Unraveled Visions (A Shaman Mystery) (21 page)

“Would you like a drink?” he said, brandishing it.

“I’d love one. Alcohol never passes my lips when I’m at work.”

“Really? Even though you have a taxi home?”

“Yep, really.”

“Wait a moment; last weekend I bought you a vodka and tonic.”

“I always ask for vodka and tonic if customers want to buy me a drink.”

“You only pour the tonic, right?”

“Sorry for the deception.”

“I don’t have any vodka. No tonic, either.”

“That’s okay. I can’t stand vodka. But it’s the best ‘not’ drink in tonic; no colour, no smell. I’ll have beer, that’ll be fine.”

Rey pulled down his mouth. “This is my last one.”

I laughed. He pushed the bottle at me. I took a swig and pushed it back. He lifted his hands—to say,
no, no, keep it
—and my fist, gripping the neck of the bottle, rammed into his stomach. Not hard. But his muscles were.

“Didn’t come here to beat you up. Though it’s clear I’d have trouble in that direction.”

He mopped a drip of beer on my chin. I breathed in air that felt like sherbet in my throat.

“Shut up,” he said.

He was right. Talking was overrated.

twenty

I woke into broad
daylight and my first thought was,
the hens.
The time blinked from an LED on the bedside cabinet. Seven-twenty. The hens could wait. They’d be quite cosy inside the coop.

Rey’s head was buried into his pillow. He was silent and still, in that deep sleep you can only get on Sunday mornings. I eased the duvet back so that I could feast on his unconscious face. I felt as tender towards him as I might looking at a sleeping baby. Rushes of wonderment flooded through me.
So this is love
, I thought.

I thought I’d been in love many times. I had been kidding myself. I’d never felt like this before. It was a surrender. There was a marshmallow ecstasy inside it, but that was wrapped with fear. I was terrified, in a shivery, stomach-wrenching way, for all the unknowns that might obliterate this moment or get in the way of future moments.

I touched Rey’s earlobe. He had the sort of earlobes that tucked neatly into the ear. In the centre of it was a healed piercing. He’d look good with a natty little stud. Diamond, maybe. I smiled. I should be careful not to dress my new boyfriend up like a doll. I have girlfriends who shop for their men and kit them out like cat-walk models until the poor guys no longer know themselves. I wouldn’t be doing that. Rey was perfect as he was.

I slid my legs over the edge of the bed and pulled on my t-shirt and knickers. Luckily (or maybe it was my internal hope mechanism) I’d worn a fairly new and slinky thong last night. Thus attired, the essential move right that moment was to borrow a toothbrush.

Rey’s flat was upstairs in a Victorian semi-detached. Someone had taken the largest bedroom and squashed a living room and kitchen into it as well. I was grateful that the bathroom at least was through a proper door, but that was almost impossible to shut once you were inside. The miniature sink was covered with old soap stains and shaved-off stubble. The shower cubicle was stuffed full of brownish wet towels, some of which might’ve started out white. The loo was brown, too, at least the bit under the water. I visualized Rey camping out in his office at work, festering there as he pondered the caseload, arriving back at this place once in a while and not bothering to tidy or clean even then.

I had a pee then ran his toothbrush under the hot tap, squeezed on Colgate and brushed my teeth. I was awake now, so I padded through to the little kitchen area. Rey didn’t seem to be interested in cleaning here, either, but I wasn’t going to do it for him. I put on the kettle and peeked through the cupboards. There was an out-of-date packet of pasta and a massive jar of Marmite, but not much else. In the fridge was fresh milk, ham, and half a loaf of sliced bread. I thought I might bring him some eggs. Everything else—tea, coffee, sugar—was right next to the kettle, preventing any waste of energy.

I made a coffee and a tea and balanced the mugs back to the single bedside cabinet. Not a long walk.

“Hiya.”

Rey opened one eye. “Oh.”

Under my t-shirt, I felt my heart lurch. “Don’t say it like that!”

“No … sorry. God, I promised myself …”

“What? What did you promise yourself ?”

“We’re not …” He snuffled and shifted up so that his head was resting on the wall behind him. “I’m not going to be good for you.” He reached out and snatched my hand, like he needed to touch it.

I wriggled under the duvet, curling my knees under his straightened legs. “You were very good for me last night.”

He put his arm round me and pulled me towards his chest. He had a nice chest. The hair on it was longer than the hair on his head. I put my fingers on his skin, walking them towards a nipple.

