At Risk

38

Twenty minutes later the white hatchback came to a stop in the car park below the Dersthorpe council flat where Elsie and Cherisse Hogan lived. Zipping up his dripping police waterproofs, Sergeant Brian Mudie reached under his seat for the heavy Maglite torch.

“Looks like they’re mostly lock-ups,” said PC Wendy Clissold, peering along the rain-hatched beam of the headlights. “I wouldn’t leave a car out in the open in a dump like this. You’d come back and it’d be sitting on bricks.”

Mudie considered staying in the car, and just shining the torch out of the window as Wendy Clissold cruised round the place. Don Whitten’s instructions to them, however, had been to get out, to look through garage windows and behind walls-generally poke around and make nuisances of themselves. And so once again he pulled on his wet cap. The cap’s elasticated rain cover was in the glove compartment, but Mudie left it there because he thought it looked daft, like a woman’s shower cap.

Wriggling his toes experimentally in his sodden Doc Martens, he stepped out into the wet. The wind was coming in hard off the sea and he had to hold his cap on with the hand that wasn’t holding the torch and nudge the car door shut with his knee. Inside the car he saw a brief flare as Wendy Clissold lit up. God, but she was a beautiful woman.

It took him five minutes to check the estate car park and a further eight to run the torch along the line of vehicles outside the Lazy “W,” ensure that neither of the clapped-out hulks outside the Londis mini-mart was a nearly new Vauxhall Astra, and seriously alarm two young men who were smoking skunk in a Ford Capri on the sea front.

He got back to find that Clissold had switched the heater on. The patrol car smelt of hot dust and the peppermint scent of her breath-freshening spray.

“Any good?” she asked, as he bundled his wet kit over into the back seat.

“Course not. Give us one of those smokes.”

As he lit up Wendy Clissold steered the car slowly out of Dersthorpe and back towards Marsh Creake. Halfway between the two, she pulled into a layby and switched off the engine and the lights, leaving only the faint hiss of the police intercom. On the seaward side of the road they could see the silent leap of the spray.

They sat in silence as he finished his cigarette.

“Are you sure your wife doesn’t suspect?” asked Clissold eventually.

“Doreen? No, she’s too busy with her soap operas and her lottery cards. Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t care if she did.”

“What about Noelle?” asked Clissold gently. “You said she’d just started at that new school.”

“She’s going to find out sooner or later, isn’t she?” said Mudie with finality. Opening his window an inch and flipping out his cigarette butt, he reached for Clissold.

A minute or two later she drew her head back from his.

Mudie blinked. “What is it, love?”

“Those holiday cottages on the Strand? There was a light in one of them.”

“Brancaster, Marsh Creake and Dersthorpe, Whitten said. Nothing about the Strand.”

“I still think we should look.”

“When they pay us the extra money, we’ll go the extra mile. Until then, bollocks to ’em.”

She hesitated. Rain beat at the windows. Dead air rasped from the intercom.

“Besides,” he said, his hand squeezing the warm flesh above the waistband of her uniform trousers, “we’re due back in Fakenham at half past. That gives us, what, fifteen minutes?”

She shifted doubtfully but pleasurably in her seat. “You’re a bad man, Sergeant Mudie, and you’re setting me a bad example.”

“What are you going to do about it, PC Clissold?” he murmured, his face in her hair. “Arrest me?”