Page 27 of Watching You
‘That’ll be Detective Sergeant Bitch to you,’ Connie told him as she walked past, escorting the line of quietly obliging men through the door.
‘You never told us what happened to him!’ someone yelled as she was heading for the exit.
She thought about the confidential aspects of the murder, and about the information she should and shouldn’t give out, then took one last look at the posters of women with dart holes in them.
‘He got whacked on the back of the head with a blunt object, dragged along a pathway in the woods, then buried alive but unable to move. What can I tell you? It’s a dangerous time to be an incel, apparently.’
They left in silence and no one tried to follow them, the men they’d removed from the scene walking straight into the arms of officers waiting to take their details.
‘Hey, Brodie,’ Connie called to him across the car park. ‘What’s a soggy—’
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘My bad, ma’am,’ Salter said, running up to her. ‘I shouldn’t have said it. It’s not like me. I’ve been spending far too much time with DS Lively, is all.’
‘I’ll get one of you to explain it to me, sooner or later. Nice moves, by the way, Salter. Martial arts background?’
‘I got injured a while back, badly. I spent my recovery time, once I was physically able, doing endless defence courses. These days, it’s an automatic response. Wish I had your verbals though, ma’am. I can never think of anything clever to say like you.’
Baarda stepped into the conversation. ‘Not something to aspire to,’ he mumbled. ‘Only makes a heated situation even hotter.’
‘Feels like I’m about to get sent to the school counsellor to try to figure out the roots of my disruptive behaviour.’ Connie grinned. ‘Come on Brodie, that was just too good to resist.’
The young man in the cowboy boots appeared in front of them, tears in his eyes.
‘Was he really buried alive?’ he asked.
The smile dropped from Connie’s lips.
‘I’m afraid so,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘Jupiter Artland.’
‘Makes sense. He loved it there. Went there a lot.’
‘Was Dale a friend of yours, Mr … ?’
‘Wolfe. Leslie. My mates call me Wolfie. And Dale was more than a friend. He’d—’ The next words got caught in his throat. He took a shuddering breath and tried again. ‘Dale had agreed to donate a kidney to me. I’d been waiting on a match for a year. I thought he’d dropped out of contact because he’d changed his mind and didn’t know how to break it to me. I was so angry with him that I didn’t—’ He began to sob. ‘I didn’t report him missing. Figured he was being a coward, not just telling me to my face. I didn’t know his family or anything. We only met through WATFOR. It’s not fair.’
Connie wasn’t entirely sure if it was Abnay’s death that wasn’t fair or the loss of the kidney, but it definitely wasn’t the right moment to ask.
‘When was the transplant operation supposed to take place?’ she asked.
‘It was scheduled three months ago. Now I’m back on the transplant list. For all I know, Dale might have been my last hope.’
Chapter 23
7 June
‘Makes no sense,’ Connie said. She lay on the floor of her hotel suite, stretched out on her stomach, knees bent, waving her feet in the air, in the centre of a circle of scattered pieces of paper. In one hand she held a stick of celery that she was dipping in and out of a tub of humous.
‘Any particular bit or just the whole damned mess?’ Baarda asked, pouring himself a glass of vintage Fonseca and loosening his tie.
‘Stop peering at me from the sofa like some disapproving professor and get down here with me,’ she demanded.
Baarda sighed but gave in. It was already 1 a.m. and he knew Connie wouldn’t sleep until they had some sort of breakthrough. It was going to be a long night. He’d shared plenty of them with her before and he was equally certain that there were plenty more to come. He sat down next to her, stretching his legs out and trying not to be disheartened by the amount of paperwork on the carpet.
