Love Story, With Murders Read Online Free PDF Page B

there.’
    ‘Weird poem.’
    I shrug. I don’t know if the poem is weird or not. But I don’t care. Nor, all of a sudden, does Watkins. She slams the door, has the driver drive off. I go inside.
    I’m feeling tired, but I find ithard to sleep when it’s daylight outside. I run a bath, but don’t get into it straightaway. Think about rolling a joint, but can’t be
bothered to do even that.
    Instead I make peppermint tea and drink it slowly, watching the rain fall. I like the rain. When I was ill, I always felt less ill when it was raining. I used to go outside to get wet. It was
one of the things I could almost alwaysfeel: the cold, the wet, that sense of falling.
    Eventually I finish my tea, have a bath, wash that icky pink soap smell away, and sleep for a couple of hours. Not good sleep, though. It feels like it’s raining body parts. A hand. A leg.
An ear or two. A drizzle of humanity.
    Eventually I wake up, feeling worse than I did when I went to bed. Make more tea, look out at the rain, think abouta smoke.
    I call Buzz.
    He takes the call with his voice set to formal, then walks away from wherever he is and says, in his intimate voice, ‘Hey, babe, have a nice time with Watkins?’
    I tell him about my night, except not the bit about going down to Pontcanna or up to Whitchurch, or the bit about calling my dad, or the bit about going into the dead girl’s room, or the
drizzle of bodyparts, or the joint which I thought about twice but didn’t have. Apart from that, I’m as open as sunshine.
    Buzz fills me in on the investigation, because he knows I won’t let it go until he tells me.
    They’ve found another hand, a foot, and a forearm, all apparently belonging to the same dark-skinned male body as the original hand. ‘Better fresh than frozen, eh?’ he says.
The inevitablepoliceish joke.
    ‘On public land, or in gardens, or where?’
    ‘One of the hands and the foot in that little bit of wood just down from the Williams house. Public access land. The other hand and the forearm in back gardens no more than three hundred
yards from the Williams house. The hand maybe could have been lobbed in there from the open land behind the garden. The forearm looked placed,not thrown.’
    ‘No ideas who yet?’
    ‘Nothing. Not a clue. Too early for DNA, but we might have something by this evening. No one on the MisPer register who looks likely. No one local, anyway.’
    I know what he means. At a national level, the missing persons register is always well stocked, not least with Londoners of every possible ethnic background. That doesn’t mean we’d
be smart togo chasing after every missing Arab-Londoner, Mediterranean-Londoner, or whatever. The DNA may reveal more once it’s analysed.
    ‘You’re up at Llanishen now?’ I ask.
    ‘Me and every other officer in South Wales. A
fingertip
search.’ More policeish humour, a thing I dearly love.
    We chat a bit more, or try to. Any room we might have found for personal chitchat feels drowned out by what we’vejust talked about. My fault. Buzz is better at switching his police mode
on and off. Me, if I’m on the hunt for something, I can never really let it drop. In my mind, I’m already up there in Llanishen, walking across the sodden slopes, examining every
tussock of grass, hoping always to find something – a foot, an ear, a pair of fingers – shining in the mud like an autumn mushroom. So thoughwe try having a personal moment, and sort
of do, it’s not great. It’ll be better when we can spend an evening together.
    We ring off.
    I wish I was better at those little intimacies. I’m lucky Buzz is patient.
    There’s been a thumping noise in my head for some time and I now realise I’m hearing the beat of a chopper overhead. I live only a couple of miles from Llanishen – eight
minutesby road, five if no one’s watching – and the helicopter, presumably, is part of the operation.
    Partly that’ll be for aerial observation. Looking for a change in