‘Just a moment please,’ says the woman behind the desk, while typing and looking at her screen. ‘Yes, fourth floor, oncology.’

Oncology, shit, shit shit.

In fourth floor oncology, the nurse, who had presumably rung her, knows who she is.

‘He’s resting comfortably. Follow me,’ she says.

Trotting after the nurse down shining linoleum-floored corridors, Manon’s mind keeps step with Emily Dickinson:

Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

And Immortality …

There he is, familiar in this strange setting, propped up and wrapped in sheets, eyes closed. He opens them to see her, smiles, takes her hand as she sits beside him.

‘Thanks for giving me the fright of my life,’ she says, her anger like popping candy on her tongue; little explosions of it. Why is he throwing her this curveball in the midst of her first murder job in years?

‘Sorry,’ he says.

‘So what’s going on?’

‘I had the most terrible pain in my stomach,’ he says. ‘So I came in.’

‘And?’ she says.

‘They’re keeping me in to run some tests.’

‘What does that mean?’

He gives a feeble shrug. God, this is like asking Fly how his day at school went. ‘Fine’ or ‘Good’ giving her no information whatsoever.

‘Are you worried?’ she asks him.

‘A bit, yes,’ he says. ‘Are you?’

‘Well I am now. Who do I talk to?’

‘Don’t bother them. They’ve got it in hand.’

This is no time to be apologetic, she thinks. He’s always apologetic. Says things like, ‘That’s so kind’, when someone is taking his credit card details. You have to push, in the NHS more than anywhere. She wants to manage him, the situation. Get control of it because her feelings are spinning like a whirligig. Not this. Not now.

‘Stay calm,’ he says, holding her hand.

‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘Not when it’s you.’

She casts about the ward for someone, but it is empty, except for an orderly mopping. Eastern European probably. Kristine, Teddy’s childminder, is Romanian.

‘So when are you coming out?’ she demands.

‘Tomorrow, I guess.’

‘You probably just ate a dodgy bhuna,’ she says. ‘Knowing you.’

Recently, she’d held Mark close and recalled their first dirty weekend away, while they were still hot for each other. ‘What do you remember about that weekend?’ she’d asked romantically, to which he replied, literally in a heartbeat, ‘The pork pies.’

They don’t call him Mr Romance.

At all.

What if he is taken away? The worst can happen.

People don’t always get through things.

Who will she discuss everything with? Who will she talk to about what she had for lunch? ‘It was under-seasoned to be honest.’

About how well the topside of beef turned out?

‘It was my herby crust that made it,’ she’d said.

‘It was your herby crust was it?’ he’d said, smiling at her ironically.

Who will have enough irony for her now?

She remains upright only by dint of the urge to bring her children home and hold them very close indeed.

Like an unexpected belch from the deep, she wonders, Did they trace the rope?

And, rather like someone drowning who grabs that rope, she reaches the dry land of the investigation and rests there.

In every case there is evidence that doesn’t make sense, the element that threatens to unravel the whole. Even where there is doubt, they are trained to ‘think murder’, because if you assume the worst, you secure the evidence. With the Balsys murder it’s how they got him into that tree. She wonders if there might have been some kind of ladder situation on the rear side, indentations missed by SOCO then erased by rain. She wonders if they brought apparatus, the murderers. Usually, perps are faced with the problem of the dead body: far weightier and more unwieldy than anyone expects. Not so in this: they left him where he died. No attempt at concealment in that sense.

But here was the problem of getting the live body to its execution. Problem: resistance of the victim. Advantage: agency of the victim. They could use their own muscle strength, under duress obviously. Unless … unless Lukas was unconscious, drugged or beaten. Impossible, surely? He would be a literal dead weight.

What she realises is there isn’t one perp. There are many. They. It is they, not him. A group, accomplices. A joint enterprise.

What if her own partnership is at an end? She has spent so long criticising Mark, this person she tells everything to, the person who is her lifeblood, the rug beneath her feet (and just as poorly treated), her walls, her roof, her warmth, and her seasons. She has wasted their short time together not appreciating him, and what if now he is to be taken away?

He is her fit, her equal, her better half. He is the stalwart presence that allows her to yearn for freedom; the one who loves her enough to put up with her, and who else would do that, even if she wanted them, which she never would because she only wants Mark Talbot? For ever and ever, amen.

Only tests, nothing is certain yet. Just get through the tests, wait and see, she tells herself.

Whoever would be comfortable enough to read with for hours at a time without talking (they would have, were it not for Teddy). Oh Teddy! Who will love Teddy like Mark loves Teddy? Who will look down on him with the benign yet brimming adoration that Mark displays and that only she sees? Teddy isn’t even biologically his, but this has never made a difference to Mark. She should have had his babies, that a bit of his nature might live on. But a sixteen-year-old, a four-year-old and a two-year-old (had they gone again) and a partner dying of cancer (as it has become so quickly in her mind) – that would’ve been some package to deal with. Not to mention work, be it cold cases or a murder inquiry.

All their conversations about food, which were not really conversations at all but more like idle thoughts pushed outwards. Must they all be inwards now, like they used to be? What was it Joan Armatrading sang?

