Page 16 of Pressure Head
I sighed and started looking. It wasn’t easy to concentrate with Phil in the room, so I decamped to the bathroom—you wouldn’t believe the kinds of stuff I’ve found in toilet cisterns over the years. Red faces all round, and a husband who’d be getting an ear-bashing when he got home from work.
I had to do it the old-fashioned way, using my eyes—all that water messes with the vibes—but all I found in Graham’s bathroom was a flourishing crop of mildew. And it looked like the loo would need a new siphon pretty soon.
I moved on to the bedroom. It was small—barely bigger than the admittedly king-size bed. There were built-in wardrobes with not an inch of door clearance to spare, and a small chest of drawers that obviously served—had served—as Melanie’s dressing table. It was covered in sad, abandoned little trinkets of costume jewellery, and various skin and hair products, all cheap brands. Maybe the iPad had been a present from her parents—Melanie’s salary must have gone to support her and Graham, which made me wonder what he was doing for money these days. A photo stood in the centre, showing Melanie’s parents looking around twenty years younger than they had when I’d met them.
There was definitely something there—the mental tinnitus started up immediately. Trouble was, it was coming from all directions, making it hard to isolate what was where. Most people hide stuff in the bedroom. Not just what you’d think, either. Besides the porn and the marital aids, there’s usually jewellery, old love letters,allkinds of stuff. I tried to get a bead on the nastiest trail. There was a greasy, dirty,shamefulsort of feel to one of the tracks. It yanked at my mind, and I took a step towards the bed—
“Find anything?” Phil’s voice grated in my ear, making me jump a mile and totally lose concentration.
“Chance’d be a fine thing with you yelling in my ear the minute I get close,” I snapped.
He backed off, holding up his hands. “Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean to smudge your aura or scare away the spirit guides, whatever. But we don’t know how long they’re going to keep him in, so we can’t afford to hang around.”
“I know, all right?” I sighed. I turned back away from him and tried to regain my scattered focus.
Phil, for once, was quiet. Didn’t mean he wasn’t distracting me, though. I could imagine those hefty forearms sliding around my waist from behind, that hard body pressing up against my back . . .
Damn it. “I need you to leave the room, okay?”
“What? You’re telling me you can’t do it while I’m watching? How old are you?”
“It’s just—you make me nervous, standing behind me like that. Happy now?”
He didn’t answer, but walked slowly out from behind me and around the bed, until he was standing pressed against the wall to one side of it. In my field of vision, but not right in my face. “Better?”
It was, actually. I tried to relax. My vision unfocused, and the tugging started up in my brain again—in several different directions, like it had before. My eyes dropped half-closed, and then I had it. Clearly fate liked a laugh as much as the next girl, because the strongest vibes were coming from right next to Phil. I strode up to him, thought,What the hell, and dropped to my knees.
His expression was priceless. Managing not to laugh, I felt all around the corner of the pine bed frame—and found a packet taped to it. It felt plasticky but soft—like, say, a packet of some kind of powder.
Shit. “I think I’ve found Graham’s drugs stash,” I said, looking up. Phil seemed around fifty feet tall from this angle, a big unfriendly giant. Getting down even lower, I managed to peel away the tape holding the packet to the wood, and I passed it up to him. It was a sturdy plastic Ziploc bag holding half a dozen little baggies, and the powder in the smaller bags was light brown in colour—for some reason I’d been expecting white, but maybe that was just coke. Like I said, I don’t do drugs and I never have.
Phil echoed my thoughts. “Shit.”
“Yeah. Can you tell what it is?”
His scowl deepened. “It’ll be heroin. The stupid prick. I’m going to kill him.”
I felt all around the bed frame again, but there was nothing else. Awkwardly, because Phil was still taking up way too much space, I stood, my hip giving a sharp twinge to remind me it didn’t hold with crawling around on floors.
As I hissed in a breath, I felt Phil’s hand under my elbow. Supporting me. Sending electric tingles up my arm from the point of contact. Suddenly this whole situation seemed way too intimate. I muttered something I hoped he’d interpret as thanks and stepped back, hurriedly, to a distance where I couldn’t feel the warmth of him anymore.
“Are you going to tell the police?” I asked, hoping my heartbeat would slow down now.
Come to that, Phil seemed a bit short of breath himself. “What the hell do you think? If they find out about the drugs, they’ll stop looking for anyone else. Christ, what a wanker. I’m going to put the fear of God into that stupid little tosser. What the bloody hell was he thinking?” Phil paced up and down the narrow bit of space in the bedroom so fast I expected to see sparks flying from the cheap carpet.
Maybe he saw it as a personal failure or something. “Don’t a lot of ex-addicts slip up in times of stress? I mean, this hasn’t exactly been a picnic for him.”
“So handing the police a motive on a silver platter is going to help his case? You know what they’ll think: he started using again; she came home from work and found him high as a kite; they had a massive row; and he bashed her head in.”
I winced as his words brought back images of Melanie, lying dead up on Nomansland Common. “Look, I hate to say it—but maybe that’s how it was?” I held up a hand to ward him off as he advanced on me like a pissed-off pit bull. “People change when they’re on drugs. Do stuff they wouldn’t dream of, normally.”
Phil’s glare deepened to an extent that started to get a bit worrying—then he sighed and sat down heavily on the bed, his face in his hands. “I just don’t want to believe it. We got, well, close, back when he was picking himself up from the streets. And no, not like that, all right? It kind of . . . Helping him got me through a difficult time.”
I wondered what that had been, but I didn’t think he’d appreciate me asking about it. I sat down next to him, and put a hand awkwardly on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. What were you hoping I’d find? Really?”
“Graham told me, before, she’d been a bit distant in the last week or so. Like she’d had something on her mind.” He lifted his head, and immediately that weird, unsettling intimacy was back, so I let my hand fall from his shoulder. A tiny frown creased his forehead, just for a moment. “I can think of a couple of possibilities. She could have been having an affair—in which case, there’s another bloke running around who’s a prime suspect for the murder. Or maybe there was something funny going on where she worked. That call from the boss—sounds dodgy to me. Particularly as I happen to know he’s denied meeting her that night.”
“So . . . you weren’t looking for dirt on Graham at all?” I frowned. I wasn’t too keen on the way he’d been holding out on me.
