‘How long have you been with the squad?’ Kate asked.
Anna heard the emphasis Kate placed on the word ‘you’ and chose to ignore it. It might have simply been her accent, but then the flirting genes in the Gwynne pool had mostly settled in her sister.
‘Few days. Still finding my feet. You live in Bristol?’
‘No, I am here on a mission to get my sister back into the world of the living. I myself am the mother of two small children in that other place over the water.’
‘Wow, you don’t look like—’ Woakes caught himself. ‘That sounded all wrong.’
‘I take them where I find them,’ Kate said, grinning.
Woakes turned his attention back to Anna. ‘This a regular watering hole for you, then?’
‘Never been here before in my life.’
‘S’nice. Pricey but nice. Can I get you two another round?’
Anna glanced at her watch and held it up to Kate. It was after eight thirty.
Kate nodded with a turned-down mouth.
Anna said, ‘No, thanks anyway. I have to get my sister to the station for nine, otherwise she turns into a pumpkin.’
‘OK, well, later, if you change your mind, you know where I am.’
Woakes drifted away. Kate called an Uber and Anna gathered up their shopping. Five minutes later they were on their way to Temple Meads in a Toyota Prius.
Kate stayed surprisingly quiet for all of three minutes until she said, ‘So, is Dave attached?’
‘No, Kate, don’t.’
‘Oh, come on, Anna. Clean, fit-looking, nicely dressed – you could do a lot worse. And I saw the way he looked at your legs. Plus, you’re a genuine departmental hero.’
‘I work with him.’
‘So it’s not a definite no, then?’
‘It is. Definitely. Not my type.’
‘Oh yes, your type. Still waiting for the memo on that one.’
‘Kate, please.’
‘All I’m saying is that he’s there in that bar and has offered to buy you a drink. What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing. But if it went beyond a drink, that wouldn’t be good because I have to see him every day and probably give him a bollocking now and again.’
‘Maybe you could do with a bollocking now and again. In a way of speaking.’ Kate grinned.
‘Don’t be so disgusting.’
Kate shook her head, still grinning. ‘Come on, Anna. You’ve had a really rough time. I know you’re looking forward to burying yourself in work again, but there is life outside Avon and bloody Somerset. And not everyone is a villain. Don’t dismiss Dave,’ she made her eyes huge, ‘out of hand, that’s all I’m saying.’
Rob was waiting for them in the station, flushed from a little too much lager. Anna hugged them both and waved them off as they walked arm in arm towards their platform.
Woakes and the Milk Thistle were a ten-minute ride away. Home, Netflix and an already opened bottle of wine in a one-bed flat in Horfield twenty minutes in the other direction.
She got in a cab, pushing her parcels in front of her. ‘Horfield, please.’
Anna didn’t believe in mixing business with pleasure. In fact, she had a problem with pleasure full stop.
At home, she did the sensible thing and drank a pint of water, keeping the Riesling corked for another evening. She knew she’d drunk a little too much and was glad she hadn’t drunk anymore. She wasn’t used to it, that was a fact. She switched on the TV, searching for something noir enough to get her teeth into. By eleven, she’d fallen asleep on the settee.
* * *
Her dream began as an all too familiar one. She was running through the woods and something was chasing her. Whenever she’d turn and look there’d be nothing there. Nothing to see. But she sensed a presence. An invisible threat. She kept on running.
Most of the time, she got away.
Sometimes, she didn’t.
When that happened, she’d jerk awake, sweating, disorientated, full of dread, aware that no matter what time it was, she would not sleep again that night.
But on this Saturday night, her dream changed. This time she ran out of the woods, out into the open air and onto the moorland, empty and vast. She knew that this was an older place, the foothills of the black mountains where she’d hiked with her sister and her father so many times before.
She trod a winding path with vistas beyond, and in the distance she glimpsed a building, a church with a spire on the edge of a cluster of buildings. Generic markers in her dream world, dragged up from recent memory, and one of the few real pieces of evidence from the files she’d pored over that morning. The place where Rosie’s remains had been found. A place modified and twisted by her subconscious into this desolate landscape. She stopped walking and looked around. All was still and quiet except for a thin wind that blew consistently. And on that moaning wind there came a whispered voice.
‘Here, Anna. I’m here.’
She turned, trying to locate the source.
‘Find me, Anna, I’m here.’
She started running again, her eyes darting, seeing nothing until, at last, she came to the edge of a cliff, to a stuttering stop where she looked down from a precipitous height. And there, below her on a vast plateau she saw where the voices came from. A strange arrangement of potholes and sinkholes arranged in the shape of a flattened skull.
‘Here, Anna, here…’
* * *
She woke fully at six. Something in what she’d read and seen already about Rosie Dawson’s case was tugging at her, demanding to be digested and absorbed.
When she’d worked with Shipwright, she’d been his deputy, learning, watching. She’d always kept her intuitive glimpses, these unformed convictions that plagued her sleep, to herself. She knew she’d revisit them and make the connections, but only in retrospect. As always, the peeling apart of these subconscious thoughts would reveal a pattern, a truth that she’d chosen to ignore.
She’d dreamed of Charles Willis’s first victim half-buried in the earth when she’d been involved in his case. In her dream his first victim had risen and held out one hand, staring at Anna with dead, blind eyes. Seeing where it was impossible to see. It was Willis’s supposed blindness that had kept him hidden from the police for so long, and Anna couldn’t stop wondering if she should have spotted this. If in her dream her subconscious had tried to tell her.
A degree in criminology and psychology had taught her that dreams were a way of assimilating and integrating new information, nothing more. But now, after Willis, she was more prepared to take notice and accept that this part of her process was as valid as knocking on doors and trawling through files.
There might come a time when she’d make a leap, join a link that had always been there to join. Nothing mysterious, nothing supernatural, just the way her brain worked. Shipwright saw it. Encouraged it. And so had Hector Shaw, though in his case he’d needed to test her abilities in the most devious and almost fatal way. He’d taken a liking to her introversion, her need to be paradoxically analytical, to be detail-oriented. Seen how it might be a weakness, but also how it gave her an edge in her job.
And now, Rosie Dawson needed her to do that job.
Nine
Sunday