him you’d gone off with Friedland it sounded like all hell broke loose.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s on his way. Look, can you please not do anything like this in future? I’ve never been so bloody scared in my whole life.’
‘You weren’t the one in the car with him,’ I said. ‘Why the hell were you scared?’
‘I thought he was going to kill you.’
I thought about the body on the sofa, wondered how long she had been there. How long Colin had been visiting her.
‘There’s another body,’ I said. ‘I think she’s been in there a long time. He called her Maggie.’
Annabel
‘I don’t want to make things difficult for you, Annabel, in the circumstances – but you do realise you put the whole investigation at risk?’
I looked at Paul Moscrop’s fingers, both of his hands flat on the desk in front of him, spread out as though he were trying some sort of supernatural table-tipping experiment.
The table didn’t move.
‘That wasn’t my intention, sir.’
‘Not to mention your own life.’
‘Well, I thought you’d have had him under surveillance.’
He had no reply to that, of course. The teams had, as Jenna Jackson had told me, been deployed to another division.
‘Of course, without your analysis we might not have found Audrey Madison in time. But nevertheless, you are not a trained investigator. You’re not even working in Major Crime. You put yourself in a position of grave danger and I can’t even begin to think of what might have happened if you’d got things badly wrong.’
‘I know.’
I looked up briefly at Bill, who was pretending to read the top sheet of the folder open on the desk in front of him. His cheeks were red, whether from embarrassment or the warmth of the room it was difficult to tell. It being early December, the heating in all the police stations across the county was at full blast. It was stifling in here.
‘The CPS have been trying to decide whether what you did constitutes entrapment.’
‘You can tell them I went temporarily insane if it will help,’ I offered.
‘I don’t really want to be here, you know, Annabel,’ he said then. ‘If it were up to me I’d be giving you a medal. What you did was incredibly brave, and very, very stupid.’
‘I won’t do it again,’ I said.
‘Good.’ He even managed a tiny hint of a smile. ‘I think we should finish there – everyone in agreement?’
Bill looked relieved and nodded; the woman from HR who had a face that could turn milk gave me a glare but nodded her assent to the DCI. The union rep looked pleased with herself. I was hoping that was a good sign.
Sam was waiting for me in the café where we’d had our first meeting, which felt like years ago but was only just over two months.
‘How did it go?’ he asked, when I put my bag and coat over the chair opposite him.
‘It was all over in twenty minutes. I thought it would be longer than that.’
‘What did they say?’
I kept him in suspense for a little while longer while I went to the counter and got us both another drink.
‘They’re going to phone me when they’ve reached their decision,’ I said, sitting down.
‘They should be giving you some sort of good citizen award, Annabel, not putting you through all this stress. How’s Audrey?’
Audrey was staying at her parents’ house for the time being. To my surprise, as well as hers, probably, we’d become quite good friends. Physically she had recovered well, but she was not sleeping and was suffering from regular panic attacks. Not having to worry about going to work while I was suspended pending the disciplinary investigation, I had been visiting her every day. Sam had come with me once or twice, but we could both tell that Audrey wasn’t comfortable with him being there.
‘Vaughn phoned while I was there.’
‘Oh?’
‘He wants to go and see her. She’s not having any of it.’
‘I guess she probably blames him, somehow. Poor bloke. Bad at choosing his friends.’
This morning she had been dressed, in jeans and a T-shirt that was too big for her, but it was still a step up from the grubby dressing gown. She’d washed her hair.
‘Wow,’ I’d said. ‘We going out somewhere?’
She’d looked briefly panic-stricken, and then she’d smiled at me. When she smiled, she looked so different. She was the sort of girl who would have been way too cool to associate with me at school, or at work, for that matter. She would