Page 68 of Blow Down (The Plumber's Mate)
“As I understand it,” the DI said heavily—well, semi-heavily; he still had a good few years and several stone to go before he’d be punching at Dave’s weight—“you’re psychic, right?”
He didn’t add the sarcastic finger-quotes. He didn’t have to. His expression did it for him.
“Yeah, so?” Great. Now I was sounding defensive.
“So how come you didn’t know the necklace was in the victim’s mouth?”
I stared at him. “I what? Seriously?”
Sharp took a gulp of water, presumably to wash down unpleasant images, and put his cup down. Him being a bit on the heavy-handed side, the water sloshed and churned unhappily, much like my stomach right then. “You find hidden things. Or so I’m told. So how come you didn’t know where that necklace had been stashed?”
“Uh, excuse me for being a bit distracted at the time. By the, you know, dead body I’d just tripped over.”
“Ah, but it’s not your first dead body, now is it?”
Cheers, mate. Thanks a fucking bundle. I now had a ghostly identity parade of all the deceased I’d been unlucky enough to stumble over through the years flitting through my head, all the way back to that little girl in the London park.
Although to be honest, even she’d been better than the one in the Dyke’s cellar . . . I gagged, reached out blindly for my plastic cup of water, and managed to knock it over. “Shit.” My eyes were watering from the effort of keeping my stomach contents in residence.
PC Peripheral hurried to mop up the mess. DI Sharp didn’t turn a hair, but he did refill my cup for me, thank God.
I took a grateful sip, and the nausea receded. “Cheers,” I said automatically. My voice sounded a bit rough, so I cleared my throat.
DI Sharp was looking at me expectantly.
“So, uh. No. Not my first. Be bloody glad if it was my last.” I managed to give him a weak smile.
He didn’t return it, the stingy bastard.
I rushed on to fill the silence. “See, when I’m finding stuff, I have to concentrate, yeah? Focus.” I stopped, remembering that time in Phil’s flat. I wasn’t gonna mention it, but something in the DI’s eye told me he’d noticed the pause. “Unless it’s really personal, yeah? Then sometimes it shouts. But most of the time, I don’t hear it unless I listen, you know?”
I could tell by his blank gaze he really, really didn’t know.
“So that necklace . . . Well. And I wasn’t, you know, really thinking straight. I mean. Yeah.” Dead body. “So I didn’t hear it.”
There was a moment’s silence. I bit my lip to keep from babbling on.
“So they speak to you, do they? The things you find?” he said at last, his voice flat as ever, but I wasn’t fooled.
I stared at him. “Christ, no. I don’t hear voices or anything. I’m not mental.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Look, talk to Dave Southgate, yeah? He’ll tell you I’m not making this up or imagining it, whatever.” A bead of sweat trickled down my spine and into my crack, where it itched like fuck.
Maybe I should’ve insisted Cherry came along after all.
Sharp just nodded. As if, say, he’d already talked to Dave and was just pissing me about. Not that I’m cynical or anything. “What were you looking for, in the tent?”
I took a deep breath. “I dunno. Forgot to ask her, didn’t I? I mean, she was just s’posed to be hiding something.” I shrugged. “It’s . . . it’s not the thing that’s important, yeah? Just that it’s hidden, and why it was hidden. It makes the vibes different.”
“So you wouldn’t recognise this, then?” The DI signalled to PC Peripheral, who pulled an evidence bag out of a briefcase and passed it to him. Sharp held it out to me.
There was a yellow plastic duck inside. It had a number scrawled on the bottom in faded marker pen and a hook screwed into its smiley little head. Around its neck someone had tied a label with For Tom written on in biro.
I took it and swallowed. I could see it so clearly—Sis going over to ask Amelia to hide something. Adding my parting shot about avoiding the hook-a-duck stall with its paddling pool of water. Must have given her an idea about what to hide. She must have borrowed one—forcibly, if I knew Amelia—labelled it, hidden it. Maybe she’d even smiled as she did it. Thought it might raise a laugh when I dug it out and held it up to show the crowd.
I mean, Christ. God knows I hadn’t liked the lady. But she just seemed so human to me as I pictured her doing all that. So real. So alive.
