they would just have to wait until the morning like everyone else.
‘Another transfusion of coffee?’ Ronnie asked and Reggie sighed an assent. The hospital coffee machine was up for an award for the world’s worst coffee (quite a competitive field), but they had completely replaced their blood with it by now so one more paper cup wasn’t going to have much more effect.
The girl had been half-naked when they spotted her cowering in a corner of the field last night. She was covered in bruises and had a badly swollen lip, but mostly she had just been terrified. Muddy and scratched by thorns and brambles, her appearance, not to mention her demeanour, gave the impression that she’d been hunted, running through fields and ditches and hedges to escape. Like prey. It was the kind of ghoulish plotline you got on something like Criminal Minds or Collier, not in real life. And yet here she was anyway, the one that got away.
All thoughts of looking for Stephen Mellors went out of their heads when she appeared, not that there was any sign of him in that field anyway. There had been a couple of old caravans – total rust buckets – as well as a newer static, but no one answered when they knocked on its door. All the blinds were drawn and it was impossible to tell what went on inside it. Stephen Mellors practising mindfulness seemed unlikely.
They had concluded that it was probably some kind of glitch in the GPS on Jamie Mellors’ phone and that Stephen Mellors was already en famille, chowing down on lasagne and chugging back his breath-taking red. Reggie had once located Sai in the middle of the English Channel, although he had turned out to be in a pub in Brighton when she phoned him to check. ‘Are you stalking me?’ he laughed, but that was when they were together and he found the idea of stalking cute, not sinister, which was what it became later, apparently.
They had got as far as a name with the girl – Maria – and had managed to ascertain that she was from the Philippines. It took much longer for it to dawn on them that the ‘Maria’ she kept repeating so agitatedly wasn’t herself. Ronnie, reduced to pidgin English, pointed at herself and said, ‘Ronnie, I’m Ronnie,’ and then pointed at Reggie and said, ‘Reggie,’ and finally pointed at the girl and raised the questioning eyebrow.
‘Jasmine.’
‘Jasmine?’ Ronnie repeated and the girl nodded vigorously.
There was another name that she also kept repeating. They couldn’t decipher it properly but it could have been ‘Mr Price’.
‘Did Mr Price do this to you?’ Reggie asked, pointing at the girl’s face.
‘Man,’ she said, and raised her hand above her head.
‘Big man?’ Ronnie said. More vigorous nodding, but then she started crying and talking about Maria again She made an odd dumb show of tugging on something invisible around her neck. If they had been playing charades, Reggie might have guessed ‘The Hanging Gardens of Babylon’, but she was pretty sure that wasn’t what Jasmine was miming. She and Sai had played charades a lot, just the two of them. There had been a lot of wholesome, innocent fun in their relationship, childish sometimes even. Reggie missed that more than she missed all the other stuff. Or sex, as it was also known.
They had put in a request for a translator but weren’t holding out much hope, certainly not until office hours kicked in. Ronnie went off to scour the hospital and came back with a Filipino woman, a cleaner – with a name badge that said ‘Angel’ – and asked her to talk to Jasmine for them. As soon as they began to talk a torrent of words flowed from Jasmine, accompanied by a lot more crying. You didn’t need to speak Tagalog to know that it was a wretched tale she was telling.
Unfortunately, before they were able to glean any real information, a dark presence chose that moment to darken the doorway of the side ward.
‘Hey up, it’s Cagney and Lacey.’
‘DI Marriot,’ Reggie said brightly.
‘Have you heard the news about your boyfriend?’
‘Boyfriend?’ Reggie echoed. Marriot couldn’t possibly mean Sai, could she?
‘Michael Carmody?’ Ronnie hazarded.
‘And the prize goes to the girl in blue.’
‘What about him?’ Reggie asked.
‘Dead,’ Marriot said succinctly. ‘Last night.’
‘Murdered?’ Reggie and Ronnie asked in unison, but the DI shrugged and said, ‘Heart attack, as far as anyone can make out. He won’t be missed. Is this your girl?’ she