Cover

One

January, and Christmas vanished without trace. The pavements of Starly village were greasy under a day of drizzle and there was an unhealthy mildness in the air.

A police patrol car, a dark grey saloon with ‘Doctor’ on the windscreen and Detective Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler’s silver Audi were all parked on double yellow lines outside the Chinese pharmacy. Crime scene tape was stretched across a side entrance that led to the flat above the shop with a uniform constable standing by the gate to keep back the prying public of two teenagers straddling their bikes and smoking ostentatiously.

The pathologist in the upstairs room with Serrailler was one he did not know, a completely bald man with white eyebrows and lashes. He was also a man of few words.

‘Overdose?’ Simon said.

A nod.

‘Can you say when, roughly?’

A shrug.

‘And you’ll know more when you get him on the table, yes, OK. What’s happened to forensics?’

The doctor ripped off his gloves with the particular tearing sound that always set Simon’s teeth on edge, and swung his rucksack onto his back. The older ones still carried bags.

‘Heroin.’ His tone said everything.

The body was hunched forwards, syringe still hanging from his arm. His age had been put somewhere between seventeen and twenty.

‘It’s everywhere.’

The pathologist glanced up at a New Age poster half peeling off the wall.

‘Love. Light. Peace,’ he read aloud before he left.

Serrailler’s phone beeped.

Bypass closed. Rerouting – eta 25 minutes.

But he was used to being alone with dead bodies.

The room was filthy, damp, with bare boards, the corpse the purple-brown bruise colours of a Francis Bacon painting, but at least there was not yet the rotten-sweet smell of death. The boy had a shaven head, dirty feet, was wearing a soiled vest and shorts. His skin had erupted in sores and boils among the thicket of tattoos, his eyes were half closed, his mouth hung open, and he was emaciated, but his skull was well shaped, his fingers long and, in spite of their filth, delicate.

Serrailler felt anger, at the waste of life, anger, despair and disgust, but the feelings were impersonal, and about the squalor of the scene not about the young man whose body was now such a revolting mess. It had not always been like that and, whoever he was, he had been, in the phrase, ‘somebody’s son’.

On a first quick search there had seemed to be nothing in the room to identify him, or to confirm that he had lived here – indeed, that anyone had, none of the usual signs of habitation even of the most basic kind, no sofa, table, crockery or kettle, no bedding. No bed.

The pharmacy had been closed when he had arrived a few minutes after the patrol car, on a job he would never normally be involved in at this early stage, but he was one of the few members of CID left standing, in the flu epidemic that had swept through the station, in spite of the fact that they were all supposed to have been vaccinated back in October.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs, as the forensics team arrived, apologising, cursing the traffic.

‘Thanks, guys. The doc’s left and the van should be on its way. Sorry to leave you with him.‘

’He won’t bite,’ one said, unpacking his equipment. The other sniggered.

Simon looked at her, then down at the body with sudden sadness, and a strange urge to defend him, whoever he was, protect him. Someone else should be here, he thought, someone close to him, not a copper and a load of clue-seekers. Someone to pray for him. What was it the priest would say? ‘Go forth upon your journey, Christian soul.’ But had he even been a Christian?

‘Do we know who he is, guv?’

Serrailler shook his head.

‘I’m heading back.’

Back to the station, not back home where he should be, enjoying two days off.

He stopped by the PC on duty beside the gate. He looked cold. ‘Once the body’s gone and forensics are done you can go too – just leave the tape and make sure you check that the flat door is fully secured.‘

’Guv. Oi, you two!’ But the boys had already spun their bikes and were off, doing wheelies round the corner and away.

Two

‘I don’t want to go in there, Doc.’

Cat Deerbon sat with 95-year-old Lionel Brown, waiting for an ambulance. She had called it nearly an hour ago, hearing him say over and over again that he wouldn’t be taken into hospital, that once you went in you never came home again, that he would walk out and get back home. ‘I’ll do it somehow.’

He had been found on his living-room floor, having fallen during the night. He had pneumonia and he was seriously dehydrated as well as hypothermic. Cat had her hand on his as she looked out of the window. Each almshouse had a long strip of garden, some better tended than others, but now there was only frozen grass to see and a few shrivelled flowers, plus, in Lionel Brown’s, a bird table and a lilac bush close to it, both holding an array of bird feeders, fat balls, seed cakes, on which a robin and several blue tits were feeding now.

