It had only been Jenny who could; he knew that, and for that he was grateful.
‘A house,’ he said. ‘It’ll be better for the baby.’
Another kiss, this time more passionate than the previous one. Isaac looked over at the clock on the bedside cabinet. It was after one in the morning, but sleep eluded him. He got up and went into the other room, opened the fridge, put on the kettle.
A cup of coffee in his hand, a problem to ponder. He phoned Larry.
‘Sorry about the late hour,’ Isaac said. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’
‘That’s alright,’ Larry replied, even if it wasn’t. After a couple of months of tension between the two men on account of Larry’s drinking and slovenliness, he was pleased that his chief inspector was looking to him for help, rather than telling him what to do. The disciplinary still hurt, and if Larry had been more ambitious, he knew it would have had some bearing on his promotion opportunities, but he wasn’t.
Sure, he had tried to knuckle down and study for the requisite qualifications, but his brain wouldn’t kick in, not only because of the demands of Homicide but because he had been no more than a moderate student at school, invariably receiving a could-do-better end of term report. He had come up through the ranks from uniformed constable to sergeant to inspector, the same progression as his DCI, but Isaac was a smart man, intellectually gifted, and he was going places, whereas Larry knew his race was over, and he’d see the rank of inspector alongside his name until the day of retirement.
Larry went and made himself a cup of coffee too.
‘We’re clueless,’ Isaac said.
‘I know. Apart from a Buddhist chant and a man who may or may not have limped, we’ve got nothing.’
‘The limp?’
‘The CSIs will go over the place again, but don’t expect too much. They’re only watching their backs, worried that the young woman might be right.’
‘Discount it for now. What can we do?’
‘A name for the woman, otherwise the case is dead and buried, unsolvable.’
An ignominious outcome, Isaac knew, and not something he’d want to explain to Chief Superintendent Goddard. How would he go about it if he had to? A dead woman, a knife, two witnesses, one who had possibly seen the murder, and we’re stumped, he thought. It made him shudder: the first murder case in his career where he had failed. And he knew how it worked, the same as in life. A multitude of successes, one failure. Which of the two would they remember? He knew the answer.
‘Tomorrow,’ Isaac said. ‘Forget the early-morning meeting, focus on the other names you have.’
‘I was going to phone you early tomorrow and suggest it. I’ve already spoken to Wendy about it,’ Larry said.
‘Great, go with it. Do you need assistance?’
‘Leave it to Wendy and me. If we need someone, we have a name.’
‘Kate Baxter?’
‘She’s competent.’
‘Tomorrow, a result,’ Isaac said. He hung up the phone and went back to bed, Jenny briefly acknowledging his presence. He was asleep within five minutes; Larry wasn’t. The coffee had woken him up; it wouldn’t let him go to sleep, not for some time.
***
Janice Robinson sat on the bed in her squalid bedsit. The darkened street corner where once she had sold herself now replaced by the mobile phone at her side. And besides, soliciting on the street was illegal, selling herself from her phone was not, nor was bringing the client to where she lived.
If she were cognisant, she would have said that her life was on a downward spiral with only one end, but she was not, having just injected herself with heroin, a momentary calm settling over her.
It had been almost a year since she had seen her mother, three months since Brad and she had met. She missed him, cheerful and cheeky, able to make her laugh; her mother she did not miss.
If the house had not been the way it was, then she would have not succumbed to debasing herself, but her mother’s live-in lovers, not all of them, but most, had seen the mother as acceptable when she was sober, her daughter when she was not.
She had been fourteen the first time one of them snuck into her bedroom, held her down with his weight; she remembered it as if it was yesterday, but it wasn’t. It was seven years ago that first time, and Jim, her elder brother, had beaten the man senseless, kicked him out of the house when she had told him, but then he wasn’t there much, as he was invariably on an anti-social behaviour order, migrating between incarceration and freedom, and now he was in prison.
A good student in her early teens, a broken young woman at the age of sixteen, she had moved from smoking marijuana to harder drugs in a short time; then to selling herself at seventeen to feed the habit. Twice she had weaned herself off, but memories came flooding back, the lost times of her youth, the wasted education, the futility.
The bedsit she reasoned was better than the street. She was smart enough not to expect too much, not to assume that the man who had phoned would be any better.
A knock on the door,
