Ruefully, Carol scrambled the pieces together and closed the box on them. ‘You know me too well.’
‘It’s mutual. So, given you’ve studiously avoided it so far tonight, dare I ask how the Robbie Bishop investigation’s going?’
Carol snapped the chess set open again. ‘How about another game?’
Tony gave her a sympathetic look. ‘That bad, eh?’
Five minutes later, having listened to Carol’s thorough resume of what had happened since last they’d met, he was forced to agree. It was indeed that bad. Later, when she tiptoed out as his eyes were closing, the faintest of smiles lifted one corner of his mouth. Maybe tomorrow he would have something better than a game of bad chess for her.
The sequence of events that had practically buried Paula McIntyre had also reintroduced her to the balm of nicotine. She hated the smell of stale smoke in the house; it reminded her too much of when Don Merrick had been camping out in her spare room. He’d been her mentor, teaching her so many of the skills she now took for granted. And then he’d become her friend. She’d been the one he turned to when his marriage had imploded and, after his death, she’d been the one who’d had to pack up his personal possessions and return them to the wife who’d pushed him into feeling he had something to prove. Now Paula missed his friendship enough without creating occasions for memory. So she’d spent time, money and energy building a deck on the back of her house with a covered area where she could huddle in the morning with her coffee and cigarettes, trying to pull enough of herself together to make it into the shower and then the office. She was under no illusions about her relationship with the job. She still loved it enough almost to forgive it for what it had done to her. And the time she had spent talking to Tony Hill had helped her to understand that only by staying with Bradfield Police would she ever come anywhere near healing the scars. Some people recovered from trauma by putting as much distance between themselves and their past as was humanly possible. She wasn’t one of those.
She dragged on her Marlboro Red, loving the feeling but hating the need. Every morning she berated herself for starting again. And every morning, she reached for the packet before her first mouthful of coffee had made it as far as her stomach. To begin with, she’d told herself it was only a temporary crutch. First case she helped to crack, she’d be able to walk away from it. She’d never been more wrong. Cases had come and gone, but the fags were still with her.
Today was a typically brutal Bradfield morning; low sky, air bitter with pollution, a swirl of damp wind that cheated its way through clothes to the very bones. Paula shivered and smoked and started out of her seat when her phone rang. She grabbed it from her pocket and frowned. Nobody but work would dare call at this time of the morning. But she didn’t recognize the number. She froze for a moment, swore out loud at herself and pressed a key. ‘Hello?’ she said cautiously.
‘Is that DC McIntyre?’ Ulster accent, dark growl of a voice.
‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Martin Flanagan. From Bradfield Victoria.’
Recognition dawned a split second ahead of the name. ‘Mr Flanagan, of course. I’m sorry, there’s no…’
‘No, no, it’s me that’s got something for you. With all the worry about Robbie, like, it completely slipped my mind. Until I came in this morning and there it was.’
Paula sucked smoke and tried to stay calm. She hadn’t got to be the queen of the interrogation suite by letting her impatience show. ‘Totally understandable,’ she said. ‘Just take your time, Martin.’
An audible breath. ‘Sorry, I’m getting way ahead of myself. Sorry. One of the things we do at the Vics, we do random drug testing on the lads. It’s in our interests to keep them clean. Any road, I totally forgot that we tested on Friday morning. And of course, that meant Robbie.’
Paula dropped her cigarette and ground it out with her heel. ‘And you got the results this morning?’ she said, trying to keep the excitement from her voice.
‘That’s right. That’s why I’m calling you. Ah Jesus…’ Flanagan’s voice cracked and he coughed to cover it. ‘I don’t even know if I should be telling you this. I mean, it was days before he died.’
‘There was something on Robbie’s test?’
‘You could say that. According to the lab…Christ, I can’t bring myself to say it.’ Flanagan sounded close to tears.
Paula was already through the kitchen door and moving towards the stairs. ‘I’m coming round right now, Martin,’ she said. ‘Just sit tight. Don’t say anything to anyone. I’ll be with you inside the half hour. OK?’
That sounds fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in my office. I’ll tell them you’re coming.’
To her surprise, Paula felt tears pricking her eyes. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she said, knowing it was a lie and knowing it didn’t matter.
The pathology suite at Bradfield Cross Hospital was the home ground for Carol Jordan’s specialist team. This was where the bodies that interested them ended up, under the careful knife and watchful eyes of Dr Grisha Shatalov. Shatalov’s great-grandparents had emigrated from Russia to Vancouver eighty-five years before; Grisha had been born in Toronto and liked to claim his move to the UK was part of the family’s slow migration back east. Carol liked his soft accent and his self-deprecating humour. She also liked the way he treated the dead with the same respect she felt he’d give his own family. For Carol, the morgue helped to reaffirm her personal commitment to finding justice. Faced with the victims, the desire to bring the villains to justice always burned that little bit brighter inside her. Grisha’s consideration for those victims had resonated with her and built a bridge between them.
Today, she was here for Robbie Bishop. The post mortem should have been done the day before, but Grisha had been in Reykjavik at a conference and Carol hadn’t wanted anyone else working on this particular body. Grisha had started work early and by the time Carol arrived, he was almost finished. He looked up as she walked in, acknowledging her presence with a curt nod. ‘Ten minutes and we’ll be done, DCI Jordan.’ His formality was for the benefit of the digital recording which might one day be produced in court. Off-mike, she was Carol to him.
She leaned against the wall. Impossible not to feel sadness seeping through her at the thought of what Robbie
