‘We’ve been patrolling the streets at night for weeks now, ma’am, and we were out there last night. Between us, we know things the cops don’t. We need to make that intelligence available for them.’
Dorothy nods. There are murmurs of agreement from around the group.
‘So how are we going to do that?’ Donald says.
‘Firstly, I need your weekly logs a day early – we’ll drop by you all this afternoon and collect them, so please have them ready,’ says Philip. ‘And secondly, I need you all to look at a photo. It’s not pleasant, but it could help the police ID the victim.’
‘You want us to look at a picture of the dead girl?’ asks Dorothy, her expression real serious.
Philip looks solemn. ‘That I do.’
There’s silence. Rick’s not sure what way the group will go on this. It’s always hard to say with civilians. Over the years he’s gotten used to crime-scene pictures and dead bodies up close. Didn’t like it, but that was part of the job. Things didn’t always go right. People didn’t always make good choices. It was a bad day if someone ended up dead, but in the world of narcotics it was something you just had to deal with. Rick looks at Dorothy. ‘Can you do that?’
Dorothy holds his gaze for a long moment, then nods. ‘I want this murdering asshole caught,’ she says firmly. She looks at Philip. ‘Okay, let’s see this photo.’
7
MOIRA
Silence.
With the dogs out in the garden the house feels strangely empty. It reminds her of how her London apartment had felt towards the end – empty and soulless. As if the joy had been sucked right out of the space, just as it had been out of her. Up until that last job her work had been the love of her life, but what happened with McCord changed that, and afterwards things felt different, wrong.
PTSD, that’s what the police doc had said. They told her that with cognitive behaviour therapy and her personalised coping strategies it’d get better with time. That the nightmares would lessen, and she’d keep the panic attacks under control. They must have believed it too, because they’d kept her on paid sick leave and the doc met her once a week to help her work through her shit. And it did help, a bit. But, as she could only ever bring herself to tell them half the story, she supposed she could only ever get half better. And as you can’t have a panic attack in the middle of an undercover operation, her offering to take early retirement seemed the best option for everyone; the safest option. Because the very last thing she’d choose to do was to endanger her colleagues. Again.
And now she’s here.
She gulps down the last of her orange juice and puts the glass in the sink. The nausea and light-headedness are gone now, and her legs feel less wobbly. It must have been low blood sugar causing them, as she’d thought. It certainly wasn’t a panic attack.
Walking across the kitchen to the back door, she steps out into the garden to see what the dogs are up to. Wolfie, the small fluffy mixed-breed terrier, is chasing Marigold, the leggy juvenile Labrador, around the bushes. Pip, the elderly sausage dog, is lying on his back in his favourite dirt patch, sunning himself. When he sees her looking at him, he raises his front legs, encouraging her to tickle his tummy.
‘Okay, then,’ she says, smiling, and does as he asks.
She’d visited the local shelter the week she moved in, hoping to get one dog, and instead she’d found three. As she strokes Pip, Wolfie hurtles across the lawn to her, looking for attention. Moira sits down on the grass and strokes him too. Marigold brings her a tennis ball and she throws it for her, laughing as the gangly adolescent fetches it and then delightedly capers around the garden with the ball in her mouth, chased by Wolfie. Dogs are so much less demanding than humans.
‘You guys crack me up.’
Moira feels her mobile vibrate in the pocket of her jeans. Pulling it out, she reads the message: