‘Two years ago. I should have dug Henry Martins up two
years ago and we would have found this girl then. We would have known we were looking for a killer. We might have got him before he killed others.’
Tracey looks at me but doesn’t know what to say. She can’t tell me the world doesn’t work that way, because we both know that it does. She doesn’t say anybody could have made that same mistake. She doesn’t try to tell me it isn’t my fault. All that happens is that her shoulders sag a little and she looks away, unable to maintain eye contact with me.
‘Shit,’ she whispers, still looking at the floor. ‘You need to leave now, Theo.’
‘Come on, Tracey, there’s got —’
‘I’m serious,’ she says, looking up. ‘You wanted to know if Martins was inside — well, now you know. That was the deal.
You can’t look at this woman and think it’s become your case. All you can do by being here now is compromise the investigation.’
‘You don’t get it, do you?’
‘What? That you could have made a difference two years
ago? I know the case, and you’re right. It could well be that you messed up and other girls have paid for it, but how many are still out there because you have taken bad people off the streets?’
‘This isn’t about checks and balances.’
‘I know that. Do you? And I know that you have to leave.’
‘You think that’s what she’d want?’ I ask, nodding towards the dead girl. ‘Or do you think she’d want as many people as she could get trying to find who did this to her?’
‘Come on, Theo, it’s time to go. I’ll let you know if one of the bodies that turns up is Martins’.’
‘Yeah. Okay, do that,’ I say as she walks me to the corridor.
The moment we step into it, her cellphone rings. She shakes it open and starts talking. I pat down my pockets, then turn them inside out. I mouth the word ‘keys’ to her and point back towards the morgue.
‘Make it quick,’ she says, lowering the phone so the person on the other end can’t hear.
I walk back into the morgue. I stare at the dead girl and I wonder what she looked like before Death crammed her into this coffin, taking everything away from her in one brutal insult.
Looking at this cheap imitation of her makes me feel ill.
Tracey is finishing up her phone call when I rejoin her in the corridor.
“They’ve found the one that sank again, and another one,’ she says, slipping the phone into her jacket. ‘That’s four in total.’
‘Any IDs?’
“They’re close to ID-ing one of them.’
-How’d she come up to the surface? The freshest one?’
‘It was the cinderblock,’ she says. looks like the rope was tied around it, but those cinderblocks can have sharp edges. The block landed against another block down there, and it damaged the rope. It cut through it partly. Gas build-up in the body was enough to break it. Look, you really have to leave.’
‘I get the feeling I’m going to be hearing that a lot over the next few days.’
“Then do yourself a favour and drop this thing, she says, before turning away and heading back into the morgue.
chapter six
The elevator is chilly, as if it sucked in most of the cold air when the doors opened. Outside it’s only slightly warmer again. I think the sun could be melting the city into a pool of lava and I’d still feel this way after coming out of there.
On the way to my car I take the dead woman’s diamond ring out of my pocket and begin to study it. There is an inscription on the inside, and I have to squint in the weak light of the car park to make it out. Rachel & David for ever. It reads like an adolescent inscription carved into a tree. The three stones are not diamonds, which could be why the ring was still by the woman’s hand and not sitting in some pawnshop gathering dust. They’re glass, cloudy-looking glass that for some reason seems to make the poignancy of what happened to her that much more awful.
Somebody bought this for her; he couldn’t afford real diamonds, but she didn’t need real diamonds. Maybe they had a promise that when things got better, when the money started flowing from some plan he would one day hatch, he would buy for her any stone she wanted. The ring didn’t come from her wedding finger, it was from the other hand, but perhaps there were other promises too.
If Tracey spotted the ring, then pretty soon she’s going to realise it’s gone. The question is what she’ll do about it. Call me?
Or call somebody else about me? I should never have put her in that position.