Ash and Bones by Mike Thomas

Author:Mike Thomas [Thomas, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zaffre Publishing

Sixteen

MacReady had grabbed a few hours, Megan already asleep when he arrived home from the maisonette scene and slipped into the warm bed. He’d finally drifted away, his dreams punctuated by a screaming Soraya Tate wrapped in a blood red gilet, a shadowy figure behind her, silver gun barrel glinting.

When he woke, groggy and vaguely annoyed, he wished he could just pull the quilt back over his head. He reached across, patting at the mattress as he went: Megan gone already. He sighed and rolled the other way. Six twenty a.m. on the bedside clock. Beside it, affixed to his phone, was a pink Post-It note. Her handwriting:

We must talk. Tonight. Please.

X

He had no idea what time he would be home. Quick shower, change of clothes, bite to eat, no messages from work – unbelievable, given last night’s turn of events – and MacReady was in the hallway and heading for the front door before quarter to seven.

Then he stopped.

Megan’s note. The desperation in the scrawled spikes of her handwriting. He remembered the day before, in the park, her talking at him, reaching into her jacket pocket for something. The jacket that hung on the coat stand tucked in the corner of the hallway.

MacReady turned one pocket out. Found nothing. Rifled through the other.

Pulled out a folded piece of paper.

Opened it.

Read the letter.

Felt his legs weaken. Felt bile in his throat.

Shoved the letter back in the jacket pocket.

Thought: how?

*

Beck made the call to Soraya Tate.

MacReady picked up hot drinks from a petrol station on Newport Road. Chocolate for Beck, more coffee for him. Waited for the early-morning rain to ease off, gave up waiting and sprinted back to the CID car. Beck talked into her mobile alongside him; he sat quietly in the passenger seat, not listening, forehead against fogged window, car roof thrumming above him. Wet and tired enough to feel it in his bones. A caffeine headache now, ice behind his eyes, mainlining three sugars and black even before they left the station at 7.30 a.m. He looked at the cardboard cup in his hands: anything to keep him going. Anything to ease the roar of static in his ears.

The letter. After reading it he could barely concentrate on what he was doing. Had staggered from his house to the car. Almost lost control of it on the drive into work, drifting into the opposite lane, missing an oncoming motorcyclist by inches. Found himself sitting in his motor in the car park of the nick, engine running and a uniform tapping on the window to check he was all right.

He’d nodded. A smiling zombie. ‘All fine here. Cheers, mate.’

All fine here. But it wasn’t fine. It didn’t make sense. Unless . . .

MacReady shifted upright. Willed himself to focus on something other than his wife. Flipped open his file of paperwork and studied the printout on top.

An email to the MIR from Barnard late the previous night: the full PM yet to be done, but from prelims the body recovered from the maisonette garden was a black or mixed-race male, late teens, early twenties.

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