‘Let me check… yes, extremely unusual. She did a fair bit of work for our agency, as far as I can tell.’
‘Could she perhaps have taken time off for personal reasons? A holiday, maybe?’
‘If she did, she doesn’t appear to have told anybody.’
Bliss thought they’d got what they came for, which was all this woman was going to give up without a warrant. ‘If you learn any more, you will contact us, won’t you?’ he said.
Parkinson didn’t bother to respond.
‘Fine. We’ll leave you to your grief. Our condolences on your sad loss.’ He turned to Chandler. ‘Come on, Pen. Neither of us wants to see Nicola here weeping and wailing.’
As he reached the door, he paused. Looked Troy Parkinson up and down. ‘You must be so proud,’ he said. Still the young man remained tight-lipped.
‘Yeah, and fuck you, too, Bliss!’ Nicola screeched as they left the room.
In your dreams, he thought. And my nightmares.
If they thought the air was frigid outside the car, it was frostier still inside. Fuming, Ashton said nothing, yet said so much at the same time.
Chandler was the first to tackle him on it. ‘You think we were hard on you back there, Glen? If so, you need to think again. Rethink your entire career, maybe. Before we went inside, Jimmy politely told you to say nothing. You were there to observe. You couldn’t do that, though, could you? You had to let go of your frustrations. Thing is, the way you went about it could have made Nicola back off so far we’d never be able to speak to her again. You could have hurt us, Glen. Me and Jimmy. The MCU. Not you, though, because you’re off somewhere else as soon as we have a result. Nicola Parkinson is no CHIS, and she’s a mouthy mare, but if you dig hard enough you can often find a way through her defences. What little she gave us, we may never have got had you stayed in the room.’
Bliss finished the explanation. ‘We know our murder victim was not supposed to be anywhere near Cambridge – at least, not on official business. And we already know she did only in-house calls as a semi-official sideline. It’s not a lot, Glen, but it’s something. It was the only something Nicola was prepared to give up, and we could have missed out.’
He took a breath as he started the engine and waited for warm air to demist the windows. ‘Glen,’ he said, more softly. ‘I know when you hit the NCA and hear all that FBI bullshit, it makes you feel as if your shit don’t stink. Well, it does. I was older than you when I did the job, and had been there since SOCA knocked down the barriers. When it comes to people like Nicola Parkinson, I’m not saying there’s never a time to shout at them, lie to them, do whatever it takes to get information from them. Sometimes she makes me so angry I stand there shaking like a dog taking a shit. But you have to know when to give in to that rage, and that takes more experience than you currently have. Okay?’
Ashton seemed to accept the rebuke well, but he remained quiet all the way back to HQ.
Seven
Despite the low-double-figures temperature, Bliss was sitting in the garden with the sliding doors pulled wide open. A Samantha Fish album spun on the turntable; ‘Watch It Die’ had just ended. He reflected on the lyrics, and idly wondered if the singer’s plaintive voice echoed what he’d been doing: sitting back and watching while his relationship with Emily withered and died on the vine. The next cut along, ‘Try Not to Fall in Love With You’, was never going to get him out of his funk. He tried hard to focus on Fish’s playing style and the soulful tones she wrought from her guitar.
It had been a while since he had listened to music while gazing at his garden, his eye caught by the pond and its fish swimming in lazy patterns; in fact, he probably hadn’t done it since before the crazy shit with the ‘slow slicing’ case back in August. His mind had been too unsettled in the turbulent weeks and months since, an inability to relax not helping his cause with Emily. He realised things were not right between them. And that it was mainly his fault. She perhaps saw him slipping away in the long silences between their infrequent conversations, and he wondered if she would stick around long enough to watch him fall.
The moment the song reached a quieter section, Bliss heard thumping coming from his front door. Expecting one of his team to start complaining about having to wait outside in the cold, he instead found DI Burton standing on his doorstep. In typical Angie style, she didn’t wait to be invited in; brushing past without a word, she marched straight down the short passageway and into the living room at the far end.
‘Bloody hell!’ She wore a heavy overcoat but still hugged herself and rubbed her arms. ‘Were you born in a barn?’
‘A stable,’ he said. ‘As all great leaders are. Anyway, quit your whining and tell me why you’ve so rudely interrupted my peace and quiet.’
She smiled. ‘Your moment of bliss, you might say.’
‘You might. I never would.’ He crossed the room to slide the doors closed, then went to the sound system, levered the stylus off the vinyl and shut it all down. ‘Is this about our victim, Ange?’
‘Yes and no. Where were you earlier? I tried several times to find you.’
‘We had a house call to make. After that, Pen and I were stuck in a meeting with Bish and Diane.’
‘Fair enough. Duty calls. Anyhow, I eventually found your girl’s true indie page. Calls herself Autumn on there. From what I could tell, she’s been running it
