Human Remains

– ’
    I’d said so much, and at that moment I realised that the excitement of having someone show an interest had made me garrulous. This wasn’t just anybody, either; this man was a journalist. He could even be recording our conversation! I hadn’t thought of that… I’d been an idiot. This was going to cost me my job. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid.
    ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What’s the matter?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘You look – I don’t know. Worried.’
    He was certainly perceptive. Probably that came with the job: the ability to spot discomfort in your companion; the ability to ask pertinent and impertinent questions; the capacity to memorise long sections of conversation and then subtly adapt them to make it seem that the person had actually said what you’d wanted them to say, without them ever actually saying it.
    ‘I should go,’ I said, heaving myself up out of the chair.
    ‘Annabel, wait a minute.’
    ‘No, really, thank you for the coffee, but I need to go…’
    ‘Can I see you again?’
    I stopped pulling my coat around my shoulders and stared at him. It sounded so odd, that phrase. ‘What for?’
    He stood up, blocking my route to the door of the café. ‘I know you care about this,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to compromise your job in any way, and I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable. Whatever’s going on isn’t just going to stop. We need to try to get them to do something about it, and the only way we’re going to do that is to find out what’s going on. Will you help me?’
    I bit my lip. He was standing close to me and I didn’t like it. My back was against the wall in more ways than one.
    ‘I don’t know what I can do,’ I said. ‘I’ve tried everything .’
    ‘I’ll do all the hard stuff. I just need your data. The same data you’ve been looking at and dealing with every day. I can put pressure on the senior officers by printing more about the people involved, and I can get that information elsewhere. I just need to get a better picture about who they are.’
    ‘That’s all covered by the Data Protection Act,’ I said, lamely.
    ‘Not if they’re dead,’ he said. ‘The DPA doesn’t apply after death.’
    ‘I know that. It still applies while there’s an active investigation, though. And in any case it still applies to their families,’ I said, trying to recover. He knew the legislation better than I did. It would do me no good to try to look clever in front of him.
    ‘I didn’t think there
was
an active investigation.’
    He must have noticed my discomfort then, because he stood aside to let me through. ‘I’ll walk you down the hill, OK?’
    I mumbled something and he followed me out into the bright, crisp air on the main road. The pavement was crowded with shoppers and although he walked beside me we kept getting separated.
    ‘Look,’ he said at last, as we turned the corner into the wide pedestrian precinct leading down the hill to the river, ‘I’d just really like to stay in touch. You’re the only person I’ve spoken to who is taking this seriously. I’ve been trying to get my editor involved, too. She agreed to start up our campaign to get everyone to check up on their neighbours, but I’m still thinking it’s a bit more sinister than a lack of public-spiritedness.’
    ‘Sinister?’
    ‘You know. That they are being murdered.’
    I stopped dead and turned to look at him. ‘I don’t think they’re being murdered,’ I said.
    ‘Really? You don’t think that?’
    ‘There’s nothing to suggest they were murdered. No break-ins – ’ Not apart from the house next door, I thought, remembering the crash of the pane of glass inside the kitchen. ‘No trauma, no violent attacks. They just died.’
    ‘Maybe it was a slow-acting poison,’ he said, ‘or they were gassed by their boilers, or something.’
    ‘It’s a bit far-fetched,’ I said. ‘And there’s no evidence. What makes you think they’re being murdered?’
    His cheeks were flushed and he dropped his voice so I had to move closer to hear him. ‘Well, alright, then, maybe not murdered. But someone else is involved with this. They haven’t all just spontaneously decided to die, have they?’
    ‘Why not? That’s almost what your Japanese teenagers did.’
    We carried on walking. At the bottom of the hill I would cross the road at the pedestrian crossing, and then I would be at the police station. I didn’t really want to be seen talking to