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ELEVEN

GARETH

I carefully ran my fingers through my hair, before pulling it as hard as I could from the back, and stared at my reflection. The strands jerked, fell back into place, and flattened as I leaned closer to examine my scalp.

‘Are you sure?’ I repeated, not truly believing what she was saying. Perhaps the stress of last week, with Mr O’Neill and the fertility clinic, had taken a toll on the total density of hairs on my head.

‘Yes, I’m sure, just at the front. But I think it would be best if you maybe just relaxed a little bit, Detective?’ Isla said to me, softly pushing her elbow against my face.

‘Eh, maybe, I don’t know,’ I said, as I pushed my nose up against the metal to take an even closer inspection at the state of my hairline, my breath fogging up the steel of the coffee machine.

‘Just to me, I swear there was a lot more hair there. It looks a little more’ – I motioned to my head – ‘deserted, now.’

I pulled my hands out of my hair, and it flopped back down unceremoniously as I stood up from my semi-squat, having scrutinised any potential hair recession in the mirrored sheen of the coffee maker.

I noticed that the barista had been looking at me, rather unimpressed, as she kept her arm outstretched with my coffee.

A long line of people had gathered for their morning caffeine fix in the seemingly short time I had been diligently examining myself.

I sheepishly grabbed my coffee from the barista’s hand and wandered across the café floor, slumping down in a chair at a window that overlooked the dull concrete courtyard below.

‘Honestly, this coffee is absolute bollocks. I have never tasted such – urgh – blandness in my life,’ Isla said as she took a hefty gulp.

‘Then why are you even drinking it?’ I asked.

‘Cos what else is there? We’ve all tried to start a petition to open up a proper concession, but they won’t do it. Sorpressa has apparently been here for decades. They have roots going straight into the sewers.’

Isla and I had worked together for the past few years, and her name was often whispered amongst officers with a mix of equal parts fear and respect.

Fortunately, I’d discovered that the key to maintaining a good relationship with the prosecution was regularly buying her coffee while updating her on cases.

I knew I didn’t trust her; she wasn’t someone I could rely on to have my back, like Cis.

I wasn’t sure if I liked her either. She was undeniably outstanding at what she did, but there was always something ruthless and calculating about her that she didn’t even attempt to hide.

I plunged my hand into my bag, yanked out my files, and slid them across the table for her to glance at.

‘And this is Novik’s, right? The same ones from the email? For me to hold on to?’ Isla asked, snatching them up to examine.

‘It is, indeed. CCTV at 22.34 at the off-licence, very clearly intoxicated, very clearly displaying aggressive tendencies.’

Isla flicked rapidly through the photos, like an addict receiving her long-withheld fix.

‘God damn,’ she said with a triumphant smile.

‘Sometimes I wish I could just get this out spontaneously in a trial, you know, like a really awesome silver bullet. But no, instead, I have to go through all the boring procedures. Disclosure, let the defence prepare and all that. What an absolute bore. Just once, I wish they’d let me Atticus Finch it. ’

‘Atticus Finch was the defence in the book, though, right?’ I asked, trying to remember it from school. ‘Tommy Robinson?’

‘Tom Robinson,’ Isla said. ‘Don’t ever call him Tommy again.’

Isla shoved the photos back into the paper folder and pushed it very uncarefully into her handbag as she took her second hefty swig of her coffee, finishing the cup.

‘Anything else in the pipeline I need to know about?’ she asked. ‘I heard you’re investigating some old codger gone missing? Sure he didn’t just wander off and fall down a drain? That’s what happened to Grandad Paul.’

‘Yeah, we’re looking into that right now,’ I said, very careful of the words I chose to say to the lawyer. ‘Currently, it’s fruitless. But we have forensics studying some samples, so hopefully we’ll have some more solid leads over the next few days.’

‘Sure, just keep me posted.’ Isla’s face ever so subtly twitched into a smirk. ‘Did hear that you chucked up on some evidence, though.’

This was never going to end, was it?

‘I vomited, outside , due to food poisoning. It wasn’t on any actual evidence ,’ I clarified for the umpteenth millionth time. Isla – obviously – didn’t believe it, though, as she mimed spewing vomit into her handbag over the photos I had just given her.

‘Hilarious,’ I replied, deadpan.

