Page 39 of Dead to Me

It was 7.15 p.m.and Reid was walking towards the tube station once again, with no clear idea of what he was doing.Despite the heat, he felt shivery with cold.

Every part of what Seaton told him had made him more afraid for Anna.Totally aside from it approaching twenty-four hours since she’d vanished– a deeply worrying fact in itself– hearing the methods Anna had been employing set off resounding alarms in him.

He couldn’t explain why it made him feel so wretched, the idea that something had happened to her.She’d let him down.Treated him terribly.

But in spite of that, he found himself remembering the Anna he’d first met.The Anna who had been almost half an hour late to their initial meeting, despite having asked him to help her with something, and still managed to utterly charm him.

He’d been leaving the office, just to make it clear he wasn’t going to be messed around, when she’d turned up in the entrance hall.And somehow he’d stopped being irritated between one breath and the next.Because instead of the pushy, driven or possibly arrogant journalist he’d been expecting he’d been confronted with a frantically apologising, rapidly talking hurricane of rain-soaked energy.

‘God, I’m so, so sorry,’ she’d been saying, before he’d even fully acknowledged her.‘The tubes were a bit messed up, but I was already running late anyway because there was one of those work meetings where everyone has to havean opinion,and you just feel your lifedraining away.And then I couldn’tfind my Oyster card, which I didn’t evenneed, obviously, but I got obsessed with finding it because otherwise you look like a tourist in front of a bunch of strangers you’ll never see again.So that was clearly stupid, and my fault, and then I suddenly realised it was dumb and ran out but forgot my coat so I’m kind of soaking.Anyway.I’m here.Do you still have time?’

She’d stared imploringly at him, rain dripping off her hair and into her eyes, with just the slightest of smiles, and he’d found it impossible to turn her away.

‘We’re OK for time,’ he’d said.‘Depending on how much of your drained-away life you can still spare.I mean, you might have fun things to fit in, too…’

She’d blinked at him and then given him a high-wattage grin.‘Oh, well.We’ve probably got, like, forty-five minutes before I expire.And you seem a good use of my time.’

‘Does… that mean I’d have to deal with your corpse at the end of the meeting?’he’d asked, letting her through the barrier and starting to head up the stairs.‘Because I already have a few of those to manage today.And, in all honesty, I’m crap at it.’

He wasn’t sure whether it was the laugh she’d given in response or the way she’d said, ‘It’s OK.We have people for that.Just ring the office,’ that had sealed it for him.

Though maybe it was the moment he’d looked back at her and seen that… warmth of hers.The fun.The skewering intelligence in her eyes, and her genuine joy in the conversation.

Whatever it had been, he’d known that he was probably in trouble way back then.Even when she’d told him that some of the evidence in her sex-trafficking casemayhave been gathered using slightly underhand methods.He’d shaken his head at her, and for the first time in his life found himself accepting that maybe the ends might justify the means.

‘I need to prove it the right way, now,’ she’d said.‘I know I should have done it the right way the first time, but I had to have enough to get my boss on board.I really had to stop them, you know?’Her eyes had been full of a much more serious expression than usual.‘One of the reasons I want you involved is to make sure nothing happens to those girls while I’m busy building a story.It’s not worth sitting back and waiting while I get all my sources right.So I’m going to give you the details of one of the sites and hope you might get someone to put surveillance on it while we find out who’s bringing them in.And if they look like they’re moving them, can you just go in there and rescue everyone who needs it, and we’ll worry about my editor later?’

The memory made him feel dizzy.Was that… had she really said that?Had he forgotten?Or misremembered?

It didn’t make sense.Not with what she’d done over Tanya.With her obsessive chasing of the story at the expense of everything else.

He reached the steps to Finsbury Park tube station and stopped there, trying to make some sense of the Anna he thought he’d known.He had no idea what he really thought, and equally little idea of where he was going or what he was going to do next.He had no excuse to bring this to the Met yet, and nothing to spur Cambridgeshire on, either.

The one thing he really wanted to do right now was ask someone’s advice.But the one person he might have talked to was no longer an option.Not since that person had been sanctioned for what was basically corruption.

Dom Davies was Reid’s fellow DI at Finsbury Park and had for a long time occupied the spot that would have been reserved for a best friend.Their close working relationship had come crashing down when it had turned out that Dom had failed to report a series of WhatsApp messagesthat had been unquestionably sexist and profoundly inappropriate.If hehadreported them, the two officers sending those messages would have been investigated and would never have been free to continue to sexually assault young women in their custody, as it had later turned out they were doing.

Much of Reid’s anger had been directed at the two offenders, but of course he’d been angry with Dom, too.His friend had turned a blind eye, in a way that so many people did.He’d been complicit and let those two arseholes get away with it for longer.

Reid had been shattered to learn that his closest friend wasn’t the man he’d thought.And, at that point, Anna had been… she’d been there for him, now that he thought about it.But she’d also provided another take on Dom’s behaviour, one that had taken him aback.

‘When it’s your friend, you probably see these slightly inappropriate things and wince but tell yourself they’re all right really,’ she’d said gently.‘And when it keeps happening, it must be like being in an abusive relationship.Where’s the line?When do you suddenly decide that enough is enough?At what point do you start thinking you’ve let it happen for too long and have missed your chance of complaining?’

Stop it,he told himself, taking a few steps along the pavement and back in an effort to clear his mind.He pushed all this away again.Pushed away the memory of Anna’s hand ruffling his hair and her head leaning against his.Of her breath tickling his temple.

He needed to work out what to do next, without Dom’s help or anyone else’s.Cambridge was a forty-five-minute train ride away, with probably a taxi at the far end after that.So with the tube ride to King’s Cross, it was realistically an hour and a half to see any of the four students Anna had been looking into.

If he started now, he might get a response from the Trinity porters about CCTV during the journey, and maybe even be able to follow up on what they found.But there was also one person in London who might know if Anna had decided to deliberately run off somewhere, someone Seaton hadn’t yet contacted.

That was Cordelia Wynn.

Reid took out the piece of embossed notepaper Seaton had so carefully inscribed for him and decided that his best bet would be to call UCL in his official capacity.Doing that was still totally legitimate within the early-stage asking of questions.

The UCL staff were helpful.He was told without trouble that Cordelia lived in an accommodation block off Pentonville Road named Dinwiddy House.

It took him only seventeen minutes via the tube to get there and, looking around the place, he realised that Cordelia Wynn might actually be a slightly less overprivileged person than he’d been assuming from her name.Dinwiddy House was a very large, unattractive, nineties-looking building spread over four storeys.It had row after row of windows that indicated the students were packed in pretty tightly.There was a large brick courtyard at its centre with a few straggling plants and an inexplicable semicircular paved construction that seemed to provide neither shelter nor seating.

The place was clearly inexpensive, and given that Cordelia was in her second year, she’d presumably had other options.Not a snob, then.

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