Stop Dead (DI Geraldine Steel)

took out her warrant card again and held it up.
    ‘I’m here to tell you that your husband is dead. I’m so sorry for your loss,’ she said softly.

     
    Neither of them spoke for a moment, then Mrs Birch dropped her head into her hands. Geraldine waited. The cat reappeared and rubbed itself against the bereaved woman’s legs, purring loudly. She moved her leg, shifting the cat away from her. It settled down on the carpet, wrapping its tail around its body. After a moment it rose to its feet and leaned against her shins again, mewing plaintively.
    ‘He knows,’ Mrs Birch said dully.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Ginger. The cat. He knows what’s happened. He can tell. That’s why he’s not purring.’
    She began stroking the cat, while tears slipped down her gaunt cheeks.
    ‘So he’s dead?’
    ‘I’m afraid so.’

     
    ‘What happened?’ She turned her tear streaked face to Geraldine. ‘Was it his fault?’
    ‘His fault?’
    ‘The accident. It was the other driver’s fault, wasn’t it? John was a safe driver. He’d been driving the buses for ten years without an accident. He – he was a good driver –’
    ‘This wasn’t an accident, Mrs Birch.’
    ‘But – the bus –’
    Gently Geraldine explained that her husband hadn’t died in a traffic accident.
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    ‘Your husband was murdered.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘He was assaulted, hit on the head and knocked out.’

     
    Mrs Birch shook her head.
    ‘I don’t understand. Why? Why would anyone kill John?’
    Geraldine asked the bereaved woman if she could contact anyone. Mrs Birch shook her head.
    ‘There is no one else. There was only ever the two of us, me and John.’
    ‘Do you have any family you could call?’
    Again she shook her head and her fringe quivered above her eyes.
    ‘We never had children.’
    She explained she was an only child, and her husband’s only brother had gone abroad and died.
    ‘Do you have a neighbour who could be with you?’
    Mrs Birch shook her head again.
    ‘Be with me?’ she repeated, bemused. ‘There’s only Ginger.’
    As if rejecting her dependence, the cat arched its back and trotted lightly out of the room.

     
    Back in her own flat, Geraldine slumped down on her sofa and scowled at an ink stain she had made with a biro the night before. The sofa was dark, so it wasn’t particularly noticeable, but she knew it was there. She made a mental note to ask her sister how to remove it, when they next spoke. It was the kind of domestic detail her sister would know about. With a bowl of pasta and a small glass of wine on a tray, she flipped through channels on the television but couldn’t settle to anything. The memory of John Birch’s widow wouldn’t leave her. It wasn’t as though it was the first time she had delivered news of a tragedy to an unsuspecting family, but there was something about the woman’s isolation that was unsettling. The detective chief inspector had considered it fortunate there were no children in the marriage, but children might have given the widow some support.

     
    Usually efficient at detaching herself from homicide victims and those they left behind, for no obvious reason Mrs Birch perturbed her. Sitting disconsolately in front of the flickering television screen, she replayed the widow’s words in her mind, like a voice over. ‘There is no one else.’ Geraldine tried not to see parallels with her own situation. She had her work. But in twenty years’ time she would be retiring. What company would she have then? She thought of Sam as a friend. An intimacy had sprung up between them as they worked closely together. But either one of them might relocate at any time and even if they continued as a team for twenty years, their relationship would inevitably lose its immediacy once they no longer worked together.

     
    Apart from her colleagues at work, there were very few people Geraldine felt close to. Even before she had learned about her adoption, she had never felt at ease with her adoptive family. Looking back on her early life, it was almost as though she had sensed that she didn’t belong with them. Now she went through the motions with her sister, pretending nothing had changed. Hannah was a loyal friend, but she had her own family to fill her life. It struck Geraldine that her birth mother might be in a similar situation to Mrs Birch, living an isolated and lonely existence. Perhaps she too had only a cat for company. For the first time Geraldine