He is more than a lover, more than a friend. He is the recipient of her thoughts, the person she can say anything to, without fear of judgement. And she has spent so long finding fault with him, with them as a couple.

Only the other day, she’d nearly walked up to a complete stranger thinking it was Mark – in the way small children sometimes nonchalantly clasp the wrong adult’s hand – she had walked up to this stranger-man and was on the brink of telling him, ‘Time to clear the area, I’ve let an evil one go’. This is the kind of conversational gold she bestows on lucky, lucky Mark Talbot. Soon to be departed Mark Talbot. Who will she tell about her herby crust, her deadly emissions, about what they might watch on telly (‘I think we ought to watch that documentary about migration called Exodus. Apparently it’s excellent. Ooh, hang on, there’s a First Dates on planner.’)? Who will hear her smallest thoughts as if they are interesting? And he, he tells her the same things at least three or four times. She barely listens to the first rendition.

They text each other pictures of their double chins. These are love notes of sorts.

People get through things, only sometimes they don’t.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asks Fly, more aggressively than she intends.

‘Nothing.’

‘Why’re you so quiet? Things OK at school?’

‘I guess.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Leave me alone.’

Fly is her adopted son, though the word adopted seems no longer relevant. The brother of a murder victim, he’d been eleven years old with nowhere to go when she’d taken him on as a stopgap that extended. He is the light of her life: thoughtful, empathic, intelligent, kind. Black, though the word seems no longer relevant. At sixteen, he now towers over her, is a hard worker at a school, which, like all ginormous state secondaries, has its rough element.

She monitors it and Fly constantly for signs of trouble. He is about to sit his GCSEs, and she has high hopes that finally the true depth of his worth will be visible to the world. As if GCSEs could achieve such a thing! But she has always felt the world at large – teachers, mainly – have been slow to catch on to her elder son’s riches.

She follows him up the stairs, wondering if she should leave it be. He has to fight his own battles, after all.

‘Anything you want to tell me about?’ she asks, sitting on his bed.

‘Nope.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yep.’

You have to come at it sideways with children. When they are little, like Ted, it is over toys or in the bath. With Fly, she often has to submit to some incredibly tedious tale about dodgeball or Greek mythology before the truth will out. The play’s the thing …

‘What are you reading?’ she tries.

‘Madame Bovary.’

‘Oh yeah? I liked that one.’

‘Yeah, same.’

‘Is it for school?’

‘No, the librarian recommended it to me, so I thought why not?’

He sits close beside her, leans in slightly. She puts her arm around him. He sniffs. He is crying.

‘Oh lovey, tell me.’

‘It’s Sulaiman.’

‘Right, what’s he done?’

‘He’s … every time he sees me, he puts his foot out and trips me up.’

‘You what?’ she says, furious.

‘It’s super annoying.’

‘Of course it is! Have you said anything to him?’

At nursery, Teddy is taught to say ‘Stop it, I don’t like it’ as opposed to, say, biting back. But he is also taught to say ‘sharing is caring’, a line he can deliver with impressive venom while snatching a toy from another child’s vice-like grip.

‘No,’ whispers Fly.

‘Told a teacher?’

‘No.’

‘Want me to?’

‘No!’ He stands. ‘Promise you won’t.’

‘Only if you promise you will.’

If she wants to appal Fly, she only has to a) meet him at school with her wheelie shopper, or b) bust out some of her finest dance moves in public. Or c) talk to his teachers.

‘Why does he do it, d’you think?’

Fly shrugs. ‘He’s a bit rough. Thinks it’s funny.’

Fly is rather reserved, she thinks. Sometimes kids want his attention and don’t know how to get it.

‘Does he laugh, after he’s tripped you up,’ she says, wanting to hurt Sulaiman very badly indeed.

He shrugs.

‘That’s horrible, Fly. You poor thing.’

He lifts his trouser legs, shows her bruises up to his knees.

‘Jesus. We have to do something about this. Shall I talk to Sulaiman’s mum?’

‘No! Please, everyone overreacts when you get involved because of your job.’

‘Mark then? Would you like Mark to deal with it?’

He shrugs again, which is tantamount to a yes. If Mark were here, he and Manon would workshop it for about an hour and she’d feel better about it.

She quietens the urge to travel out of the house, track Sulaiman down and trip him up, saying ‘How do you like it, you little shit?’

In fact, as far as she remembers, Sulaiman is a nice kid with nice parents. Teenage boys are tricky. Hard to read, everything under the surface.

Teddy stands in the doorway of Fly’s room in his jammies. She scoops him up, squeezes him tight, which is what she’d like to do to Fly but can’t.

The spectre of Fly leaving home for university hangs over them. She harbours a fantasy he might attend her alma mater, Cambridge, and live at home, while knowing this would only be a fraction of the university experience (cheaper though). She can’t bear the thought of the house without children in it. The quietness. Just her and Mark and encroaching infirmity. Small dinners, elderly trips to the cinema (Ooh, there’s a 6 p.m. showing! Bed by 9 p.m.!)