‘DC RACHEL BAILEY, Manchester Metropolitan Police. We sent you a request yesterday evening for call data on a missing phone.’
‘Nothing for you, yet,’ said the man on the other end.
‘You do realize this is a murder I’m dealing with here?’ Rachel complained. ‘Can’t you get your finger out?’
‘You do realize that this is the police liaison department?’ the man said frostily. ‘All we deal with is murders. I’ve a stack of requests here. You wait your turn.’ And he hung up. Rachel looked at the receiver for a moment, taken aback. Then she made a note in her daybook about the call.
Rachel was miffed at the way Godzilla had talked to her, making her look stupid in front of everyone. She had brought her into the syndicate and now she was being snotty to her. Making her tag along for the formal identification, for fuck’s sake.
It had snowed in the early hours, not much, but enough to mottle the landscape with patches of white, a piebald effect. Slush already on the main roads. On the drive over to the mortuary Janet had explained it was policy to have two FLOs in the initial stages of an inquiry, before they knew what flavour it was. You didn’t know how many next-of-kin might come crawling out of the woodwork, you didn’t know if there was bad blood. Things might kick off.
‘One time,’ Janet said, ‘we had the father at the mortuary, he had been easy to trace. The mother had done a runner years before, leaving the kids…’
Rachel looked out of the window; she knew what that was like, aware of the old twist in her stomach, the anger just underneath. How could she, the bitch? Didn’t want to think about her. Waste of space, waste of time. Dead. Good as.
‘… but,’ Janet went on, turning into the car park near the mortuary, ‘mother pitches up, completely trollied, seen the death on the news, and attacks the father. Only one FLO there and yours truly, trying to pull them apart. I got a smack in the face for my trouble.’
Rachel still thought this was overkill, Denise Finn at the mortuary along with the FLO and two detectives. Three to one. Plus the mortuary staff. Janet obviously thought so, too. ‘You can wait in the car?’ she said when they arrived.
‘You’re all right,’ Rachel replied.
‘Frightened you’ll miss something?’ The woman thought she was a mind reader now.
