Human Remains

play…’
    ‘Only the unusual ages,’ I said. ‘And the fact that they all appear to have gone totally unmissed. You do get that sometimes with elderly people who are so afraid of being shipped off to a home that they actively avoid contact with the outside world, but not with younger people.’
    ‘Is this just our borough?’ Ellen asked then. ‘What about other parts of the county?’
    I’d forgotten all about my last slide; I could have kicked myself. ‘That’s interesting too. I’ve got it on the next slide…’
    Kate took her cue and pressed the button.
    ‘It’s a simple enough graph. As you can see, all the other areas are following similar patterns to previous years. Whatever it is that’s causing this spike, it’s only happening in Briarstone.’
    They all stared at the slide. The woman from Social Services even had her mouth open. Frosty ran one hand through his short grey hair. ‘I’ll bring it up at the Force Tactical,’ he said at last. ‘See if anyone from Major Crime has any ideas. Can you email me your slides, Annabel?’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
    ‘I’ll do it now while I’ve got them open, if you like,’ said Kate helpfully.
     
     
    ‘You coming?’ Trigger said to Kate, standing in the doorway with his coat on.
    It was half-past three. Trigger had his own parking space owing to a slightly dodgy hip (which curiously didn’t stop him fell-walking, his favourite weekend and holiday pastime), and Kate usually cadged a lift with him back up to the Park and Ride.
    ‘I’ve got stuff to do, Trig,’ she said. ‘Thanks anyway. See you tomorrow.’
    I looked at her in surprise. Normally, once the tactical presentation was over for another fortnight, she was so worn out with the effort that she’d leave extra early.
    ‘Frosty emailed you yet?’ she asked, when Trigger had gone. The station had fallen quiet; even the tannoy hadn’t had anything to say for the last hour or so.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. He’d emailed me about an hour before, but I’d been too upset and frustrated to say anything.
    ‘And?’
    ‘He said they won’t even look at it. Apparently they said they’ve got enough to do with all the actual crimes they’re investigating.’
    ‘Told you.’
    Her response wasn’t exactly helpful, but at least she was showing an interest in it, even if it was just so she could be smug.
    ‘This force is too obsessed with meeting Home Office targets,’ I said. ‘Everything’s about disposals and sanction-detection rates. If they can’t clear something up, they’re finding a way to pretend it didn’t happen or wasn’t a crime after all. They just completely ignore the fact that they’re dealing with actual people, real people. Everything’s been distilled down to crime figures and taking the easy way out. Drives me mad.’
    Half an hour later, we were walking together up the hill towards the bus stop. She’d never walked anywhere with me before, even if we were going in the same direction at the same time. At four, I’d turned off the workstation and gone to wash up my mug. By the time I was back, Kate had her coat on and we ended up walking out of the station together, as if this was normal.
    ‘I mean,’ I said, puffing a bit as we went up the hill, ‘it’s not even as though we had a heatwave, or a particularly cold winter, or anything like that.’
    ‘Or floods,’ Kate said. Her long legs took one stride for every two of mine, effortless.
    ‘And, as I said in the presentation, they’re not all old, either. The one this morning was forty-three. Then there was that Hampshire woman, remember? The one they found in Baysbury? She was only twenty-one. And another one I just saw was thirty-nine.’
    ‘How old are you again?’ Kate asked.
    ‘Thirty-eight.’
    She smirked a little, the smirk of someone who was still – just – in her twenties, and for whom forty seemed an impossibly long way off.
    ‘I just can’t think of anything more awful than dying in your own home and being left there to rot,’ I said quietly, walking past the automatic doors of the chemist and enjoying the brief blast of warm air.
    ‘Well, you wouldn’t know anything about it, you’d be dead,’ Kate said.
    I bit my lip. Imagine if it wasn’t the end, though, I wanted to say. Imagine watching your body decomposing and knowing there was nobody around who cared enough to wonder why they hadn’t seen you for a while.
    ‘Don’t you think,’ I persisted, sniffing longingly at the