‘Yes and that’s another thing and another reason why I can’t go. Who else is going to look after my birds? There’s a party of long-tailed tits comes down morning and afternoon, easily a dozen of them, they flock down like a gang of kids. Well, I’ll tell you who’ll look out for them, nobody, that’s who, and my birds have grown used to it, they rely on me, I feed them every day. They won’t know what to do if it’s left empty.’

‘But I can see some peanut feeders in the garden next door, I’m sure your neighbour’ll look after them for you.’

‘What, her? She’s got a broomstick parked inside her back door, I’ve seen it.’

Cat laughed. His skin was pale ivory and translucent as an honesty pod, his finger bones felt like winter twigs under her hand.

‘Are you getting warmer? I can find you another blanket.’

‘No, I’m all right now, you’ve made it lovely and cosy in here, Doc, which isn’t what you went to college all those years for.’

‘I’ll make sure you’re wrapped up well when you leave, it will be colder in the ambulance. When it comes.’

‘I am not going in an ambulance, I’m not going anywhere, I’ve already told you.’

Cat thought he had probably had a mild stroke, fallen and been unable to get up, or else simply tripped over, though he had no broken bones and his contusions were only superficial. When the almshouse warden had found him on her morning check, she had found Lionel alive, though as she had said, ‘Only just.’

The twelve almshouses, built and endowed in the sixteenth century by a local landowner, had dark red-brick walls, tall, barley-twist Elizabethan chimneys and rather small rooms, but all of them had been modernised within the last ten years and the warden installed in an adjacent, newly built bungalow. The founding benefaction had been augmented over the centuries by several large bequests and the money shrewdly invested by the trustees. The last doctors’ surgery in Starly had closed several years ago, following the major changes in the NHS, with GP home visits a rarity. Nobody in the almshouses had a car and the warden had spent too much time driving residents in and out of Lafferton for medical appointments. The problem had been solved by another benefactor, anonymous – though Cat had a shrewd idea of his identity – who had set up a fund to pay for registration of every almshouse resident with GP care from Concierge Medical.

She still wondered occasionally how Chris, her first husband, would have dealt with it, given his steadfast opposition to private medicine, thought about how much he would have objected when she had, as he might have put it, ‘gone over to the dark side’.

‘I know I’m going to die, Doc, I should have died last night, shouldn’t I?’

‘Not “should have” – but you easily might have done, that’s why –’

‘And I’m all right with that, I’m old – I’m too old. But I’m not dying in that hospital. My wife, Lois, did that and it was terrible, and I’m not having it happen to me. Why won’t you just take some notice of what I keep saying? Why doesn’t anyone take notice of you when you’re old? I’m ninety-five but I’m still all there, I’m the same person I always was and I know what I want and why, but nobody takes any notice. I thought you’d be different, but you’re not.’

His eyes were full of tears, not of sadness but of frustration, of apprehension and deep loneliness, and Cat felt ashamed of her own obtuseness. She had been thinking medically, which was right, but over her years as a GP she had prided herself that she always thought of her patients first and foremost as people, individuals, who needed and deserved more than fast diagnosis and treatment. It was those other things that took the time, but which were as vital as the medicine and which had always given her deep job satisfaction.

She stood up. ‘You’re absolutely right, Mr Brown, and you do right to remind me. I’m sorry. Listen, I’ll help you as best I can but I am not going to promise that I won’t ask you to go into hospital. I can’t do that, it would be irresponsible of me, and I would rightly be held to account if I gave you anything but the proper treatment. But I am going to make absolutely sure it is the best thing, I promise you that.’ She took his hand again. ‘Deal?’

His temperature had started to go up because she had covered him in blankets and a duvet, he had a hot-water bottle and the heating was now on. He had drunk two large mugs of sweet tea and one of water but he still needed intravenous hydration, his blood pressure was much too low and his breathing rattled. But his sight and hearing were fine, he had no numbness or paralysis, and although his speech had been slightly slurred when she had first arrived, it had improved. Nevertheless, even if his stroke had been minor and transient, at his age he was at high risk of suffering another, and it would be negligent not to send him into Bevham General for rehydration, and a full assessment – the stroke unit there was outstanding.

She was still holding Lionel’s hand, mulling it over, when the ambulance arrived and the paramedics were knocking on the door, accompanied by the warden, Sadie Logan.

‘I’ll go with you to the hospital, Lionel, it’s not a problem.’

Cat was relieved but still asked her if that was part of her job.

‘I make it my job. What chance would he have in that A&E scrum trying to make his voice heard? Shall I let you know what happens?’

‘Yes, please do – the hospital will report back to me but not for ages.’

