The Trawlerman, стр. 43
Moths had gathered on the window, drawn by the light. More arrived, banging against it. The air seemed full of them.
‘But you know what you’ve just done, don’t you?’ her daughter had said when she’d told her the story.
‘Hopefully, I’ve found a way to get an innocent man out of custody.’
‘Yes. And now the insurance aren’t going to pay for Callum Younis’s care any more because you’ve proved it wasn’t a murder. Finding this out means he won’t get any money, just like with Bill.’
The moths seemed to multiply on the window. Those that didn’t settle knocked against the glass, over and over, the sound of a gloved knuckle gently tapping. There seemed to be hundreds of them there. Alex shivered.
Thirty-one
The weekend came and went, with still no sign of Bill. Alex waited for news about the Younis case but heard nothing.
On Monday, for the first time, on Jill’s advice, she tried heels, to mark her first week back at work. Low ones.
‘Really, Mum?’ said Zoë.
‘I’m just trying them. You’re the one who wants me to change, after all.’
‘They just look wrong on you, that’s all. I prefer your dykey look.’
‘My what?’
‘Seriously, Mum. I’m glad you’re doing this. Even if you’re dressing funny.’
Alex leaned forward for a kiss. Zoë jerked her head backwards, laughing.
At work there was coffee, at least. The one without the beard had brought in his own beans and made the coffee on an AeroPress. Alex smelt it, took a sip and looked up. ‘This is actually amazing,’ she said.
‘I roast them in a popcorn popper,’ he said shyly.
She looked at him. ‘Married or single?’ she asked.
He blushed.
‘I’m kidding,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’m half lesbian, according to my daughter. It’s just I don’t want to accept that I actually like you guys,’ she said. ‘I might get stuck here.’
The man retreated, backing out of the door.
‘Wait,’ she said, calling him back. ‘That data you are putting together on domestic violence. Is it anonymised?’
‘Of course.’
‘Before you get hold of it?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘I want to look at historical clusters of domestic abuse.’
‘Fine.’
‘Particularly in Folkestone.’
He hesitated. ‘Folkestone?’
‘Yes. Between say, seven and nine years ago. Can we do that?’
A look of concern crossed his face. ‘That’s a very specific data set. You might not be able to learn much from such a small sample.’
She took another sip from her cup and smiled. ‘That’s a risk I’m willing to take. Will it take long?’
He blinked. He thinks I don’t understand anything he does here, she thought.
‘About the same time as it takes to make a cup of coffee.’
Five minutes later an email pinged in: Is this what you need?
She opened the link. There was a graph and a click-through to a map, created from the data she had requested. She zoomed in on it until it showed a small selection of streets in the north side of the town. A slider at the bottom allowed her to move through the dates, starting with the oldest. As she moved through the dates, a large blue blob appeared on the screen, first in early 2010, then it faded. It was back in the following summer and again that autumn. A blue blob indicating a roughly anonymised area of town that included the street that Tina Hogben had lived in with her husband Frank. She zoomed in closer. The blob hung over the bottom end of Broadmead Road.
She called through the door. ‘Can you help me with this?’
His head appeared around the door and edged around to her side of the desk. She ran through the dates over again. ‘What would explain that kind of pattern?’
The man peered at the screen. ‘I would assume that to be a single household, with multiple call-outs over that period.’
As she slid through the dates, she watched the blob bloom from some time in 2011 and disappear around a month before Frank Hogben disappeared.
‘Call-outs from that address?’
‘Yes.’ He hesitated, then changed his mind. ‘Not necessarily from the address. Just as likely the neighbours calling it in. You can’t tell from that data which address it is, but it’s very localised. So whether it’s someone calling from that address or people calling in a problem about that address . . .’
‘People who hear stuff and make the call?’
‘Yes . . . Is that all?’
When he’d closed the door, she thought for a while, then took out her phone and texted Zoë.
Do you have Stella’s number?
At lunch she arranged to meet Jill on the recreation ground at the back of the HQ; on hot summer days, they weren’t the only people who took their lunch out here. Jill was sitting under the shade of a horse chestnut. She had several plastic pots around her containing brownish dips, and vegetables carefully cut into fingers. Alex had bought an egg sandwich from the canteen and wolfed it down faster than she should have.
‘Look at you,’ said Jill, looking approvingly at her shoes.
‘Bog off.’
Jill grinned. ‘And what about Bob Glass? We were right all along. They released him. Apparently we’re looking at a possible murder suicide. Did you hear?’
Alex said nothing.
‘Which is totally weird, isn’t it? If they’d actually listened to what we were saying . . . DI McAdam says he thinks it was all so the Younises could get insurance for their son on account of Ayman losing all that money.’
‘Really?’
‘You should do something about your hair too.’
‘Will you leave it alone?’ said Alex, but she didn’t mean it. Maybe she should look after herself a little better, she thought.
‘We are in such shit. Did you see the papers this morning? They mentioned DI McAdam by name as the one who’d cocked it up.’
Alex lay on the warm grass, feeling like a woman with superpowers