Voices 02 - Wanting by Sarah Masters

Author:Sarah Masters [Masters, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Oliver leaned his head back against the passenger seat as Langham drove away from Mr and Mrs Drum’s for the second time. They’d been to deliver the awful news—well, Langham had delivered it—and left a crumpled couple to try to come to terms with the fact their son was dead and no, they really didn’t need to view the body if they didn’t want to, but if they did it might be best to wait a day or two.

Wait for Hank to make Jason pretty again.

“That was…horrible,” Oliver said. “I don’t ever want to do that again.”

“Be thankful you don’t have to. I, on the other hand, have it on my list of regular to-dos.”

“Every job has its shit points.” Oliver massaged the bridge of his nose, hoping the headache that taunted from the back of his skull would fuck off before it had the balls to shift to the front.

“And we’ve got a shitty point ahead of us now.” Langham veered out of the housing estate and headed towards the city’s innards.

“Hank?”

“Yeah, Hank, but you can wait outside in the corridor, if you’d rather.”

Did Oliver rather? He wasn’t sure. The morgue hadn’t been his favourite place last time, but as with the Sugar Strands case, this one had got to him. It had something to do with him being in the thick of it again, seeing the case unfold, the officers working around the clock to get some kind of lead, and he wasn’t sure he should be enjoying, if that was the right word, the change from mere informant to being Langham’s ‘associate’.

He thought about his editor boss’s voice earlier, filled with glee that Oliver wouldn’t be coming in to work because he had to assist the police. The barrage of questions—“Do you have anything you can give me yet? You got some information for me before we go to press?”—made Oliver feel ill. Oh, he knew that was the way of the world, that humans had the urge to know every gory detail, but the fact his boss did this for a living and revelled in all the juicy titbits he could get his hands on wasn’t quite right in Oliver’s opinion. Would he rather be making endless cups of tea for the journalists or sitting beside Langham now, on their way to see a jolly man who cut open corpses in order to find out how they’d died?

The latter, definitely, although not the going to see Hank part, not seeing Jason Drum laid out on a metal slab, the top of his head cut off as Hank weighed his brain. Oliver wanted to help solve the case, that was all, to give the dead justice so they could move on.

Jason hadn’t spoken to him since they’d been to see him at the barn. If it was some kind of ritual killing then the way Jason had been murdered was an escalation. Thomas hadn’t been harmed—discounting strangulation by a thick chain, of course—and there had been no whipping marks on his body, no signs he’d been mistreated prior to his death.

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