Detective Inspector Maud O’Connor was very late to leave work. It was Monday evening, and the cells in the basement of the station were already full. They were more than full. There was a young man who had been threatening suicide in the street. He should have been in hospital, but he had been brought here. There was a man whose trial was due to start today, but it had been postponed at the last minute. There were four remand prisoners who should be in prison. Now three young gang members had been involved in a serious affray and there was nowhere to put them, and Maud had spent the last hour ringing round trying to find places where people could be shifted to: a hospital, a prison, another police station.
On top of this, the case she had been working on looked as if it was about to collapse. The young woman whose partner had beaten her so badly that when she had turned up at the station last week, she had barely been able to utter words from her split and swollen lips, was now saying she wanted to withdraw all charges. She had a broken rib, a broken nose, her face discoloured, but she said she had made a mistake. She had fallen down the stairs.
Maud put on her leather jacket and picked up her backpack. As she opened her door, she heard voices in the corridor.
‘So young,’ said a woman’s voice.
‘Yeah.’ A man answered. ‘It’s usually the young men, not the women, who top themselves.’
‘Will you write the initial report for Kemp, or shall I?’
‘You do it. It’s pretty straightforward. She obviously looped the rope over the beam, tied a noose, stepped off that stool. End of story.’
‘I wonder why, though?’
‘We’ll never know.’
‘Drink?’
‘I need one after that.’
The voices faded, and Maud left her room, pulling on her woollen hat and tucking in the stray tendrils of blonde hair.
A young woman had taken her own life. The male officer was probably right when he said they would never know why. The woman and her individual tragedy would remain a mystery, a small entry in the filing system. So often, she and her colleagues just scratched the surface of a case. If they were lucky, they found an answer to a crime: they followed a formula, wrote notes up in triplicate, dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, made things that were savage, incoherent and incomprehensible seem neat, moved on to the next case.
Maybe it was the only way to do this job, thought Maud, although it wasn’t her way. You could go mad if you looked too closely at what lay beneath the surface. A young woman had died. As the officer had said: end of story.