office as they waited to be dealt with. I was never going to have to calm down someone who was holding a knife, nor tell someone that a loved one was dead. I was never going to have to try to persuade a woman to leave her violent partner, or tell a parent that their child was being abused. Instead I looked at all the figures, all the raw data that churned in day after day after day, forming it into patterns, looking for a way in. Even then, after finding something that was potentially interesting, trying to persuade the senior management that my recommendations were worth following up was often a battle. As I’d just said to Kate, phrasing it carefully to suggest that there were added benefits in terms of achieving Home Office targets was always a good idea.
I looked at my list of incidents. Twenty-four people, all found dead, alone, some time after they’d died. Unfortunately, as the deceased weren’t classed as victims of crime, there was no way to search for other parameters such as age or sex, but scanning through a couple of the incident reports it was already clear that they weren’t all elderly people.
I ran the same report going back to the start of 2005 and exported the data to a spreadsheet. A quick table showed just how interesting the latest results were – just three decomposed bodies in the whole of 2005. In the seven years between 2004 and 2011, twenty-two bodies – the highest in 2010 with eleven, but then it had been a very cold winter. And in 2012 – twenty-four bodies in the first nine months of the year.
At lunchtime I went out, walked up the hill to the town centre, puffing a bit. On the other side of the road, Kate and Carol were also heading in the same direction, talking animatedly. They hadn’t seen me, or had chosen to pretend I wasn’t there. They were walking twice as fast as me, anyway, and in a minute or two they would be at the top of the hill and around the corner, out of sight.
On the way back to the police station I looked at the rows of terraced houses lining Great Barr Street, rows of dirty-looking steps and greying net curtains. Piles of post against the inside of one frosted glass door; a couple of dead flies, legs up, on the windowsill of another. How many more people were out there, waiting to be found?
I drove from the Park and Ride to the supermarket in the rain, the radio on, going through the list in my head of all the things I was going to do to treat myself after the trauma of the weekend. Maybe order a takeaway. Have a long soak in the bath. Read a book, or watch a film.
I had lived on my own for years, and I liked it. Besides, I had the cat. I had the angels to protect me.
My mum was becoming frail. Since she’d had a fall last year, even though she’d only been bruised, she had been too nervous to go out – so she issued me with shopping lists, instructions to collect her prescriptions and post things for her, and on the way home from work I would stop at her house two or three times a week, make her dinner and wash up. Technically she could cook for herself and do her own washing-up, but when she’d been ill with a chest infection in December I’d cooked for her, and even though she was now well again I hadn’t quite managed to get out of the habit when I was over there.
Her house was an old Victorian terrace just outside the town centre. Still parked outside was her old Nissan Micra, rusting to pieces and yet she insisted on taxing and insuring it just in case she suddenly felt the urge to leave the house. I pulled in behind it and sat for a moment, savouring the feeling of being alone, being quiet.
I opened the front door with my key, which I kept on a separate key ring as a kind of message to myself that this wasn’t a permanent arrangement. ‘Only me, Mum!’ I called. From the back room I could hear the sound of her television, loud – one of the soaps, as it always was at this time of the evening.
‘Hello, dear,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Can you turn the thermostat up