One Christmas the team bought her a pair of white cotton gloves, the kind a magician wore. Gill had got very pissed at the works party and waxed lyrical about how what they did was magic of a sort. Dark magic, maybe, solving the sordid little details of the crime, turning a tragedy into an achievement.
‘For who?’ Andy had objected, winking at Janet. ‘We’ve still got a dead body. Someone’s still lost a family member.’
‘But they know how, why. And that’s all we can do for them,’ she had said, taking another swig of vodka. ‘Give them the story, the facts, the name, the face… At least we can do that.’ She had sliced at one hand with the other for emphasis, and Janet had laughed and shaken her head. ‘Without that they are in bloody limbo for ever,’ Gill said. They all knew that. Lee and Mitch had nodded, muttering in agreement.
She had drunk way too much that night; it wasn’t long after Dave had gone walkabout, and she’d ended up curled over a bog in the Ladies, with Janet holding her hair out of the way and saying, ‘Time for bed, Houdini. Got you a cab.’
Gill walked through the tiny porch on the stepping plates that had been laid down and turned ninety degrees into the narrow hallway, noting the bathroom immediately to the right. Straight ahead, a bedroom. The door ajar. Gill took in the mattress on the floor, the carpet littered with clothes and scraps of paper, cigarette papers, DVD cases, burn marks on the carpet. Someone had once attempted to redecorate the far wall either side of the window. It was painted a muddy ginger shade, reminding Gill of parkin, the cake they ate round Bonfire Night. But they’d obviously lost heart and the edge near the ceiling still showed the cream woodchip paper underneath. Gill could smell damp in the room mixing with the rank stench of stale fag ends and, peering carefully round the door, saw an area in the corner there mottled with mildew. She didn’t go in, it had yet to be examined. The next ninety-degree turn took her past a storage cupboard on the right and into the living room at the end. The smell was different here, unpleasantly metallic.
‘Hello,’ Gill greeted them all.
The girl was under a duvet, face partly visible, wedged between a sofa and a squat, dark-coloured coffee table. The table was slightly askew and tilted, one leg broken. The technicians would already have filmed and photographed the room before anyone else was allowed in, creating a record of the scene as close as possible to how it had been found. Phil Sweet, the CSM, was logging details and supervising everyone. Gill had worked with him maybe half-a-dozen times. He raised a gloved hand in acknowledgement. ‘Go round that way.’
