seems, Hutton had said, and she hopes it is true.
She automatically rings the bell, without a clear thought in her head; moves back from the second step so that she is outwith the meagre protection of the front of the house. The rain soaks her head. She shivers again in the cold. Throat dry, nervous fingers.
The door opens, catching her unaware. She stares into the dim light of the house, feels the rush of warmth. Charlotte Miller stands in front of her. Doesn't recognise Bathurst at first. Miller wears a long, blue silk pyjama top, her legs are bare. Bathurst looks at her skin, smooth and gold in the dim light from behind.
'Constable Bathurst?' she says, surprise in her voice coming with sudden recognition.
Bathurst nods, says nothing. No words. They stare at each other for a few seconds, before either awakes to the other. Miller shakes her head, feels the cold, summons her inside and closes the door behind her.
Bathurst stands in the hall, looking around. Unaware of what her husband does for a living, she wonders what Miller earns as a superintendent to afford such opulence.
'I'm sorry to bother you on a Friday night,' she begins, but Miller stops her with a shake of the head.
'Don't be silly. Take your coat off and I'll get a towel. How long were you standing out there?'
Bathurst thinks of stepping out of the car, seems like an hour ago. Doesn't answer, removes her coat, Miller ushers her into the sitting room.
'I've just got a quick phone call to make, then I'll get the towel,' she says.
She disappears. Evelyn Bathurst stands in the middle of the room, suddenly warm, aware of the dampness of her hair.
There was nothing special about the story of the kid walking along the road, bumping the head of a dead baby in the potholes. Fuck, I grant you, it sounds special. It sounds like the kind of thing that doesn't happen every day. But that's just what people think nowadays because most of the population haven't spent time in a war zone.
Previous generations, those bastards were always going to war. That's what they did. Everyone went to war, everyone got used to it, learned to live with all the complete shit you see when you're in that situation. You got home, you coped. If you didn't cope, they locked you up, or you became the guy stuck away in the corner of the village that everyone told their kids to stay away from.
These days, it's all about coping. Society is about the individual. It didn't use to be. It used to be about society functioning as a whole, and if that meant that individuals got shafted to enable society to function, then so be it. These days individuals have the right not to get shafted. Very thoughtful of society to put the individual first, except it's the very reason why society is falling apart.
So everybody hurts and everybody cries and everybody has a story to tell, and this is just me telling mine. Except I don't want to tell it; I don't want to talk. There's so much of it, that if I have to think about it, if someone was ever going to force me to think about it, then by fucking God, I won't just cry, I won't just go quietly fucking mental…
I don't know what I'd do. I just don't want to think about it.
There was nothing special about the kid and the baby with its head bouncing off the road, except it was the only story I told to the psychiatrist I saw a month after I got back from the Balkans.
I sat down, she asked me a couple of questions, I cut her off and told her the bouncing baby's head story, and then before I'd got to the end — although, of course, it's a story that doesn't really have an end — I got up and walked out. I didn't want to tell her any more, and if I wasn't going to talk to her then there was no point in being there.
As I talked, I stared at her throat. She had an unusually large Adam's apple for a woman, and I just stared at it the whole time wondering if she was really a man, or if the Adam's apple wasn't actually all that big and I was exaggerating it in some bizarre attempt to distract myself.
I never saw her again. Looking back, her Adam's apple probably wasn't all that big and she probably wasn't a man.
Not much after six a.m. The rain still falls in a steady drizzle, as Constable Bathurst arrives at the station, leaving Forsyth's Peugeot in the car park, the keys in the exhaust. He will be off duty in a couple of hours. From there she will walk home, a ten minute promenade through wet, deserted streets in the middle of the night.
As she steps out onto the street and rounds the first corner, someone sees her, sees her dark brown hair dully reflect the orange street lamps, but she does not see him. She walks on, the dull ache in her leg muscles heightened from sitting in the car.
She thinks about Charlotte Miller, has vague thoughts of Thomas Hutton, but thinks not of the problems with which she stepped out that evening. Wonders whether to have coffee when she gets home, or whether she should go straight to bed.
She will, however, never get to choose.
24
Having a weird dream where Peggy and Charlotte are naked together on a huge front lawn somewhere, singing Aerosmith — Crazy — when the phone rings. It plagues the dream for a while, before I'm plucked from the fantasy into the cold early morning. Still dark outside, cold in the bed. First thing I think of is driving down to see Charlotte last night, and getting my rude awakening. Constable Forsyth's Peugeot 307 sitting outside her front gate. Forsyth. Fuck. So I sat there feeling like a total idiot, before turning around and heading back home. Resisted the pull of the vodka bottle, went straight to bed. I cannot believe she went for Forsyth. Course, I can't believe she went for me either, but at least I'm not some spotty constable for whom shaving is a distant dream. At least we'd had some sort of thing going on since the curious incident of the tits in the lunch time. But Forsyth? Had he ever seen her tits?
Look at the clock while my hand makes its tortuous way out from under the covers, on the long journey to the phone. Not yet seven o'clock.
'Yeah?' I mutter down the phone.
'It's Ramsey. You need to come in.'
Dawn's grey light begins to show behind the tenement buildings. The rain has stopped, the cold does not seem so cold. The small area at the bottom of the park where the body was found is log-jammed with police; the entire park is cordoned off from the public. The Saturday between Christmas and New Year, and not too many people have crawled out of bed. A few anoraks who've brought their dogs out to let them dump on the park, stand around and watch the police activity, such as it is. What are they expecting to see?
And what are any of us doing, these too many chiefs and too many Indians? The SOCOs are doing their business, while the remainder of us stand around in monstrous misery and anger.
The body of Evelyn Bathurst has already been removed.
The first officer at the scene did not recognise her, her face having been dealt with in the same manner as Anne Keller five days ago. Multiple stab wounds, so that she was utterly disfigured. The body was identified by the ID card in her inside pocket. Strangely, it wasn't until then that the constable on duty had to throw up.
The gang's all here, each and every one of us looking sick. What makes it worse? That she was one of us? That she was so attractive? Or is it just that it's happened again, the killer has struck once more?
Bloonsbury is still drunk from last night. Very fetching he looks in his abject misery and inebriation. Taylor at least has managed to sober up, just looks hungover — the same as that idiot Herrod. And Charlotte Miller stands alone. Even saw her shed a tear. Haven't seen her at the scene of a crime since she got here, but this is different. This is a combination of all our worst nightmares.
Tried speaking to her a few minutes ago, got nowhere. She looks in shock. That hard bitch act is exactly that, but you would have to be built of granite not to be moved by this.
'And when he was home, there lay his uncle smitten on the head, and his father pierced through the heart, and his mother cloven through the midst.'