“I don’t do this often,” he said.

I restrained myself from saying that I could deduce that from the state of his bedsit. “Because of work?”

“Sort of.”

To my surprise, and bit by bit with long, ruminative pauses in between, he started telling me things. “I moved out of my house two years ago. My wife still lives there. It wasn’t anybody’s fault; we’d both had flings on the side. We haven’t started on a divorce yet. I’m not sure why. So at the moment, we both own the house, even though another bloke is living under its roof with her. I pay my half of the mortgage, and half of any major repairs. The idea is that we’ll sell it, I suppose, when things get … finalized.”

“But they haven’t got finalized,” I pointed out.

“I’m trying to forget. Rather than forgive, if you see what I mean. I can’t live with the bloody woman. And to be fair, she can’t live with me. If we sold the property now we’d both end up with next to nothing, so I get a manky bedsit and Lesley stays on until the time is right.”

“I’m glad you told me,” I said.

He laughed once. “Do you know, she comes over sometimes. Washes up. Hoovers. Still got a soft spot, I suppose.”

I wasn’t going to ask if Rey had the same soft spot, and if that was why they were having trouble “finalizing.” “The rumour is that it’s hard to live with a cop.”

“Yep. Now I’ve made DI, it’d be harder still. Live and breathe the job, so on and so on.”

I’d had that feeling last night. We’d had a great time in bed. I’d wanted him so much. Thinking of the things we’d done made me shudder and press my body closer to his warm one. But Rey had been a lot less present than me. Occasionally, something seemed to come into his head that took precedence even over my body, naked and willing though it was.

“It’s how it has to be, right?” He shrugged as I spoke, turning away as if he didn’t want to face what might be an accusation. “I’m the same with my clients, especially the shamanic ones. I have to believe their world if I’m to help them. It’s a sort of immersion; ideas come into your head that start to make sense …”

“And if you follow those trains of thought …” He turned back to me, realization in his face. “We both solve things.”

“Need to solve things. Not all of them get solved.”

“True.” He swallowed a laugh. “Like our August victim, the body we found in Dunball’s Wharf. She’s back in the papers and on the telly and, despite the entire station keeping mum, things are slowly leaking out.”

“That there’s a link between her and Kizzy?”

“It’s what they’re saying.”

“What they’re saying is that you’d shelved that investigation because there was no one to pester you to get on with solving the crime.”

“We don’t shelve things, we wait for a breakthrough. Finding the Brouviche girl at Hinkley Point gave us two lucky breaks.”

I wrinkled my nose at the word. “What’s so lucky about that?”

“We had nothing to go on with the previous victim. She was forensically sterile; out of sight long enough to remove almost all the forensic evidence.” He grimaced. “Whoever did this, they panicked, second time around, thinking if they threw this one into the sea, she would never be found. First lucky break: some idiot went walking where they should never have walked and saw her, hanging above the sea, waiting for the tide. If the tide had taken her, she could have turned up anywhere. The link would never have been made. Second lucky break: someone was looking for a missing girl. You called in and that turned the direction of both investigations.”

“What are you saying Rey? Same MO? Is it someone with a knife?”

“We didn’t have an MO with the Jane Doe.”

“Rey … don’t call her that. She once had a name. It’s so sad that it was lost in her death. Surely, somewhere, there are people searching, grieving.” I didn’t need to add that if it hadn’t been for Mirela’s determination, Kizzy might never have been named, either.

“Coppers are best not getting emotional. Our satisfaction is in getting justice for those left behind.”

“You have found something
…
” I had to stop, clear my throat, start again. “Which is why you’re asking for buccal swabs. What is it? Skin traces under her nails? Semen?”

He gave a mirthless chuckle. “You’ve been reading crime fiction again, Sabbie. Bad mistake. But yeah, because you ID’d the victim, we can target hot spots. Where she worked, who she knew. We’re simply asking for the full cooperation of the public. We are not accusing anyone.”

“I thought you’d be linking her death to Abbott’s.”

“I’d love to be able to say yes to that. A cop’s death is always the primary investigation, and I’m not going to make any apologies for saying so. I’ve cancelled the rest of my life until I get a result.”

“Surely you’re getting somewhere
…
leads
…
clues and things?”

“Whoever shot Gary, they were clever. They chose the squibbing.”

“Because of the noise, masking gunfire?”

