of things he shouldn’t say to her – like ‘Eat up, you need some meat on your bones,’ or ‘At least finish what’s on your plate, for heaven’s sake,’ which were things Amy’s mother said to her all the time. Harry, on the other hand, said things like, ‘I’m not going to be able to eat all of this apple, would you like half of it?’ Half an apple didn’t alarm Amy the way a big plate of pasta did.
‘They’ve been in there a long time – longer than usual anyway.’
‘Maybe they’ve been scared to death. That’ll be the day. You’re going to be late, Harry.’
‘Oh, by the way,’ Harry said casually as he was going out of the door, ‘there’s a hummus and salad sandwich here I couldn’t eat. Crystal made it so it’s all good. Just toss it if you don’t want it.’
‘Thanks, Harry.’
The Kray Twins
Reggie had brought in coffee in a Thermos flask. The coffee at the station was bogging, more like brown water than actual coffee. Ronnie drank hers black, but Reggie had brought a little jar of soya milk to put in hers. She’d been a vegan for quite a long time, nearly ten years, before celebrities made it fashionable. People always seemed to want to quiz her about her diet and she found the best response was a vague ‘Oh, you know – allergies,’ because everyone was allergic to something these days. What she really would have liked to say was, ‘Because I don’t want to put dead animals inside my body’ or ‘Because cow’s milk is for baby cows’ or ‘I don’t want to add to the death of the planet,’ but for some reason people didn’t like it when you said that. Mind you, it was hard work being a vegan and Reggie was no cook. She’d probably be dead of starvation by now if it wasn’t for her go-to meal of beans on toast. Reggie was twenty-six, but she didn’t think that she had ever been the right age.
‘Thanks,’ Ronnie said when Reggie poured her a coffee. They had their own mugs. They had already had coffee that morning, ‘at home’ as they had already started calling it, although they had so far only spent two nights in the little tumbledown Airbnb cottage in Robin Hood’s Bay that had been rented for a week – which was how long this part of the investigation was expected to take.
They perched side by side on the one desk they had been allotted in a sparse office that was on the top floor of the station. There was a computer on the desk and that was pretty much it apart from a pile of boxes that had appeared out of nowhere yesterday and contained paperwork pertaining to the original investigation into Bassani and Carmody. It was a chaotic jumble of receipts and bills and mysterious notes that their DI, Rod Gilmerton, had asked the local force to sweep up for them. ‘Paperwork’ would be an obsolete word one day. Reggie very much hoped so anyway. Another reason for not partaking of the station coffee was that Gilmerton had instructed them to keep themselves to themselves. ‘Discretion’s the better part of whatever,’ he said.
‘Valour,’ Reggie supplied. ‘Although what Shakespeare actually said is “The better part of valour is discretion.” People always misquote.’
‘You need to get a life, Reggie,’ Gilmerton said.
‘Contrary to popular opinion, I do have one,’ Reggie said.
There had been no flags and bunting out for them when they arrived. They were interlopers from another force and they had not been exactly welcome in this neck of the woods. The case they had been tasked with had originated here over ten years ago now. It had been closed for some time – the guilty punished, the innocent compensated, the stain scrubbed away, although, as any SOCO will tell you, there’s always a trace left behind. Nonetheless, everyone behaved as if it were closed, and not just closed, but put in a locked box on a high shelf where everyone involved had tried to forget about it and move on, and now here were Ronnie and Reggie breaking the locks and opening the box again.
It was still early and it was relatively quiet, although down below at the front of house a small knot of last night’s drunks were being processed by the desk sergeant so they could be released back into society and become tonight’s drunks. Reggie and Ronnie spent a few rather futile