‘I’m going to work. Can’t we do this later?’ Cassie was due on shift at 11 a.m., but truthfully, that wasn’t her main concern when she saw the warrant card the shiny-suited middle-aged detective held up from the towpath.
No, the first thing that jumped into her mind was: that Molly she’d got but had never taken was still in the drawer of the galley.
Above the guy’s practised smile his eyes were as cold as wet pebbles.
‘Jethro here can give you a lift to the mortuary afterwards,’ he said, nodding to his uniformed sidekick. ‘That’ll save you a good fifteen-minute walk.’
She caved in and let him into the cabin, leaving Jethro in the cockpit.
‘As you know, Sean Kavanagh’s death is now a murder investigation so I wanted to speak to you directly since you discovered the body,’ said Willets.
She pulled a sigh. ‘There’s not much to tell. I heard a knocking against the hull, and found him up by the bows. That’s the pointy end.’ Flashing a mean-girl smile.
He laughed but she caught the flash of hostility in those eyes: DS Willets was surprisingly thin-skinned for an inner-city murder cop.
As they talked, she got an all-too-familiar vibe – that he found her piercings, haircut, her whole look, challenging – almost a personal insult. He was probably one of those guys who thought that women’s sole purpose in life was to provide a pleasing visual environment to rest their eyes on – like a fucking footstool. Back before she’d goth-ed up, barely a day would go by without some random middle-aged bloke in the street telling her, ‘Cheer up, it might never happen.’ In other words, ‘You would be more pleasing to me if you walked around wearing a sappy smile all day.’ Her response, without breaking step, was always the same: ‘It just has.’
‘When you found the body, did you notice anything odd about it?’
‘No, nothing.’
‘Did you notice that his flies were undone?’
She shook her head, feeling bad that she couldn’t remember that detail.
‘It was noted in the PM report,’ he said. ‘As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, that helped the story that this was some drunk who overbalanced while urinating from the side of the canal.’
‘Which is what somebody wanted you to believe.’ Remembering how she too had bought that obvious fiction: something the old Cassie would never have done. ‘So where do you think he got chucked in? The towpath is pretty busy this side.’
‘Much further up that way, towards the lock.’ He thumbed over his shoulder.
‘We call it upstream,’ she said. ‘Can I ask, why isn’t DS Flyte here?’
‘Now that it’s a murder case, I’m the investigating officer,’ he told her, his lips thinning into a humourless smile.
‘Oh, sorry, I assumed that as she was the only one showing any interest in him before it was a murder she’d be the obvious person to run it?’ Widening her eyes to drive home the sarcasm.
Flashing her a look of unveiled hostility, he ignored the question. ‘You and DS Flyte have spent a lot of time together in the course of her investigations, right?’ – his tone insinuating.
She pulled a ‘so what?’ shrug.
He chuckled. ‘I hope you haven’t been bumping people off just to tempt our best-looking detective down the mortuary?’
When she stared him out, he raised a hand. ‘Sorry, just my little joke.’
‘I thought cops had to watch what they say these days’ – her tone transmitting just a hint of I could drop you in it.
‘True enough.’ Although he didn’t seem especially troubled. ‘I understand you were the one who queried how long Sean had been dead, a few days after he was pulled out of the water. What made you question the pathologist’s finding?’
Cold, so cold.
‘Um, I just noticed he was decomposing faster than he should be.’
‘Right.’ He sat back and looked at her. ‘How long does a pathologist train for?’
‘Seven or eight years?’
‘But you know better than them?’ This with a fake-friendly grin.
‘Sometimes, yes’ – lifting her chin. Then, regretting her words: ‘Look, if we’re done here, I need to get to work.’
He sat there looking at her for a moment. ‘OK, that’s fine for now, but I’m sure we’ll talk again. You’re not planning a holiday or anything?’
As he left the cabin, she said, ‘I’ll just be a minute.’
Going to the drawer, she scooped up the paper-fold of pills and emptied them into the sink, using some of her precious water to flush them down, with a silent apology to the fish.
Having declined the lift to work in a panda car – Er, no thanks! – she waited until Willets and Jethro were out of sight, before calling Flyte.
‘Thanks for warning me!’
‘Warning you about what?’
‘That I was going to get the third degree from some smarmy cop with a bad haircut. He treated me like a freaking suspect!’
‘I’m sorry, but you’re a witness in the Sean Kavanagh case and I’m a police detective – you don’t seriously expect me to forewarn you of a fellow officer’s visit? It’s not as though you have anything to hide, is it?’
But Flyte’s defensive tone suggested that Willets hadn’t told her about his planned visit. Interesting.
‘So why is it him handling Sean’s case and not you?’
‘He’s the investigating officer, I’m just the bag carrier,’ bitterness surfacing in her voice.
‘So you’ve been cut out? That’s bang out of order. I told him as much.’
There was a moment of amicable silence.
Feeling like an apology was in order, Cassie gritted her teeth. ‘Look, Phyllida, I’m sorry if you felt like I . . . pressurised you, showing you Sean’s slides . . .’ Silence. ‘The thing is, once I thought there was something off about his death, I could hardly let them cart him off to a public health funeral. I had to do something.’
‘Why not?’ She sounded gently curious rather than challenging.
Cassie opened her mouth to give some evasive answer but instead found herself saying, ‘It’s probably going to sound mad. But out of all the places he could have washed up on the canal, it was my boat he came knocking on.’
‘It doesn’t sound mad,’ said Flyte quietly. ‘The dead are quickly forgotten. They need people like you looking out for them.’
Cassie sensed a subtle but tangible shift in the space between them. The sense that although Flyte was a cop to her fingertips, they were on the same side.
‘Anyway,’ Flyte went on, ‘I’m just glad that you’re seeming a bit more like your old self.’
‘As in pushy, rude, irritating . . . ?’
‘All of those things,’ she said drily. ‘And a bit happier, in general?’
Cassie didn’t go in much for navel-gazing, but Flyte was right. She still had the Archie split and the Callum angst to deal with, but the return of her bond with the dead had given her work meaning again. Hard to tell if the antidepressants could’ve kicked in so quickly but at least she’d suffered no discernible side effects.
‘Changing the subject,’ said Cassie. ‘You know Willets fancies you, don’t you?’
Flyte snorted incredulously.
‘OK, ignore me, but I’m telling you he does.’