She took the old man’s hand again. ‘You do know you have to go, don’t you? You have to be scanned and fully assessed and I can’t do that, but you won’t get to stay in unless they are sure you need to, they haven’t enough beds to keep fit and well people in them.’

‘You’ll get a thorough going-over,’ Sadie said.

‘Makes me sound like a carpet.’ But he winked at Cat, and the wink gave her the reassurance she wanted. If Lionel Brown was making a joke of going to hospital, then he was reconciled to it.

Three

‘Hey, you!’ Cat slowed at the corner of Starly Square, lowering the window to call her brother. A few minutes later, they were sitting at a corner table in the Dreamcatcher Cafe. Cat looked at the menu.

‘I once had dandelion coffee here, but it’s gone. Espresso. Cappuccino. Flat white . . . heavens, quite normal.’

‘Nothing in Starly is normal. Go out there, it’s like walking through a pack of tarot cards. Do you remember Dava? And that guy who called himself a psychic surgeon?’

Cat shuddered. ‘And Freya,’ she said.

Freya Graffham, the detective sergeant, victim of a psychopath, who had engaged in a killing spree in Lafferton, some ten years ago. She had also been the first woman in Simon’s life Cat had thought he might actually have married. Now, he met her eye briefly as their coffees came.

‘This isn’t real milk.’

‘Of course it isn’t real milk, this is a vegan cafe, it’s a dairy-free zone. It’ll be soya or oat or almond.’

‘Or breast, even.’ Simon raised his hand-thrown pottery mug, decorated with the symbol for the star sign Aquarius.

‘Don’t be mean.’ Cat lifted her own cappuccino with the design for Pisces.

‘Anyway, what’s brought you up here?’

They traded news and cases, catching up for the first time since Christmas.

‘What a way to die,’ Cat said, ‘on the floorboards of a freezing cold flat above a quack herbalist, with a syringe in your arm.’

‘You don’t know the half of it – you in your private patient world.’

‘You’d be surprised. Anyway, that’s not like you – the disapproval.’

‘Sorry, sis. I don’t really . . . I’m just feeling a bit below par.’

‘Hope you’re not getting flu.’

‘Had my jab. Which is more than you can say for half the station, apparently. They get it provided, nurse in the station, and they still don’t go for it.’

‘Don’t start me on anti-vaxxers – odd for policemen, though.’

‘Oh, they’re not anti-vaxxers, they just can’t be bothered.’

‘It’s just January with you, then.’

‘Right, and I’m ready for a proper winter now . . . frost and ice and deep, deep snow.’

‘And limb fractures everywhere.’

‘Only I could do with a proper break . . . oops, didn’t mean that one.’

‘Really? What about Morocco? Sun there.’

‘The Alps . . . I haven’t been skiing for –’ He stopped and glanced down at his prosthetic right arm. ‘Maybe not. You know, skiing hasn’t even been on my list of things I’ll never be able to do again – and it’s a pretty short list.’

‘So it should be.’

‘Somewhere, anyway.’ Simon finished his coffee and gestured for another. ‘You?’

‘Yes, let’s go for it. There’s time.’

‘Until something kicks off.’

Four

The only actual cooking their dad did was a fry-up, which they had every morning, and that was it for the day. Otherwise, there were the tins and frozen packets they opened themselves. School dinners were free though there was never enough in them. But it wasn’t food the Ropers lacked. The Ropers – Tommy. Connor. Brookie. Alf.

That Wednesday morning, Brookie nearly missed the bus.

‘Where’s my trainers? Where’s my trainers?’ Nobody took any notice. Someone had always lost something, in the jumble sale that was their home. Brookie raced back upstairs.

His bed was head to tail with two others, and all of them spurting out mattress entrails, with assorted coverings, blankets, old curtains, thrown about anyhow. Tommy had a duvet, a new one, that had been still in its packaging when found in a skip but there had never been another and even that had no cover.

‘Brookie!’

The door slammed shut, frying pan and crockery slid off the draining board into the sink. Brookie ran after the others, trainers undone, as the bus was pulling up to their stop, Connor on first as usual, and straight into a seat. He stuck his leg out. By now Brookie should have been ready for it but he never was and crashed over sideways into some girl’s lap, to mass cheers.

When a day went wrong at the start, that day went on going wrong, and Brooklyn’s days were mostly like that now. He missed the primary school at Starly that they had all just walked to, so they got an extra half-hour in bed, and there were other things about secondary school he wasn’t keen on. He staggered into the last window seat and started drawing stick men on the steamed-up glass.

