“Well, turns out he was right. I’m talking to him later.” Caro got out her notebook to jot it down. “Oh, shit, I’ve got to ring round the hospitals to see if Charlie Perry has been admitted.”
Elise’s scalp prickled. “Charlie? Why?”
“He’s gone missing, according to his wife. It’s not the first time, and, to be honest, I think she’s more worried about her trip to the shops. I’ve had her up at the festival site, playing it to the hilt. It’s been a busy morning. . . .”
“Really? Poor old Charlie.”
“So you know him, then?”
“Sort of. He came collecting for a charity last week and we got talking about his disabled daughter. He got really emotional. Lovely old boy.”
“Well, that’s nice. Did you see him during your night out?”
“Actually, yes.” And Elise hesitated. Should she tell her sergeant she’d thought Charlie had looked frightened? Was she sure he had been? She’d seen his face only for a second. Just stick to the facts, Elise. Caro has got enough going on with the drugs and the local lynch mob.
“I only got a glimpse of him in the crowd. He’d had a lot to drink, according to one of the barmen,” she said. “But I found his wallet minus any money near the stage when the place emptied. I was going to drop it off at his caravan this morning. Look, he’s probably sleeping it off somewhere—he knows everyone in Ebbing. And he’ll turn up and get seven kinds of hell from his wife. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when he does.”
Caro laughed. They walked on and Elise put away the image of Charlie’s gaping mouth shouting into the crowd.
* * *
—
She lasted only a few minutes at the scene—it was just too hard watching the team working. She felt like a spare part. And she knew she was in the way, making her DS feel she was second-guessing everything Caro was doing. She hadn’t been. She was too busy second-guessing herself.
Procedure should have been burning a hole in her brain. But she had been ditsy since the treatment—chemo brain, they called it on the support group forums. She’d always prided herself on being able to master a brief in one reading but now she felt like she was groping around in a fog. She forgot words, her own ideas, what someone had told her five minutes ago, what day it was. It was the cruelest torture for a woman like her. It meant keeping a lot of lists.
How am I ever going to be me again? Some days she missed work so much—even the crap. The paperwork. The shirkers. The endless personal problems of her colleagues.
But other days, when she thought about her actual return, she felt like she was having one of those exam anxiety dreams. Where you turned the paper over and couldn’t understand any of the questions. She tortured herself with the thought of standing in front of a whiteboard, the team looking at her, knowing she was no longer up to the job.
And that moment was barreling toward her. Her appointment with the consultant was in four days. She’d had the blood tests and a scan in preparation. She knew she should be worrying about the results but it was the idea that he could declare her fit that was making her stomach churn. A start date had already been penciled in by Human Resources. September eighteenth. Just three weeks away.
Nine
SATURDAY, AUGUST 24, 2019
Elise
By the time she reached the cottage, the sun was scalding the pavements. She stood in a cold shower for five minutes, sluicing off the heat and disappointment, and put her pajamas back on to do her exercises.
She started, bringing her arms up over her head and down like in the YouTube video, but she felt as though she was signaling for help. Oh, God—not waving but drowning . . .
Caro and the team would be plowing through witness statements and the hundreds of selfies and videos on festivalgoers’ phones, trying to find drugs transactions. She, on the other hand, had nothing to do but squeeze a virtual orange between her shoulder blades. She caught her movement in the mirror and she saw her face, slack and vacant. It scared her, how blank it was.
She looked out of the window at the sea to be soothed. But the tide was on its way in and the waves were thumping against the stony beach like a giant fist knocking at her back door.
* * *
—
Caro had pulled a face when Elise had told her she was buying in Ebbing. “The seaside? All those chip papers and seagulls. And the traffic . . . It’s an hour’s commute to headquarters and you won’t be able to get in or out in the summer.”
“I’m not always sitting in HQ anyway—the joy of the Major Crime Team is that I can be working on a case anywhere in Sussex. And Ebbing is central. Back off!”