I stared at them, wondering if they really hadn’t noticed I was standing right there or if they were being deliberately rude.
‘Is that all you want, Annabel?’ asked Lynn. She’d plopped eggs into the pan and was spooning brown water over them to hurry the cooking process along. I turned towards the till, opening my purse.
‘Yes,’ I said. My cheeks were burning.
‘Oh, shit,’ I heard someone say from the table behind me.
They were all silent, then. I handed over a pound coin and took the milk and hurried away, not looking at the table, not looking at Lynn even though I heard her say, ‘Wait – your change!’
The Chief’s Summary arrived by email at half-past nine, just as Kate came back into the office. In the twenty minutes or so since the scene upstairs in the canteen, I’d had a few private tears, washed my face in the Ladies’ and decided to put it behind me. I knew they talked about me, after all. They talked about whoever wasn’t currently in the room, so I couldn’t consider myself special.
Kate put the kettle on behind me and cleared her throat. ‘You want a tea?’
‘Yes, please. I’d love one.’
She’d obviously been hoping I’d say no, but it gave me a perverse pleasure to take her up on the offer. When it was plonked on to the desk, it was very milky. I was thirsty enough for it not to matter. She was making some sort of an effort, after all.
‘Thanks, Kate. Looks smashing, just how I like it.’
The summary normally contained about five or six items of note: crimes and incidents that had taken place on the previous day. Anything classed as a critical incident was included – armed robberies, sudden and suspicious deaths, suicides. Rapes and murders were the ones that were of particular interest to me, in case any of the offenders I was supposed to monitor had crossed the line. Although I could search through the overnight crimes on the system, the summary was a handy shortcut, since the most serious offences would always be included.
And there it was.
Suspicious Death
At approximately 2032hrs on Friday patrols attended an address in Newmarket Street, Briarstone. The neighbour had noticed a strong smell coming from the address and had entered the property and discovered the decomposed remains of a female in the living room. The deceased is believed to be a 43-year-old who lived at the address. Next of kin have been informed. Major Crime Department attended the scene and, although investigations are ongoing, the opinion was that there are no suspicious circumstances.
That was all. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting – some sort of fanfare maybe – but it was bland description, deliberately designed to inform those who needed to know and to obscure things from those who didn’t.
The house next door had been full of people for much of Saturday. The forensics van parked outside my house, and, although I’d spoken to the first patrol that turned up, I waited around all day to be interviewed properly.
My emotional state had been fragile, spinning from nausea and shock at what I’d seen and done, to annoyance that they were taking so long about it all, and guilt that I hadn’t rung them straight away, instead of breaking in like some lumbering real-life Jessica Fletcher.
After I’d found the body, I’d gone back home and shut the door. Then I’d opened the door again and thrown the cat out and shut the door behind her. In putting my hand under her belly I had felt, instead of soft fur, cold, wet, slimy muck all over her.
The smell of it, on my hands, on my tights, my skirt. Black and green and brown, the colours you get when you mix together all the colours in the paintbox, combined with the odour of putrefaction. I took my clothes off, right there in the kitchen, and put them in the washing machine. I turned the temperature up to sixty degrees and was about to turn it on when I suddenly realised that I shouldn’t. Maybe it was evidence.
Of what?
I washed my hands with antibacterial handwash that had a strong perfume, but even when I rinsed it off my hands still smelt bad. I got some kitchen roll and dampened it, then squirted some of the blue soap on it and rubbed at my legs, in case the substance had come through my tights on