‘Oh, don’t be such a bloody bore, Gareth.

You’ve always been so serious. Your poor wife,’ Isla said with an overdramatic scowl, placing a hand a little too close for comfort on my wrist. I gently pulled away.

I was never quite sure if Isla was just overly touchy-feely or if she maybe had a bit of a thing for me.

Either way, I had no intention of finding out.

‘So, what do you think happened? Some guy comes in, stabs a pensioner for the sheer thrill of it?’ she asked, indifferent, as always, to the gory details.

‘We think there may have been some premeditation involved, yeah,’ I said, my mind flicking back to the removed blood stains on the carpet, and of course, the charming note reading:

Stay away from her or I’ll kill you.

Isla slouched back in her chair, only partly satisfied, for now. I knew it was best to keep schtum about what we had found in the attic at this point. She would have had a field day with that. It was all about tiptoeing around the classic lie of omission with Isla.

I did, however, feel that small prick in my chest and slight gurgle in my stomach as the memory from last week went through my mind again. My pulse ever so slightly began to quicken, and the words began to spill out as quickly as the kebab had a few days ago.

‘Imagine someone truly vile ends up murdered, like a real A-tier bastard. Would you ever struggle to prosecute the guy that killed them?’

‘How vile are we talking?’ Isla asked.

‘Pretty bloody vile.’

Isla leaned in, her voice dropping to a hushed whisper, tinged with palpable excitement.

‘Intriguing,’ she mused, clearly fascinated by what I was asking her.

‘But no, the law is the law. You can’t simply take lives, regardless of how awful a person is.

That’s precisely why they pay me – to ensure that “justice” prevails and those found guilty find their way to a cot at Berwyn. ’

‘But, come on, sometimes people are driven to extremes to protect others. Right? Like, surely justice isn’t always just what the law dictates?’

Her response was cold and uncaring. ‘If I didn’t prosecute, Gareth, I wouldn’t have been able to have my honeymoon in the Maldives.’

You know, I didn’t think I actually liked Isla at all. She’d never even thanked me for looking after her milk snake.

I went back into the office. The stares from other detectives had now seemingly subsided, but I still felt a little like a gazelle in the lion enclosure.

Steve and Darren had mostly kept to themselves ever since I’d started, but over the past few days, Darren had seemed to make a conscious effort at communicating with me.

Telling me how the case was progressing, updating me every chance he got.

He’d even offered to get me a drink from the cafeteria.

I didn’t want to commend myself, but I did wonder if my personable efforts with him had finally paid off in some way.

Maybe he felt bad about the lasagne; maybe he’d realised I wasn’t such a bad guy after all.

I walked across the office and sat down at my desk, though any pleasant, warming feeling of potentially being liked by a colleague was swiftly cut down by the thick wad of case files in front of me.

From gleaning through the notes, it seemed that there were three points of information that had emerged over the past few days.

Number one: they had recovered the doorbell footage from Beryl’s son, who had all the video streamed right into his laptop, and sure enough, we had video confirming that Fran was the last person to go and see Mr O’Neill.

Just before, he had exited a taxi with his grocery shopping, which had set off the motion detector on the doorbell.

She had followed behind him as he entered his house only a few moments later.

They had both gone in at around 3pm, but only Fran had come out, an hour and a half later, carrying some enormous bin bags.

Which was longer than Fran had implied she had helped him for.

Darren and Steve had combed through the rest of the footage, before contacting the taxi driver in question to ask some questions about Mr O’Neill, but had found nothing of interest.

Fran had smashed the doorbell camera a few days later in quite an impressive form of clumsiness, meaning that any footage after that point was through a shattered, iridescent lens.

However, O’Neill hadn’t been picked up by the camera between returning with his shopping and Fran’s accident.

Although he could easily have left his house without the motion-detector picking it up.

We had been told by Beryl herself that the camera was extraordinarily incompetent.

Number two: they had begun conducting very casual interviews with a few of the neighbours, and it had all come back that Mr O’Neill was – to put it mildly – a bit of a weirdo.

There had been repeated stories of Mr O’Neill being antisocial, reclusive and aggressive, often shouting obscenities at the small children who lived on the other side of his house if they ever built up enough courage to trespass one inch onto his property on their bikes.