Trust Me - T.M. Logan Page 0,60

rectangular and metallic. He raises it to my neck. There is an instant of shock and then a white-hot, paralysing pain, fierce agony like I have never known before, lighting up every nerve ending in my body like I’m filled with freezing fire. I am falling backwards.

Then, nothing.

29

He liked to listen to her in the dark.

If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine himself there, in the house with them, in the room with her. Just the two of them. Her little hand in his. Five tiny fingers, curled softly in sleep.

The woman was there most often, talking to the baby. Playing music designed to stimulate or soothe the infant brain.

But he preferred it when the door closed, when the woman’s voice faded away, when it was just the two of them. He would listen to the baby’s gurgling laugh, her coos and chatter. He listened to her breathe. Short, shallow breaths in and out of little lungs. Sometimes he listened to her cry. But she didn’t cry often. She was a good girl.

Hacking the Alexa in her room made the little gadget so much more useful.

Helpful for so many things.

For listening in.

Feeling like a part of the family.

30

DI Gilbourne & DS Holt

Gilbourne took two of the pills from the small plastic bag and held them in the palm of his hand.

Twenty years ago he could go a night without sleep and it would barely touch him. Ten years ago, even. Crime scene, search, door to doors, arrest, interview, doing the briefings, grab an hour of sleep along the way, plenty of coffee and he could keep rolling. That sleep-deprived first or second or third day after you got the call, pushing and pushing until you could finally charge your suspect.

But he wasn’t that man anymore. The years had left their mark on him. With the ranks of frontline officers increasingly depleted and not enough new blood coming through to replace them, with the ever-growing expectation from the top brass and the know-nothing politicians above them, the thin blue line was getting thinner all the time. Everyone was stretched to the limit and beyond. And everyone had their breaking point.

His eyes were gritty, his head thick with fatigue. He needed this. It was just about staying sharp, that was all. It was what the victims deserved, what their families deserved. He shook a third pill out of the clear plastic Ziploc bag and threw all three into his mouth. Found an almost-finished takeaway cup in the driver’s side door and washed the pills down with a grimacing mouthful of yesterday’s coffee.

He opened the car door and poured the rest of the cold coffee onto the lay-by’s cracked grey tarmac. The country air was a cold slap in the face as he got out of his car and he pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his raincoat. Holt was waiting for him a few metres away, the younger man with his head down, talking earnestly on his mobile. Seeing his approach, Holt hurriedly finished the call and slipped the phone into his pocket. Somehow, he looked fresh and ready to go despite the hours they’d been putting in this week. He looked keen. Excited, even. What was that saying? Youth is wasted on the young.

Gilbourne nodded a hello to his partner.

‘What have we got, Nathan?’

‘Called in two hours ago by a woman walking her dog. Uniforms came down to check it out and found the body just down there, in the stream near those trees.’ He pointed into a stand of beech trees further off the track.

‘Come on then.’

The two of them set off up a rise out of the lay-by, an unofficial path where the grass was trodden flat up the bank’s gentle incline. It levelled out at the top, the path disappearing into trees. There was a uniformed officer in a high-vis jacket standing sentry by the first oak tree, at the top of the bank. Gilbourne showed his ID and stopped to take a brief look back.

A country road between Beaconsfield and Amersham, curving away in both directions. Quiet. You’d probably hear approaching traffic from a fair way away, before you saw it at least. Or before they saw you. It was early afternoon but only two cars had passed since he had parked up a few minutes before. Trees on both sides made for good cover and concealment. He estimated the distance from the lay-by into the trees at five or six metres. It