in here, but when that feeling comes it feels good. They have nothing they can charge me with, despite their best efforts, despite their crass need to try to humiliate me into saying something incriminating. I couldn’t incriminate myself even if I wanted to, because I’ve done nothing – NOTHING – wrong. I know it and they know it. It is deeply satisfying, this warm thrill of vindication spreading through my whole body. I sit down in my favourite armchair and let myself daydream, picturing the beauty of the transformations I’ve observed and loving them, loving them all.
Annabel
‘Sod it,’ Sam said, after half an hour of sitting in the car with nothing at all happening. He turned on the engine.
‘Thank goodness. Can we go to the police station now, please?’
He looked at me closely. ‘Are you OK? I’m sorry, I didn’t think – seeing him again…’
‘It’s not that,’ I said, quickly, although I’d just about had a heart attack when Colin had looked up the road directly to where we were sitting. ‘I need to get back to work…’
‘I told you,’ he said, heading back towards the main road, ‘they won’t be expecting you; you’re still supposed to be on compassionate leave. And besides, we need to catch up with someone far more important.’
As it turned out, Lindsay Brown lived just a bit further down the hill towards the town centre from Colin. It was a fairly substantial house that had been divided into flats. Lindsay and Audrey shared the bottom floor.
‘Oh,’ she said, opening the door before we’d even had a chance to knock.
‘Lindsay?’ asked Sam. ‘I’m from the Chronicle. You spoke to one of my colleagues, I believe?’
‘Yeah, um… I’m just on my way to work.’
‘Oh, sorry,’ he said, looking genuinely apologetic. ‘I thought I’d be able to catch you before you left.’
She hesitated, one hand on the door, looking from Sam to me and back again. ‘Well, you’re here now. I can spare five minutes. You want to come in?’
The living room was neat, all the furniture old and mismatched but cosy nonetheless, the kitchen through a big arch. Last night’s washing-up in the sink. ‘Do you want a drink?’ she asked. ‘Tea, or something?’
‘That would be wonderful, thank you. Do you mind if I use your loo?’
‘At the back,’ she said, filling the kettle, and Sam scuttled off down the corridor. I sat awkwardly perched on the edge of a sunken sofa. ‘You go around in pairs, do you?’ she asked me, over the noise of the water boiling.
‘Oh, um – no. I’m just – er – shadowing him.’
She looked baffled. ‘What – like work experience?’
‘Kind of.’
Clearly I looked far too old to be doing work experience on a newspaper, but to tell her the truth would take far too long.
By the time Sam came back Lindsay had placed three mugs of tea on the table, along with a bowl of sugar and some spoons. I was ravenous all of a sudden and was on the verge of asking if she had any biscuits.
‘Do you mind if I…?’ As well as the notebook and pen he’d fished out from his canvas bag, Sam waved his phone at Lindsay. ‘I’m just really bad at taking notes, I always miss things…’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Thanks.’
He found the voice recorder function on the phone and put it on the coffee table in front of her.
‘Have you and Audrey shared the flat for long?’
She cradled her mug of tea and, looking at how relaxed she was, I could have easily predicted her answer.
‘No, just a few months. My last flatmate went travelling. Audrey answered an ad – in the Chronicle, in fact. Must have been… erm… February? March?’
‘Did you get on well?’
‘Yeah, I guess. I didn’t see much of her, to be honest.’
‘She went out a lot?’
‘She was round at her boyfriend’s, most of the time. She didn’t sleep over there that often, but I was usually in bed by the time she got in.’
‘That would be Vaughn Bradstock?’
‘Yes. Funny old thing, he was. But they seemed to get on, until last week, that is.’
‘They had a row?’ Sam shifted in his seat, took a gulp of tea.
‘They split up. I think it was all her idea.’
‘Do you know why she finished it?’ I asked.
Sam shot me a look of surprise – it was his interview, after all – but I felt like a spare part and, besides, I was curious.
‘She said he was just a bit dull. She liked him a lot,