At the end of the day he was still trying to catch up with himself, shoving his things into the plastic carrier that served him for a schoolbag, when a boy who seemed to have taken against him, for no reason Brookie could fathom, shoved him hard from behind, knocking him over and sending the carrier flying. He didn’t bother to retaliate but by the time he had gathered up his scattered belongings, including his pencil case that had rolled under a bench into the mud, it was twenty to four and the bus had left. He knew better than to expect his brothers to ask the driver to wait a minute for him, even if the driver would. He looked along the line of waiting parents’ cars in case he saw anyone who might be going to, or even near, Starly, but it was dark and hard to make anyone out as he walked up and down, trying to stop the split carrier bag from spewing out its contents again.

Brookie never wasted time feeling sorry for himself because it was just the way things generally were, and he was used to it. ‘Shit happens,’ his dad said, half a dozen times a day.

‘You lost or what?’

The man’s voice, close by him yet apparently coming out of nowhere, made him lose his hold on the carrier bag completely.

‘Here, let me. What are you like, Sam?’

‘I’m not Sam,’ he said, wiping water off his pencil case.

‘Sorry, could have sworn you were. Is this yours?’

‘Yeah! Great, thanks.’

‘So who are you?’

‘Brookie Roper.’

‘Course you are, should have known, only it’s dark, right?’

‘OK.’

‘Looking for your mum?’

‘I . . . no. I just missed the bus.’

‘Your fault or the bus’s? Still, whatever – you missed it.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where’d you live?’

‘Starly.’

‘Then lucky you, Brookie Roper, it’s where I’m heading. I was just dropping off my girl’s homework books . . . she’s off sick.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Her name? Amy.’

‘What year is she?’

‘You’d make a good cop – what this, who that.’

‘Sorry.’

‘You’re all right. So, do you want a lift to Starly or what?’

In the man’s van and clutching his carrier bag, Brookie said, ‘I’ll be home first, the school bus stops everywhere, it’s really boring.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Mercer Close but you can drop me anywhere.’

The bloke didn’t seem old. He had one those stupid man-buns of which there were a lot in Starly.

‘What’s your name?’ Brookie asked.

‘Fats.’

‘That’s not a name.’

‘Well, it’s mine. What does Brookie stand for?’

‘Brooklyn.’

‘There you go then.’

It didn’t take long without all the stops, and the man dropped him on the corner, and drove straight off. When the others got in they foraged about in the kitchen for their tea. The TV went on and there was the usual fight over the remote. Brookie made some toast, spread with the last of the peanut butter. Nobody said anything about him not being on the bus. They probably hadn’t even noticed.

Five

Still January, but the damp mild air had given way to a northeast wind that cut down the lanes and sent Saturday shoppers looking for warmth so that even at ten minutes past ten, Cat could not see a seat in the brasserie, until Rosie waved to her from a table in the window.

They had not met since well before Christmas. Sam had come home but Rosie went to her own family in Manchester, partly to get down to work – her med school final exams were this year. Cat made her way through the packed tables, thinking how neat her son’s girlfriend always was, tidy, well presented and stylish, even on little money. She was wearing a navy-blue jacket with large, tangerine-coloured buttons, which she would have found and sewn on herself, in place of whatever uninteresting ones had been there.

Rosie started speaking before Cat had settled herself, a girl who was always focused, never wasted the moment.

‘Can I ask you about a big specialty recruitment drive that’s going on?’

‘There’s always one. What is it this time? In my day they wanted everyone to go into infectious diseases.’

So far Rosie had not been able to settle on a career direction once she had qualified, though she was very sure of what she did not want to do – any form of surgery, anything that would keep her in a research lab, or general practice. The last time she had talked to Cat about it, she had been veering in the direction of neonatal.

‘I went to a great session – this consultant was really inspirational, encouraging us to widen our horizons, look beyond the obvious.’

‘I’m not sure anything in medicine is obvious, not even A&E.’

Rosie smiled. ‘We haven’t had a catch-up for so long you wouldn’t know, but I’ve been thinking seriously about A&E.

‘It’s a killer.’

‘I know, but this is a different bit of A&E and there aren’t enough going into it.’

‘Which is what every spokesperson for every specialty will tell you.’

‘When people have spent six years being involved with bodies they tend to look at – well, bodies. I was too, but after this talk – not so much.’

‘Ah, you’re talking about psychiatry – I’m slow on the uptake this morning.’

Rosie gave one of her rather infrequent, sudden smiles. She was not a miserable or gloomy girl but her default facial expression was thoughtful and rather serious.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!