‘Gloves,’ Harriet said, ‘or it was someone whose DNA is already there.’
Meaning Carter. They are still tracing his return journey along minor roads back from Stoke; still watching that mobile number ‘unknown-515’; still waiting for data off the Corpus college computer – everything taking an age because of Christmas rotas, skeletal staffing. Every email met with an ‘out of office’.
‘Good Christmas?’ asks Marie from Accounts as she passes Manon’s desk, the question she dreads and tries to shrug off.
‘Yeah, good thanks,’ she says, barely looking up from her newspaper and some story she’s not reading about a muscled pop star on his third marriage, though ‘This time it’s for keeps’.
She was pulled off the Hind case Christmas Eve, onto a suspicious death. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Elderly man burnt to a charcoal slump just inside the front door of his bungalow on the outskirts of Peterborough. Cover-up for a burglary, or obtaining money with menaces, or perhaps he’d done it to himself. She picked over the charred interior of the man’s home and found a selection of wigs, cheap and matted – platinum blonde, mostly; a rail of polyester women’s dresses in a wardrobe untouched by fire; and below a jumble of dusty high heels with slits cut in the sides and back to make room for his man-sized feet. He had worked the bins for Peterborough City Council all his life.
Manon spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day tracing his family and yet there were none; at least, none that said they knew him. She tried to capture CCTV, which took double the time when no one but the dimmest or most desperate was on duty, and she included herself in that. Never go in for an operation or become a victim of violent crime on a major national holiday, that would be her advice.
Still, the death of old Mr Cross-Dresser did away with the day. She picked up a takeaway from The Spice Inn on Christmas night, stepping into the darkness of her flat and heading straight to her kitchen. She set her phone on the kitchen counter, its screen illuminated then darkening, like some sleeper rousing then turning over again in the bed, and she remembered the calls from her father she’d ignored.
Her kitchen was the one area of the flat overlooked by the mid-century modernisers: gloomy with brown floral tiles; the grouting cracked and orange behind the taps; the cupboards dark and over-twiddled with vaguely medieval handles. Bryony said she should paint the cupboards. ‘Cornforth White. Brighten it up no end.’ But Manon never got around to it. Shifts blurred into shifts, overtime into more overtime. They filled her bank account but not her fridge, so that when the tide rolled away, only empty wastes remained. A deserted life. Celery that hadn’t been opened but had gone rubbery. Pants and tights spilling from the top of the basket. Apples that were woolly to the bite, so that she spat them into the bin. Manon would determinedly fill the fridge, resolve to paint the cupboards Cornforth White while the washing machine churned; resolve, too, to eat beetroot more and take up Zumba, only to have it all disappear in the suck and tow of the next tide.
Bloated with korma, she listened to her father’s message. ‘Hi, lovey. Just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas. Um, we’ve had a good day up here. Una cooked a terrific salmon terrine to ring the changes. So that was good. Yes. Well, don’t work too hard. Call when you can, Manon, OK? Righto then. Bye.’
She had hoped for one from Ellie – even double-checked her missed calls, but nothing. So she told herself it was Ellie’s fault, this silence. She called her father back, reluctantly, because he would inevitably ask for a festive-jollity meter reading and hers was set at zero, so to head him off, she told him about the cross-dressing corpse, which left him satisfyingly at a loss. She could hear Una getting restive in the background, whispering as loudly as possible, ‘We really must go, Robert.’ So Manon had said, ‘Go on, then. Obey her.’
She wished she could call Ellie, if only to slag off Una, but the climb-down was too hard to face.
A phone rings somewhere across the room and Manon raises her head to see Davy walking back from his canteen lunch with Stuart and Nigel. Colin is Internet shopping as usual – a TV sound bar, he says. (‘You can get some real bargains in the Christmas sales.’)
Manon ignores the ringing, which is shrill in the strip-lit yellow room, bouncing off the birch laminate desks as broad as mortuary slabs.
‘Sarge?’ says Kim.
Manon turns. Kim is looking directly at her, the phone held away from her body, in a way that makes the department stop.
‘Spartan Rescue,’ says Kim. They continue to look at each other, Manon’s heart quickening. ‘A body. In the Ouse. Just shy of Ely. Dog walker found it this morning.’
No one moves.
‘Sarge?’ says Kim.
‘Tell them we’re on our way.’
‘I honestly thought …’ Davy begins.