They just completely ignore the fact that they’re dealing with actual people, real people. Everything’s been distilled down to crime figures and taking the easy way out. Drives me mad.’
Half an hour later, we were walking together up the hill towards the bus stop. She’d never walked anywhere with me before, even if we were going in the same direction at the same time. At four, I’d turned off the workstation and gone to wash up my mug. By the time I was back, Kate had her coat on and we ended up walking out of the station together, as if this was normal.
‘I mean,’ I said, puffing a bit as we went up the hill, ‘it’s not even as though we had a heatwave, or a particularly cold winter, or anything like that.’
‘Or floods,’ Kate said. Her long legs took one stride for every two of mine, effortless.
‘And, as I said in the presentation, they’re not all old, either. The one this morning was forty-three. Then there was that Hampshire woman, remember? The one they found in Baysbury? She was only twenty-one. And another one I just saw was thirty-nine.’
‘How old are you again?’ Kate asked.
‘Thirty-eight.’
She smirked a little, the smirk of someone who was still – just – in her twenties, and for whom forty seemed an impossibly long way off.
‘I just can’t think of anything more awful than dying in your own home and being left there to rot,’ I said quietly, walking past the automatic doors of the chemist and enjoying the brief blast of warm air.
‘Well, you wouldn’t know anything about it, you’d be dead,’ Kate said.
I bit my lip. Imagine if it wasn’t the end, though, I wanted to say. Imagine watching your body decomposing and knowing there was nobody around who cared enough to wonder why they hadn’t seen you for a while.
‘Don’t you think,’ I persisted, sniffing longingly at the smell coming from the pasty shop on the corner, ‘that someone would notice? I mean the younger ones in particular. They’d have families, work colleagues, friends. Even if they weren’t working, surely they’d be signing on or something like that? It’s got to be pretty hard to just disappear.’
‘I guess so. I think if I didn’t appear on Facebook for a couple of days there’d be some kind of inquiry.’
We sat on the wall waiting for the Park and Ride buses. That was, Kate sat on the wall and smoked; I leaned against the wall upwind of her.
‘Although there wouldn’t be really, not if you’d withdrawn from it gradually,’ she said a few minutes later.
‘Withdrawn from what?’ I asked.
‘From Facebook. I mean, if you were intentionally withdrawing from society, then you’d gradually stop posting on Facebook, wouldn’t you? And after a while nobody would even notice you’d gone. Or they might, and they could leave you a message, send you an email, but if you didn’t reply… I mean, most of them aren’t real friends, are they? Close friends, I mean. And the ones that are – well, what if you told them you were moving abroad? Or that your computer was broken, or something? How many months would it be before anyone seriously wondered where you were?’
‘I’m not on Facebook,’ I said.
She wasn’t listening. ‘I still think there’s no point pursuing it, though. Twenty-four bodies or fifty-four, you’re still talking about people who have just – died. People die every single day, hundreds of them. None of your decomposed ones were murdered, according to the logs, were they?’
I shook my head. ‘There was one I saw where the coroner had failed to determine a cause of death, but most of them seem to be seen as natural causes.’
‘Anything obvious linking them all?’
‘Other than that they’ve all been left to decompose, and they all lived in Briarstone… not that I’ve seen so far.’
‘Well, then. Unfortunately we’re crime analysts. We’re not here to look at social issues, that’s what they’re going to tell you. And what’s worse,’ she said, jumping off the wall and stubbing her cigarette out on the rubbish bin, ‘if they think you’re busying yourself looking into something like that, they’ll find some other work for you to do.’
‘Great,’ I said.
Just for a change, my bus came round the corner bang on time. Kate, who parked in the other car park on the Baysbury side of town, was going to have to wait here a little longer.
When I got home there were no parking spaces anywhere near my house. I