‘I want to die in the daylight,’ he said.
But no one was listening to him. As far as they were concerned, he was already dead.
Detective Sergeant Diane Fry stumbled in the middle of the floor and kicked out in irritation. She’d never thought of herself as a tidy person - there were too many messy loose ends in her life for that. And God knew, her flat was a tip; she might have been competing with the students across the landing for the pigsty-of-the-year competition. But the intrusion of someone else’s untidiness was a different thing altogether. It made her grit her teeth every time she came home from a shift. She’d barely noticed the mess when it was her own clothes thrown on the bathroom floor, but finding a pair of black jeans halfway across the room from the laundry basket reminded her that she was no longer alone.
Fry’s pager was bleeping. She checked the number, scooped up her phone from the edge of the bath and dialled.
‘DS Fry here. Yes, sir?’
Her boss at E Division, Detective Inspector Paul Hitchens, was at his desk early this morning. Yet he sounded far from
alert.
‘Oh, Fry. Are you on your way in?’
‘Very shortly.’
‘OK.?
Fry waited expectantly, but heard nothing except a metallic whirring in the background, as if Hitchens were having some construction work done on his office.
‘Was there something, sir?’
‘Oh, just … Does the name Quinn mean anything to you, Fry?’
‘Quinn?’
‘Mansell Quinn.’
‘I’m sorry, it doesn’t.’
‘No. No, it wouldn’t do.’
Hitchens sounded as though his mind was on something else entirely. Fry pulled a face and gestured impatiently at the phone, as if she’d been reduced to using sign language to an idiot.
‘Well, make sure you come and see me before you do anything else, will you, Fry?’
‘Certainly, sir.’
Fry shrugged as she ended the call. It was probably nothing. Hitchens was just losing his grip, like everyone else around E Division. But she’d better not be late. There was no time for clearing up someone else’s clothes.
Hold on, though. She looked more closely at the jeans on the floor. These weren’t someone else’s clothes - they were hers, bought only a couple of weeks ago during a shopping trip to the Meadowhall Centre in Sheffield. Worse, they’d been a comfort purchase on a day when she’d been feeling particularly down. She hadn’t even found a chance to wear them yet.
7
‘Angie!’
There was no reply from the sitting room, where her sister lay wrapped in a duvet on the sofa. The flat was so small that the distance between the rooms was only a few feet. The fact that her sister was asleep irritated Fry even more.
‘Angie!’
She heard a grunt, and a creaking of springs as her sister stirred and turned over. Fry looked at her watch: quarter past eight. She’d better pray the traffic wasn’t too bad getting to West Street, or she’d be late.
She called again, more loudly, then picked up the jeans and tried to fold them back into their proper shape before laying them on top of the overflowing laundry basket. They were creased and scuffed across the knees, as if Angie had been crawling around the floor in them. They were hardly worth wearing now, despite the money she’d lashed out for the sake of the designer label stitched to the back pocket.
Cursing, Fry began to fuss about the bathroom, picking up more items of clothing and shoving them into the basket. She rescued a towel from the bottom of the bath and hung it on the rail. She straightened the curtains, swept up an empty toothpaste tube and a Tampax wrapper and threw them into the pedal bin. She dampened a cloth and began wiping splashes of soap off the mirror. Then she caught sight of her own reflection, and stopped. She didn’t like what she saw.
‘What’s all the noise about?’
Angie stood in the doorway wearing only a long T-shirt, scratching herself and peering at her sister through half-open eyes. Fry felt a rush of guilt at the sight of her sister’s bare, thin legs.
‘Nothing.’
‘What are you doing? I thought there must be a fire, or a burglar or something.’
‘No. I’m sorry. You can go back to sleep, if you want.’
Angie coughed. ‘I’m awake now, I suppose. Are you going
out, Sis?’
‘I’m on shift this morning.’
‘Yeah. Well, I’ll get myself a coffee. Do you want anything?’
‘I don’t have time.’
Angie looked around the bathroom. ‘Tidying up? Just before you go to work? You want to slow down, Di. You’ll be giving yourself a heart attack if you get so stressed.’
