Human Remains

know about Frosty. Have you tried his office?’
    ‘I’ve been ringing him and leaving messages. It’s really urgent.’
    ‘Anything I can help with?’
    I looked at her, then, for the first time: jeans, a pale blue shirt over a white T-shirt, long brownish hair tied in a loose knot on the back of her head. Her ID badge told me she was DC Jenna Jackson. She looked young. But she’d asked, and for want of anyone else she would do. She would do just fine.
    ‘I’m the analyst,’ I said. ‘I was working on this job until recently.’
    ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You’re Annabel. You got us to Colin Friedland through the phone data. I read your report.’
    ‘Did you?’
    ‘Come and sit down,’ she said, pointing to her desk in the corner.
    She’d obviously drawn the short straw, or perhaps been the last one at the briefing this morning. The desks were all shared ones, but hers was the smallest and piled with other people’s crap.
    ‘I shouldn’t be in here,’ I said. ‘They made me come off the case.’
    ‘Yeah. Heard about that. You want a coffee?’
    ‘Oh. That would be good.’
    ‘How do you take it?’
    ‘Um, whatever’s easiest? Black. Thanks.’
    The single advantage to her desk was that she was next to the fridge, on top of which was a dirty tray toppling over with stacks of mugs of various sizes and states of cleanliness. Spoons that were dark brown with tannins and encrusted with sugar. Coffee and tea spilled and dried. A brown glass mug of the type that used to be given away with petrol, half-full of some liquid, which was already growing a cushion of mould. I was willing to bet this same still life was repeated in almost every office in every police station in the county.
    ‘Now,’ Jenna said. ‘Tell me.’
    ‘Do you know about Audrey Madison?’
    ‘Who’s Audrey Madison?’
    I told her about Audrey and Vaughn and the links back to Colin, and then she started to take notes. I told her about seeing Lindsay this morning, and about Cheryl at the office where Audrey worked. I told her about the small dark-coloured car that might have been a Fiesta driving on the Baysbury Road at seven minutes past midnight, with stolen numberplates. I drank the coffee. It was reassuringly foul.
    ‘I just want to make sure that they are investigating,’ I said, when I got to the end.
    ‘I’m sure they are,’ she said, comfortingly.
    ‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘If Colin took her on Friday night, the chances are she’s been without food or water since then. He will be waiting for her to die. I mean, is he under surveillance? Surely he wouldn’t just be released without being put under obs?’
    She looked uncomfortable.
    ‘As far as I’m aware, he was supposed to be under observation but then something kicked off in North Division and both teams were deployed to that.’
    ‘They think he’s low-risk,’ I said.
    ‘He seemed to be quite compliant,’ she said. ‘It’s always more of a concern when they’re unstable. He came across in interview as being alarmingly rational.’
    ‘Don’t you think that’s even more concerning, given what he’s been doing?’
    She shrugged, managed a smile.
    ‘That’s not my call.’
    ‘But they don’t know about Audrey,’ I said.
    ‘Annabel,’ she said, ‘leave it with me, OK?’
    I left it with her. I drank half the coffee and left the rest, then I went back to the main office.
    I couldn’t believe they weren’t watching him, and at the same time, given the appalling lack of resources and the usual bureaucratic wrangle involved in deploying what little they had, I wasn’t surprised at all. Colin could have been doing anything. I was more certain than ever that he had taken Audrey.
    Trigger and Kate had disappeared, which suited me fine. If I was going to try to break the rules, I didn’t need an audience. I logged on to the system, into Windows Explorer. They’d granted me access to the Major Crime drive where all the documents were stored – Drive L. Surely they wouldn’t be efficient enough to have removed my access already? But they had. I only had the Intel drives again. They’d shut me out.
    I put my head in my hands, the sense of urgency building, growing, thumping inside my chest and my head like a pain.
    I opened my email, thinking that I would send emails marked urgent to the DCI, the DI and anyone else, just as a last resort. Two hundred new emails. I scanned through them, and, finding four from Frosty, I gave a sudden