Flyte didn’t know what to make of that morning’s encounter with Cassie Raven.
When they’d first met about a year earlier Flyte had taken an instant, visceral dislike to the girl which she recognised now had largely been a reaction to her challenging look – albeit a commonplace in ‘alternative’ Camden Town. Flyte still couldn’t understand why such a pretty girl would go out of her way to make herself look so unfeminine: that half-shaved black-dyed hair, the tattoos, the cruel-looking bolts and rings piercing the soft skin of her lip and eyebrow. All topped off with the regulation black nail varnish and workman’s boots – and the bolshy attitude to match.
But as she had got to know her, Flyte had discovered that beneath the ‘screw you’ facade was someone who not only possessed unusually acute observational skills but also looked after the dead with profound care and respect – almost as if they were still alive. Her knee-jerk impression had finally evaporated with the discovery that Cassie had once slept on the mortuary floor alongside a dead child because his mum said he was afraid of the dark.
That had struck home because three years earlier Flyte had suffered her own loss when her baby girl had arrived stillborn. The cause was a rare syndrome in which the umbilical cord didn’t properly attach to the placenta during Flyte’s only pregnancy. The rupture of the umbilical vessels during labour caused Poppy, as she had unofficially named her, to bleed out her tiny volume of blood within minutes.
When Flyte had finally felt able to face reading the medical report it had been Cassie who’d helped her to understand the jargon and to explain why her ultrasound scans hadn’t picked up the condition, prompting a C-section that might have averted tragedy. The explanation had helped her to accept that no one was to blame for Poppy’s death – including herself.
Now and again she had wondered whether the two of them might become friends. Or more . . . A rogue thought she was quick to stifle.
So it had come as a shock seeing her again. Flyte had always viewed her as a troubled soul who drank too much, smoked cannabis – and doubtless worse – but she’d been expecting to find her happier, more settled, now that her father was back in her life. The old Cassie would have been far more engaged with the guy pulled from the canal and driven to find out who he was. Today, she’d come across as detached and impatient.
Picturing his face, with its heartbreaking scatter of acne, she imagined his parents, girlfriend . . . surely someone would be starting to worry that they couldn’t raise him?
She’d been weaving her way through the human traffic jam along Camden High Street but now she ducked out of the throng into a shop doorway. She pulled out her phone and clicked on the photos she’d taken of the dead guy. There was something about his face that had been niggling at her – almost as if he looked familiar? But after flicking through all the images, she gave up, unable to say who he reminded her of.
Whoever he was, the thought of having to hand him back to CID made her feel guilty but she reassured herself: it could only be a matter of time before someone called the police to report him missing.