The Trawlerman

business.’ Jill looked shaken herself.
‘What bad business?’
Jill walked to the back of the Skoda. ‘Listen, Alex. You’re supposed to be taking time off from all this. We’re only here for that one. Don’t ask.’
‘What’s been going on? You look genuinely like shit.’
‘Drop it. Just not now, love, OK? Please.’
Jill opened the boot and pulled out a tactical vest for herself and another for Gilchrist, but when she realised Alex was standing next to her, Jill slammed the boot shut, though not before Alex had seen what else was in it.
Inside the boot was a clear plastic bag stuffed full of used white forensic coveralls and blue overshoes. Blood had soaked into the blue fabric of the shoes, turning it a deep brown. There were patches of blood on the coveralls too. Alex had been to too many crime scenes. That’s why she was on sick leave. For their forensic clothing to be that stained, there would have had to have been a great deal of blood.
Jill was already opening the CNC car door and leading Mandy over towards her Skoda. The woman got in the car without any protest at all. Afterwards Jill called over to the CNC officer. ‘You got the witness details?’
He nodded; held the weapon in a gloved hand. ‘You’ll be needing this too,’ he said, holding up the machete. ‘Evidence. Can I stick it in your boot?’
Jill looked at the weapon and baulked. ‘Oh. We can’t take it.’
The man looked confused. ‘You’ll want it though.’
Jill looked as much panicked by his statement as by the sight of the weapon.
Alex stepped forward between them. ‘They can’t take it with them,’ she explained. ‘She’s right. They can’t have the weapon inside the vehicle with the suspect for obvious reasons, and they can’t put it in the boot either because there’s a danger of cross-contamination of evidence.’
The man blinked, confused, holding the weapon between finger and thumb.
‘They have . . . some stuff in their boot already, from another case. They’ve just come from another serious crime scene.’
She looked at Colin, who gave the smallest of nods.
‘You’ll have to arrange for someone else to collect it.’
Jill looked gratefully at Alex, then got into the car next to Colin, who hadn’t said a word the entire time they had been there.‘Come by later,’ called Alex as she started the engine. ‘I need the company. I’m going mad out here with nothing to do.’ Which was more than half true, she realised.
Jill said nothing. She put the car into gear and all three drove away. Where the car had been, lay the small splatter of Colin’s sick.
If she hadn’t been off work, Alex reflected, it would have been her witnessing whatever they had seen, and whatever they had seen had not been good.
She watched the two brides leave, hand in hand, walking unsteadily across the uneven shingle towards the low pale-blue cabin, picking their way uneasily between the gorse and the sea kale.
They had left her with the bottle of wine. After maybe twenty metres, Tina stumbled and fell. Stella bent and took her arm, hauled her up. After another few yards, Tina stopped, hitched up her dress and Stella bent her legs to allow her to jump up onto her back, and carried her all the way to the bungalow.
Curly said, ‘Fancy a couple more at the Pilot?’
He was drunk. So was she, she realised. The day was scarily empty. She could stay and drink like she would have done when she was a younger officer on the force in London. She hesitated and said, ‘No thanks, Curly.’
She turned and made her way down the track towards her house, hair blowing in her face as she walked.
It was stupid, drinking at lunchtime. She was supposed to be straightening out her head, not messing with it. The afternoon had become a blur.
By the evening she was sat on the sofa with the TV on, sound down, and was struggling through one of the books her mother had left behind on her visits. Her mother went through two or three novels a week. Alex was trying to fill the empty days off work, but reading books took her forever and she found it impossible to believe in any of the stories.
Alex gave up, looked up at the silent television and saw a young woman holding a microphone outside the gates of a large house. There was police tape across the gates. The caption underneath read New Romney, a town a little further up the coast.
‘Oh,’ she said out loud, and remembered the bloody coveralls in Jill’s car.
She scrabbled around, looking for the remote control as the reporter talked to camera with the sombre face of someone delivering terrible news. Behind her right shoulder, crime scene officers dressed all in white, just as Jill would have been, emerged from the front door. Where was the remote? It had been here next to her on the sofa a minute ago.
She felt a prick of irritation. Normally she would have already known every available grisly detail. All she could guess was that something very awful must have happened in that house, a little way down the coast from her.
By the time she had found the remote, tucked between cushions, the news had moved on to an item about an old people’s home.

Four
Zoë came in late, non-verbal, walking dirty footprints onto the kitchen tiles.
‘Nice day?’ Alex asked her daughter.
Zoë didn’t answer; instead she started opening and closing cupboard doors, then moved on to the fridge in which she found half an avocado. She scooped it out of its skin, methodically mashed it with a fork for two whole minutes, then squeezed a little lemon juice in it and mashed it some more.
‘See any lesser spotted wood pigeons?’
‘No such bird.’
‘A great booby?’
‘Mum.’
‘A little bustard?’
‘Unfunny, Mum.’
‘Where were you all day, then?’
‘Where do you think? I was volunteering at the Wildlife Trust. I told you that this morning.’
‘Did you?’ Her strange misfit daughter who loved wildlife