At least, I hope it was internal.
I am aware that I’ve started to actually talk to myself out loud recently. I’ve caught people staring at me in the street when it happens. It mostly seems to occur when I’m overly tired or stressed, and as a middle-aged detective, living with a perpetually unhappy woman and a two-year-old child, I’m pretty much always both. I try to remember if anyone on the team smokes—perhaps I could just bum one, calm myself down.
Priya is staring at me as though waiting for some kind of response, and I have to rewind my mind to remember what she said.
“She’s a TV news anchor, that’s probably why you recognize her.”
My words are in too much of a hurry to leave my mouth and trip over themselves. I sound even more ill-tempered than I feel. Priya—who rides my mood swings as though they are her favorite thing in the playground—won’t let the conversation slide.
“I meant the victim, boss. Not Anna Andrews.” Hearing someone say her name out loud winds me a second time. I’ve no idea what face I am pulling, but Priya seems to feel the need to defend herself from it. “I do watch the news,” she says, doing that strange thing again where she sticks out her chin.
“Good to know.”
“In terms of the victim, I don’t know her name, yet, but I have seen her around town. Haven’t you?”
Seen her, smelled her, fucked her …
Thankfully Priya doesn’t pause long enough for me to answer.
“She’s hard to miss, don’t you think? Or was, with the blond hair and fancy clothes. I’m sure I’ve seen her walking along the high street with a yoga mat. Listening to the rest of the local team, it sounds like she was from here, born and raised in Blackdown. They seem to think she still lived here too, but that she worked in London. For a homeless charity. Nobody seems to remember her name.”
Rachel.
She didn’t just work for a homeless charity, she ran it, but I don’t correct Priya, or tell her that I already know almost everything there is to know about the victim. Yoga was something else that Rachel turned to after her husband turned to someone else. She became a bit obsessed with it, going four or five times a week, not that I minded. That particular hobby had benefits for us both. Apart from meeting me in parking lots or the occasional hotel—we never visited each other’s homes or met in public—she didn’t seem to do a lot of socializing unless it was for work. She posted pictures of herself on Instagram with alarming regularity—which I enjoyed looking at when I was alone and thinking of her—but for someone with thousands of so-called friends online, she had surprisingly few in real life.
Maybe because she was always too busy working.
Or perhaps because other people were jealous of her perceived success.
Then again, it might have been because below the beautiful exterior, she had an ugly streak. One that I chose to ignore but couldn’t fail to see.
We’ve established a wide cordon around this particular pocket of the woods now, but it’s as though we’ve put up fly tape, the way the press insists on buzzing around, trying to get a better view. I’ve been told by higher up the food chain that I should give a statement on camera, and have received a torrent of phone calls and emails—from people I’ve never heard of at HQ—wanting me to approve a line of copy for a police social media account. I don’t do social media, except to spy on women I’m sleeping with, but lately it feels as though the powers that be think it is more important than the job. The next of kin haven’t even been informed yet, but apparently, I’m the one who needs to work on my priorities. My stomach rumbles so loudly I’m sure the whole team hears it. They all seem to be staring at me.
“Almond?” asks Priya, waving what looks like a packet of bird seed in my direction.
“No. Thank you. What I want is a bacon sandwich or a—”
“Cigarette?”
She produces a packet from her pocket, which is unexpected. Priya is one of those fancy vegetarians—a vegan—and I’ve never seen her pollute her body with anything more dangerous than a single slab of dark chocolate. She’s holding my old favorite brand of smokes in her little hand, and it’s like catching a nun reading a Victoria’s Secret catalog.
“Why do you have those?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Emergencies.”
I dislike her a little less than I used to and take one.
I snap it in half—an old habit of mine that makes me think this little stick of cancer will only be half as bad for me—then I let her light it. She’s so small I have to bend down, and I choose to ignore the way her hands tremble as she holds a match in one, and shelters it from the wind with the other. I’ve met former smokers who say that the smell of cigarettes now makes them feel sick. I am not like them. The first cigarette to touch my lips for two years is nothing less than ecstasy. The temporary high causes my face to accidently smile.