“Partly. Mostly because half of Bridgwater was milling about that night. Usually, if someone is gunned down in cold blood late at night on the streets, there will be a small number of people who think they saw something a little odd. But that night? No one saw anything. Because they saw far too much. People running, standing still, shouting, fighting even. People all over the place. The perfect cover.”

I could smell it like sweat, the thing he wasn’t saying. But he was stroking my hair, and I could think of nothing but the sensation. People used to love to stroke it when it fell to my waist, but now I thought of it as mutilated, traumatized; Rey’s fingers were healing me, as if I’d erred in the past, but he could forgive. Why did I feel a need to be forgiven? Perhaps it had been with me all my life.

“It’s so awful,” I said, after a sleepy pause. “How can anyone deliberately kill another human being?”

“Change or status quo,” said Rey.

“What?”

“It’s my personal ‘motivation measure.’ I thought it up.” He looked chuffed. “Ninety-nine percent of murders only have one of two true motives: change or status quo.”

“What about money? Crimes of passion? Suicide bombers?”

“All of those want one of two things. Either they want change—the big win, a new political situation—or they don’t want things to change—they kill their lover’s spouse, or kill to stop a crime being discovered. See? Ninety-nine percent. Not complicated at all.” He paused, picked up his mug and took a long pull. I didn’t speak, I knew I’d be interrupting.

“Statistics tell us that we should always look close by. Around the victim’s life. Hence our decision to cherry-pick DNA samples. The glory of that method is not those who offer willingly, but those who refuse.”

“Has anyone refused?”

Rey
stared into the surface of his coffee as if trying to read the future. Then he put the mug back. “
Being DI is like being put in a black cloth bag. You can move around okay, but you stumble a lot and you can’t see out.”

“Sounds like a bad shamanic journey.”

“Tell me about it.
The back of my neck is dripping from where my DCI is breathing down it. So without being heavy about this, i
f you come up with anything … shamanic or not … y
ou knew Kizzy, is what I’m thinking.”

I was pleased he’d called the dead girl by her first name. “I didn’t know her well, Rey. I only met her the once.”

“Don’t you think that’s weird? As a shaman? You met her o
n the night she disappeared.”

“You don’t know the half.”

Why had I handed her my card? Passing it over had nothing to do with business acumen. But it sent Mirela to me.
It starts with death
. The last thing I’d heard her say.

“How long was she in the water, Rey?”

“What d’you mean?”

“I’m trying to make sense of the weeks Kizzy was missing. The letter she wrote—was she a captive when she wrote it? How long after she wrote did she die?”

“Sorry, Sabbie. That letter is a forensic field day. Can’t say a thing.”
Rey rested his head against my neck, not quite kissing, more nuzzling my skin. “But I can tell you this, because it’s now been released to the press, that she had been dead for around forty-eight hours before we found her.”

I put my hands over my face to keep the tears from sobbing out of me. “I wouldn’t feel so bad about Kizzy, I’m sure of it, if Mirela was here. I’m so worried that she went searching for her. And now I’m worried that somehow she knew her sister was dead.”

“I shouldn’t be discussing the case with you at all,” said Rey. “Nothing. There are guidelines for problems with
…
”

I couldn’t make out the words. “Problems with what?”

“You and me.” As he said the words, he slid a hand under my t-shirt, resting it over my belly button. He had worker’s hands, rough at the heel of the palm, but warm and clean. They had a special magic that transformed me into a formless, brain-dead amoeba. “We should not be having conversations like this one. In fact, we should not be having this relationship. We can’t be lovers. Do you see that?”

“No. I don’t see it.” I pushed him away, thrusting handfuls of grubby duvet to separate us, oozing across the bed like a mollusc disturbed in a rock pool. “What happened last night is rapidly becoming an inconvenience isn’t it?”

“God, no. No, Sabbie, but—”

He didn’t finish.
I’m not going to be good for you
.
We can’t be lovers.

The tears I’d managed to keep right down inside me boiled and spilled from my eyes. Rey snatched at my arms and held me. “Don’t cry, baby, please don’t.”

“I’m crying for Kizzy. For her and Mirela.” I didn’t want to believe that he could make me dissolve into tears.

But as the sobs wracked out of me,
I wasn’t sure whether I was crying for lost sisters or lost lovers.

_____

She was nine or so when her father came back that night, wounded. He sat on the bunk with one arm raised over his head, holding himself erect, swaying only slightly, biting his bottom lip against the pain, while she and her mother had worked with water and clean rags to bind the wound. She tried to fetch and carry for her mother, to not drop anything even though her fingers trembled with shock.