Timothy took out a much bigger plastic bag containing one long bone and handed it to the doc. ‘And she said you were to have this one second.’
Doctor A turned it in her hands and then held it up to the light. A beam shot straight through a section of the lower part of the leg. The hole cut clean through the bone.
Doctor A looked her way.
Kim let out her breath and nodded at the same time.
She knew exactly what she was being shown.
That hole had been caused by a bullet.
TWENTY-ONE
Stacey walked through the door and into the distinctive aroma of chip fat.
The café was located just off Dudley High Street and had been frying for the masses for over twenty years. She had first graced the place in her teens when there was little else to do in Dudley on a rainy Saturday afternoon once the activity of window shopping had been exhausted.
It was also the place she’d been when she’d first had the notion to end her own life.
In the years since, the ownership had changed hands but the décor and menu had not. A few of the usuals were in their normal spot, and her preferred table was free.
Hank Brown sat at the window table. He spent most evenings in Betty’s Bite’s. Having lost his wife of thirty-seven years he ventured to the café a few nights each week for a hot meal. She had once made the mistake of offering him a smile. That was an hour of her life she would never get back.
‘Hey Stacey, what can I get you – toasted tea cake and diet coke?’
Stacey nodded and fished into her purse. It was her theory that the one cancelled out the other. She suffered a diet Coke to spread the packet of butter onto the warm, fruity dough. And after receiving a cup of tea, suffocating beneath a film of grease, she’d chosen a sealed bottle ever since.
Priscilla held up her hand. ‘Already balanced the till,’ she said, with a smile. ‘It’s on me.’
‘Thank you,’ Stacey said, returning the smile. Genuine acts of generosity were few in her personal life and even less in her work.
Priscilla nodded towards the corner table. ‘I’ll bring it over.’
Stacey thanked her, hoping she didn’t offer too many free snacks. Manny wouldn’t like that.
Manny was the owner of the café and so nicknamed after the woolly mammoth in the Ice Age films. He was big, hairy and Romanian. He had inherited Priscilla with the fixtures and fittings from the previous owner.
Stacey wiped the table and took out her iPad.
Priscilla placed the small plate and a knife onto the table.
‘There you go, lovely,’ she said.
‘Thanks a lot but…’
‘Shhh…’ she said, resting a hand on Stacey’s shoulder. ‘It’ll be our secret.’
The woman headed to the door and turned the ‘open’ sign to ‘closed’.
She was the most unlikely Priscilla that Stacey had ever seen. Not a common Black Country name, Priscilla tended to stand out. Stacey guessed her to be late twenties. Her lips were full and shapely but her eyes seemed too small for her face. Her large forehead was exaggerated by the dyed red hair pulled back into a bun. And yet there was a quality to the features that Stacey found intriguing.
Priscilla caught her appraisal and smiled.
Stacey blushed and turned her attention to her snack. She spread the butter onto the teacake and watched as it disappeared.
People came into the café for any number of reasons. Her own was to provide a buffer between work and home. The six miles between the station and her flat were not normally enough to erase the events of the day. On the days she went straight home she entered one doorway as fraught as the one she’d left. Eventually, the traumas of the day would dissipate but by then it was time for bed. If she used the café as a pit stop it became an event, a separation between work and home.
Tonight she was struggling to leave work behind. The vile texts found on Henryk’s phone were still rattling round in her head. Despite his attempts to delete them, perhaps to hide from his wife, she had managed to retrieve the messages that had escalated in to vicious, sickening threats. The last one she remembered word for word.
‘Fuck off or we will gut you, gang rape your wife while your little bastards watch and then rip their limbs off one by one’
Her mind could not compute the level of hate needed to send such a message. At the very least it was designed to terrify human beings who had done nothing wrong. At most it was a credible threat.
She pushed away the teacake, unable to stomach food as she glanced at the World of Warcraft icon on her phone. A smile hovered around her lips as she imagined the smirk and eye-roll if Dawson could see her now. It would confirm everything he ribbed her about: that she had no life and spent most of her time in a fantasy world full of goblins and ogres.
And he was right. She didn’t have a life. Not since her relationship with Trish had died in a lacklustre way. The initial spark between her and the forensic tech had never ignited in the way both of them had hoped. There had been no great scene or argument; there hadn’t even been enough passion for that. The period of time between phone calls just got longer and longer until they were no longer calling or texting at all.
She took a moment to check her emails. Nothing new.
Her whole day consisted of four messages. She’d been tagged in a photo of a relative on Facebook. She’d received a daily email voucher, and got three new followers on Twitter. The fourth was someone trying to sell her more followers.
She put the phone away.
Tonight she wasn’t trying to cut off her emotions from work, this time she was trying to distract her mind from the feelings that had engulfed her upon reading Justin’s letter.
And those same feelings would not now let her go.
TWENTY-TWO
Kim let out a low and prolonged groan as the darts of water pricked her flesh before rolling over her skin and down the drain.
Although symbolic, she did actually feel as though she was cleansing Travis from her flesh.
After leaving Doctor A, Travis had pointedly looked at his watch. They had been half an hour past the official end of shift. Personally, she had wanted to crack on and visit the Preece family or pore over the missing persons reports, but Travis’s set expression had told her neither was an option. So, she had delivered him safely back to his wife, who was twitching behind the net curtain. Probably fearful of burning the meat and two veg.
She stepped out of the shower and into a beach towel. A rub of her head with a smaller towel followed by a quick shake and her short black hair was damp and spiky.
She dressed in loose jeans and plain black tee shirt, and smiled as she saw Barney sitting patiently at the bottom of the stairs. Kim had no clue why the dog had never even tried to venture upstairs. There was no gate or barrier and yet he never crossed that invisible threshold.
She rubbed his head and continued through to the kitchen. She looked behind but he hadn’t moved a muscle.