‘Yep. There’s thousands like that littered all over Afghanistan.’
‘Melanie Jones. She do anything on the Afghan war?’
‘What war? That’s a fucked-up police operation, that’s all.’
‘Yeah, spare me the political analysis, Jack. Did she do anything on the war? Wind up some comrade of a fallen soldier? Make some comment a disgruntled and disaffected soldier would take the wrong way?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘A tenth of all prisoners in this country are ex-military, you know.’
Delaney shrugged. ‘I know, but I get my news from Chris Evans or Roy Smiley at the burger van. I certainly wouldn’t pay good money to watch that bubbleheaded slapper.’
Sally smiled apologetically at Diane Campbell. ‘Do you want me to look into it, boss?’
‘Yeah, you do that.’
‘You seriously think she was the target?’
‘I don’t know, Jack. Who would want to shoot the cameraman?’
‘Someone with an axe to grind with the channel?’
‘No, I don’t buy it. He’s an anonymous nobody. Melanie Jones is the name, she’s the face.’
Delaney shook his head, unconvinced. ‘It doesn’t ring true. If someone wanted to take her out they could have done that any time, anywhere. Why now? Why there? Why Peter Garnier?’
Diane looked at him steadily. ‘Maybe you can find that out.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s been a development.’
‘A development?’
‘He wants to speak to you.’
‘Peter Garnier?’
Diane nodded. ‘In the flesh.’
Delaney looked at her blankly for a beat. ‘You
‘Do I look like I’m smiling to you?’
‘What the hell does he want to talk to me about?’
Diane shrugged. ‘He wouldn’t say. Said he’d talk to you.’
‘And that charade in the woods today? What was that about?’
‘Don’t know. But the morning he leads us a merry dance in Mad Bess Woods is the same day someone takes a shot at him and he decides he needs to speak to you. Maybe he wants to unburden his soul.’
‘How the hell does he even know who I am? What does he want from me?’
‘What am I suddenly, the oracle of fucking Delphi? Go and speak to him, Jack. Find out.’
*
It was Jennifer Hickling’s fifteenth birthday that morning, but if she was at all pleased or excited about it then it didn’t show in the brown eyes that looked back at her from the mirror. She was dressed in a quasi-goth style, with dyed black hair and black make-up around her eyes but not her lips. Her lips were ruby, thick with lipstick. She looked about twenty-two and felt half a century older. She put down a plastic hairbrush matted with different- coloured hair and practised a smile. Her face felt waxen somehow, its muscles not quite under her control, the corners of her mouth twitching downward. A reflex that she couldn’t control, like a knee being tapped with a hammer.
She smoothed down the front of her short dark denim skirt and held her Doc Marten-booted foot up, looking at it along the line of her dark stocking leg, and felt like kicking it straight into the man sleeping on the sofa. His mouth was open, drool gumming the corner of his mouth, and Jennifer felt like slamming the boot straight into his head. Breaking his teeth. Stamping on his face so it looked like raw hamburger. He was twenty-eight years old, with long greasy hair, two days’ worth of stubble on his pockmarked chin and stains on his jeans where he’d pissed himself during the night. The sight of him made her almost physically sick.
A wet sigh escaped from the lips of the sleeping man and Jennifer curled the corner of her own lip again. The guy was a pig. She picked up a short-bladed knife which she had put on top of the sideboard moments earlier and not for the first time thought about slicing him from ear to ear across his scrawny throat. Slaughtering him like the hog he was.
She looked back across at him, the knuckles on her hand whitening as she gripped the knife, and a younger girl’s voice cut across her dark imaginings.
‘Jennifer?’
Smoother than a seaside conjuror, she palmed the knife into the side pocket of her skirt and turned to smile at her nine-year-old sister Angela.
‘Wassup, kidder?’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘Come on, then. Let’s get you breakfast.’
