Because the body carried a Service card, red flags went up. This meant attending police officers were demoted to traffic duty, while Nick Duffy—the Park’s Head Dog—became scene boss, and his underdogs measured angles and took witness statements.
Most of the witnesses had arrived after the event, though not the car’s driver, obviously. The car’s driver had turned up at precisely the moment the event took place.
“Came out of nowhere,” she repeated.
She was blonde and appeared sober; an impression borne out by a breathalyser borrowed from a disgruntled cop.
“I didn’t stand a chance.”
A voice tremor, but that was understandable: mash into someone with your car, blameless or not, and you were bound to feel shaky.
It wasn’t the busiest junction, this time of night, but you wouldn’t want to cross it blind. Though of course, if you were drugged up or drunk, the Green Cross Code might not be top of your agenda.
“I mean, I hit the brake but—”
The shakes took her again.
Nick Duffy heard himself saying, “Look, I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.” Christ, he sounded like a Special Constable.
But she was blonde and reasonably fit, and the corpse had a Service card but was from Slough House, which was every bit as special as a Constable; the same way some kids were special, and had special needs. When a spook died under a car, you had to poke around carefully, in case the car—metaphorically speaking—had dodgy plates, but when you found out the spook was a slow horse, you refigured the odds. Maybe they’d just been looking the wrong way. Left/right. It could be a confusing issue.
And she was blonde and reasonably fit …
“But I need to take a look at your licence.”
Which told him she was one Rebecca Mitchell, 38, British citizen; nothing on the face of any of that suggesting she’d just carried out a hit. Though of course, the best hits were carried out by the least likely hitters.
Nick Duffy scanned the junction again. His Dogs were checking kerbs and shop doorways: last time a car took out a spook a gun had gone missing, and Bad Sam Chapman, his immediate predecessor, had wound up on the short end of an internal inquiry. Last heard of, he was working for some private outfit. Not a fate Duffy was ready for, thanks. As he handed the licence back, a taxi arrived, and out climbed Jackson Lamb. A woman was with him, and it only took Duffy a moment to collect the name: Catherine Standish, who’d been a fixture at the Park back when Duffy was a pup, but went into exile after Charles Partner’s suicide. The pair ignored him. They went straight for the body.
He said to Rebecca Mitchell, “You’ll need to make a statement. There’ll be someone along shortly.”
She nodded mutely.
Leaving her, Duffy approached the new arrivals, about to tell them to back away from the body, but before he could speak Lamb turned, and the expression on his face persuaded Duffy to keep his mouth shut. Then Lamb looked down at the body again, and then up the street. Duffy couldn’t tell what he was focusing on: the cross traffic at distant junctions; the lights jewelling the highway. Always, in the city, there were strings of pearls at night; sometimes fairy lights strung for a wedding; sometimes glassand-paste baubles, hung for a funeral.
Standish spoke to Jackson Lamb.
“Who’s going to tell Louisa?” she said.
To begin with what it hasn’t got, Upshott has no high street, not like those in nearby villages, with their parades of mock-Tudor frontages gracefully declining riverwards, clotted with antique shops and garden-furniture showrooms; whose grocery stores offer stem-ginger biscuits and seven kinds of pesto, and whose pubs’ menus wouldn’t be out of place in Hampstead. It doesn’t have cafés with the day’s specials chalked on pavement blackboards, or independent bookshops boasting local-author events; nor are its back lanes lined with neatly coiffed hedges guarding houses of soft yellow stone. Because Upshott doesn’t invite the epithet “chocolate boxy,” so often delivered through gritted teeth. If it resembles any kind of chocolate box, it’s the kind found on the shelf at its only supermarket: coated with dust, its cellophane crackly and yellowing.
