Human Remains

to have to go back a few metaphorical pages and help me catch up.
    ‘Yesterday, in the early evening, Sam Everett had a phone call from a female who claimed there was another body we hadn’t found yet. She provided an address. He wrote it down. He went off to check it out – as journos do, of course, although it would have been nicer if he’d thought to notify us first – and at the address he realised that there was a body in there because he could see part of it through a downstairs window. Then he called us out.’
    ‘Was it the next-door neighbour who rang him, then?’
    ‘No – that’s the interesting bit. We traced the call back to an address in Briarstone, right over the other side from Carnhurst where the body was. No reply. Broke in. Woman called Eileen Forbes lives there.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘Dead. Less than twenty-four hours.’
    ‘Murdered?’
    He shrugged. ‘Got to wait for the PM, but, on the face of it, it looks bizarrely like all the others. No food in the house, no sign of any activity, just the woman on her own. Post neatly piled up on the dining room table, unopened. We got some phone data back already – she only made that one call to the newspaper. It’s the only outgoing call for weeks. Incoming calls all unanswered. Like she was deliberately not contacting anyone. And at the moment we can’t work out any connection between her and the body we found in Carnhurst.’
    ‘So the woman who called – she starved to death?’
    ‘Looks like it.’
    ‘And the body – the one in Carnhurst?’
    ‘Same.’
    ‘So how did this Eileen know the body was there?’
    His face lit up. ‘Exactly,’ he said.
    I looked around the room, at the people buzzing about setting up desks, on the phone. There were six desks crammed in here already, a small office in the corner, enclosed by a partition with a glass panel at the top.
    ‘So,’ I said, wondering if I was just tired or if I was being incredibly stupid, ‘all this…?’
    ‘They’ve set up an incident room. They’re going to treat it – for a while, anyway – as a proper murder enquiry.’
    ‘Really?’ I said, overwhelmed. ‘You mean it?’
    ‘They want you to be the analyst.’
    ‘Me?’
    ‘Who else, Annabel? You know more about this than anyone.’
    ‘I’ve never worked in an MIR before.’
    ‘Well, now’s your chance.’
    I shrank back in my chair, the thought of all this activity being my responsibility suddenly overwhelming.
    ‘Hey,’ Frosty said. ‘It’s OK. You’ll be fine.’
    ‘It’s not that. I’ve got a lot on my plate,’ I said, my voice unexpectedly quavering. ‘My mum – my mother’s been taken in to hospital.’
    ‘Kate told me. I’m sorry, really. Should you even be here?’
    ‘There’s not much I can do really. She’s unconscious. They said they’d ring if anything happens.’
    ‘Andy?’
    A man had entered the room, someone I knew vaguely but couldn’t quite place. Smartly dressed, dark hair.
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘Ah, you must be Annabel. Pleased to meet you.’
    ‘Annabel, this is DCI Paul Moscrop, Major Crime.’
    He held out his hand and gripped mine firmly as I shook it.
    ‘Hello,’ I said.
    ‘You’re the one who’s been monitoring all the incidents, so I’ve been told?’
    ‘That’s right.’
And you’re the one who deleted my emai
l, I thought.
    ‘I’d like to see everything you’ve got – it would really help bring us up to speed. Can I meet up with you in twenty minutes or so?’
    ‘I guess so, yes.’
    ‘That’s wonderful, thank you. Top job. Andy, can I see you for a sec?’
    The DCI ushered Frosty into the office in the corner and shut the door. I took myself off downstairs. Trigger had gone to a meeting and taken Kate with him. The office was silent apart from the whirr of the workstations. I closed the door behind me.
    I logged on to the system and went through my documents and files until I got to the one marked, prosaically, ‘Op Lonely’. All of the stuff the police worked on had an op name, and no doubt this one would, too, now; but in the meantime I’d given it a name of my own.
    Inside the folder was the document I’d prepared for the meeting: the slides, and the spreadsheets of data I’d kept on all the bodies found so far, which showed names, addresses, further information, which might contain anything linking them to each other, next of kin, approximate date of death, date of discovery, possible causes of death. And now it looked as though I had