Chapter 33

This work, you need a good memory. Facts, figures, faces, names, attitudes; they all need to be kept straight in your head. You get nowhere if you start to forget things, fuzz up cases and people.

I’d never played the game like amateur hour. Call that a matter of pride.

Concussion counts as an excuse?

Maybe to some.

I was trying to recall what I’d seen on the paper. The address. Sitting in the spare bedroom, lit up by a desk lamp, writing down names and words on paper, concentrating on the memory of that wee pink square I’d seen in Wickes’s grasp earlier.

It had been important.

Time ticked by. Hours. I struggled. My head was swimming. If I sat back, I’d drift off again.

Every time, that nagging insistence would pull me back out of sleep.

But it was slow going.

How hard had I gone down in the car park?

I should have been paying attention to Wickes.

Not allowed myself to be distracted by suspicions and conspiracies. Maybe then I wouldn’t be locked up in a spare room trying to drag some half-remembered scrap out of information out of the useless lump of grey matter inside my skull.

But it wasn’t just that. Sure, I’d refused to go to hospital, but I recognised the fuzzy feeling in my head, knew I wasn’t at my best. My memory wasn’t working properly: things seemed more confusing than they should have been. I couldn’t separate out every fact I wanted to.

All I wanted was one piece of information.

Something that could help me connect the dots.

This was important. I wasn’t about to be responsible for yet another fuck up. I was going to get all the evidence together, present it to Susan, let her deal with it.

That bastard Lindsay wasn’t going to be right about me.

But I wasn’t calling Susan until I had hard evidence.

Same old story.

The psychiatrist I’d seen after the crash – mandatory counselling, so the big boys on the force had called it – had unofficially diagnosed me like this:

“You have to be the hero. Save everyone. Doesn’t matter if you know it’s a bad idea. It’s a compulsion. To satisfy your own ego.”

I’d called shite.

Knowing he had my number down cold.

But who’d admit to that?

I closed my eyes, tried to see that paper.

Got nothing.

Threw the pen and paper across the room. Wanting to roar.

My head was bulging from the inside out. That pain even worse than ever, now.

My hand was buzzing.

The muscles in my left leg were screaming. As though stretched to breaking point.

I leaned back in the chair, locked my fingers behind my head and pulled my hands together. Tried to squeeze all the pressure out from inside my skull.

I closed my eyes.

The thing with this job, so much of it is logical procedure. Simple steps lead you to every solution. You need to remain methodical.

You can’t remember an address, there’s always some small thing you can do. Some tiny, intuitive practice that should come to you natural as breathing.

Remind me how hard I’d slammed the concrete?

Fuck my memory; Swiss-cheesed as the fall had made it. Let my fingers do the walking.

A name.

Kathryn Brown.

Came to me in a moment, as though something in my head just turned and clicked into place. That was all I needed. That first step, I could stumble the rest of the way.

What had Wickes called her? Aye, “the bitch”. That and the way he reacted to Susan, I had to wonder how much love was really in his heart for Deborah.

One name is all you need. A name, enough information to guess at where they’d roam. Most people don’t move so far. Aye, sure this is the age of mass transport, but the fact of the matter is that most folks stay where they’re comfortable. Within a day’s drive of the place they consider home.

Makes them easy to trace.

Especially if they’re staying on the grid.

Information is everywhere. The modern world is a mass of facts and figures, most of it unsecured. People think they’re being careful, they don’t know the meaning of the word.

Without thinking, we give names and addresses to unsecured agencies. We willingly put ourselves on the electoral register. We give our whole lives out to the world in plain view of anyone who knows where to look.

A straight citizen like Kathryn Brown wouldn’t be hard to trace. Made me wonder why the police hadn’t done so already. Could be any number of reasons, of course. Most of them bureaucratic.

That was part of why I’d struck it out on my own. Any mistakes in my investigation would be my own and no one else’s.

Of course, some days that was no comfort at all.