the waiting journalists. ‘We should have taken better care of her.’
Dora would have been tickled pink to see herself on the news.
* * *
Delilah turns up at his flat two hours later, her arms laden with Chinese takeaway.
‘I’ve eaten,’ he says.
‘Good,’ she snaps. ‘I didn’t get you anything. Pass me a plate.’
In spite of her grumpiness, and her usual appetite, she has brought far too much food for one, so they sit together at Joe’s kitchen table and eat chicken chow mein, Singapore noodles, and sweet and sour pork.
‘You need a hobby,’ he tells her. ‘Get you out of the house a bit, give you an interest. It’s not too late to find a boyfriend.’
‘Cheeky git.’ She forks up noodles. ‘And look who’s talking.’
They eat in silence; Joe can’t decide whether it is sad, or sweet, how much the two of them depend upon each other.
‘Did you see me on telly?’ she asks him.
‘You looked great,’ he lies. ‘Any leads?’ he adds, without much hope.
‘We did the usual appeal for witnesses and information but after seven months?’ Delilah shakes her head.
‘Still no news on Shane?’ Joe asks. The prime suspect in the murder of Bella Barnes has proven most adept at avoiding discovery. The darker nights of autumn and winter have only aided his powers of concealment.
‘Gone,’ Delilah confirms. ‘If he was ever real in the first place. I tell you, love, my legacy is going to be the unsolved murder of two homeless women and a hunt for a phantom.’
When she’s eaten, Delilah gets up. ‘Got to get back in,’ she tells him. ‘See if anything’s turned up.’
Joe walks his mother to her car and she is unusually silent. ‘What’s up?’ he says, as he opens the driver door and wipes a dusting of snow from her windscreen.
She hovers, half in half out, of the car. ‘Probably nothing,’ she tells him. ‘Probably coincidence.’
‘What?’
‘The two women who were killed, Bella and Dora? What did they have in common?’
Joe thinks he might laugh if he weren’t so sad. ‘Where do I start? Both rough sleepers. Both suffered physical and mental health problems. Both ridiculously unlucky, in life and death.’
‘Yeah.’ His mother gets into the car. ‘And both very keen on you.’
* * *
Joe doesn’t sleep much that night. He spends the hours after his mother has left combing the news channels on TV and the internet, looking for information on both murders. He checks his diary for last year to see what he was doing the night Bella was found dead and is worried, but not surprised, to find it was a Friday. He nearly always spends late Friday evenings out in the city, doing the rounds of all the rough sleepers. On that particular night, the seventh of June, he was still officially on sick leave but he’s pretty certain he did go out that night.
All the time he searches and reads, he is conscious of his unease growing. He does not want to form the word alibi, even in his own mind.
He remembers the Friday night shortly after he last saw Dora, when he walked the streets checking on the homeless. He’d been afraid, as though sensing something very wrong was happening in the city, and he knows he won’t be at all surprised if that turns out to be the night she died. He goes to bed at midnight and falls into a light doze, only to wake less than an hour later, convinced he has heard someone moving around in his flat. Sweating in spite of the chill he checks each room. Finding nothing doesn’t reassure him.
The night seems to last forever. Finally, when the emerging sun casts a blood-red cloak over the pale and shivering city, he gives up trying to sleep. He makes coffee, sits at his window and waits. The call arrives shortly before nine in the morning. His mother is sending a car for him and he is wanted at the police station, immediately.
61
Joe
For once, Delilah isn’t waiting in reception. Joe gives his name at the desk and a detective he doesn’t know leads him to an interview room where a young woman is waiting. She introduces herself as a detective sergeant and he immediately forgets her name. She has dull brown hair tied back in a ponytail and wears a dark-blue suit with a white shirt. There is not a single feature, on her face, body or clothes, that strikes him as memorable.
Recording equipment is switched on and both detectives give their