Kissed a Sad Goodbye

“My guess is they pinch,” he said under his breath, for Coppin had finished with the radio and begun the climb back up the hill from the gate.

Reaching them, the DI made a visible effort to regulate her breathing before she spoke. “They’re on their way. What next, sir?”

“Tell me what the pathologist found.” Kincaid pulled his small notebook from the pocket of his trousers.

Coppin consulted her own notebook. “The pathologist estimates that the victim died sometime in the night or the early hours of the morning—can’t have been much longer than that in this heat or the deterioration of the body would be marked. There are no outward signs of sexual assault, but there is some obvious bruising on the throat.”

“Any identification?”

“No, sir. We’ve not found her handbag, nor any obvious dry cleaner’s markings in her clothing.”

“Who found her?”

“A pensioner, sir. George Brent. Lives in the council flats down the bottom of the park. He was out walking his dog when he saw her at the edge of the shrubbery, but I’m surprised no one called it in sooner—she was visible as a bloody beacon.”

“Has he been interviewed?”

Coppin frowned. “No—I didn’t see much point. I know him—he’s a harmless old man, not likely to have noticed anything important.”

After a moment’s pause, Kincaid said evenly, “Inspector, at this stage of an investigation, we don’t know what’s important, and everything has a point. I’ll see Mr. Brent myself.”

“But—”

“In the meantime, we’ll need to get the house-to-house inquiries started as soon as possible and the incident room set up. Our first priority is identification, and we had better be prepared to make use of the media.”

A SHREDDED PIECE OF PLASTIC BLEW fitfully across the section of the ASDA car park visible through the screen of trees. Watching from her balcony, Teresa Robbins thought of a film she’d seen once about tumbleweeds in the American desert. The giant weeds had blown in a similar way, in erratic bursts, as if they had a life of their own. The movement of the bit of rubbish made her feel vaguely uneasy, as did the hot breeze that animated it.

Yet she stayed, leaning against the chipped iron railing, craning to see beyond the trees. She’d seen the first police car arrive midmorning, while she’d been hanging out washing on her half of the narrow concrete balcony. There was a cluster of cars now, pulled up in a rough circle beyond the petrol station. It worried her, not knowing what was happening, but she couldn’t bring herself to join the crowd of onlookers gathering in the car park.

A loud thump from next door warned her that her neighbor was up, and that her time on the balcony was limited. Teresa prized her quiet mornings there, especially Saturdays, when she had the time to tend her geraniums and petunias. The evenings were his, given over to heavy metal music and six-packs of lager, and he fueled their ongoing skirmish by leaving fag ends in her flowerpots for her to clean out the next morning. She knew she should tell him to bugger off, but standing up to people was never as easy for her as it was for Annabelle.

She’d improved at it, though, in the five years she’d worked for Annabelle Hammond. It simply never occurred to Annabelle that she wouldn’t get what she wanted, whether professionally or personally, and Teresa had often watched with quiet amusement as her boss sailed into a meeting with unsuspecting executives who had not been prepared to take her seriously because she was female. By the time they stopped gaping at her looks, Annabelle would have their signatures on the dotted line.

Although Teresa knew she could never aspire to Annabelle’s flair, she’d worked at her job as the firm’s bookkeeper with a zeal and efficiency no one from her Croyden comprehensive would ever have expected from her—a girl so ordinary that she’d once overheard a teacher describe her as “the girl most likely to disappear.”

After a series of accounting jobs that hadn’t quite fit, she’d started at Hammond’s with little expectation. To her surprise, she’d soaked up the business like a sponge, discovering a talent for organizing as well as figures. She learned she could juggle things in her head, and had even begun to develop a passion for tea that rivaled Annabelle’s. A year ago, Annabelle had promoted her to chief financial officer.

They made a good team. Between them, they had taken Hammond’s Fine Teas from the past into the nineties, and it was only in the past few months, as Annabelle had begun to address the future of the firm, that Teresa had seen her display any doubt or hesitation.