Gone

18

At six o’clock that afternoon the inspector came into the office, put a hand on Flea’s desk and leaned over so that he was staring hard into her face.

She ducked out of his way. ‘What? What is it?’

‘Nothing. Just the superintendent likes you, apparently. I’ve had Professional Standards on the phone.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. That review of your competency pay? It’s been suspended.’

‘You mean they’ll get their bonus?’

‘Happy Christmas. Ching ching ching.’

When he’d gone she sat for a while in silence in her familiar office, surrounded by the things she’d got easy with over the years. The photos of the team on jobs pinned to the walls, the budget forecasts scribbled on the whiteboard. The stupid postcards stuck to the locker doors. One showed a man in snorkel and fins and read: Steve had got all his diving gear, now all he needed was to find those elusive muffs his friends kept telling him about. And a force poster on the wall about an anti-drugs operation: Atrium: since 2001 we’ve arrested one person a day. Help us make that two. One of the team had used a marker pen to delete ‘a day’. Flea would catch serious hell from the superintendents if they saw any of this, but she’d let the boys leave it all up. She liked their sense of humour. Liked the easy way they were around each other. They were going to get their money. They could buy their Xboxes and their kids’ Wiis and their alloy wheels and all the guy things that would make it a real Christmas for them.

The front door opened, wafting in a blast of cold air and petrol fumes from outside. Someone came down the corridor. Wellard, carrying a bag and heading for the decontamination room. She stopped him in the doorway. ‘Hey.’

He put his head into the office. ‘What?’

‘You’re going to get your pay. The inspector just told me.’

He inclined his head. A small, chivalrous bow. ‘Well, thank you, kind lady. My poor disabled children will smile this Christmas for the first time in their sad, short lives. Oh, they will be content, kind miss. They will. It will be the best Christmas ever.’

‘Make sure the one with the polio gets the iPod Touch.’

‘You’re not as nasty as you like to pretend, Boss. No, really, you’re not.’

‘Wellard?’

He paused, door half open. ‘Uh-huh?’

‘Seriously. This morning.’

‘This morning?’

‘You saw the cast the CSI made. You didn’t recognize what the jacker used to score out his prints?’

‘No. Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ She felt something cold and half opaque patter across the back of her head. A shadowy picture of the forests they’d searched. The farmland stretching away to either side. During the search this morning there had been whispers about the things the jacker had said in the letter. No one outside MCIU was supposed to know but things got around the other units, and this morning all the officers had worked with their heads full of vague, unsettling notions about what the jacker might have done with Martha. ‘Just a . . . feeling about that place. Something I can’t quite put my finger on.’

‘A hunch?’

She gave him a cold look. ‘I’m learning to trust my “hunches”, Wellard. Learning I’m not as blonde as you think. And I feel like there’s something in the . . .’ she groped for the word ‘. . . the environment out there that was important. Does that mean anything to you?’

‘You know me, Sarge, I’m a grunt. It’s my stunning body I use to turn a dime. Not my loaf.’ He winked and left the office, his footsteps fading down the corridor. She smiled bleakly and listened to him go. Outside, rain had begun to fall, so slow, fat and nebulous it could almost have been snow. Winter really was here.