Free Dead Bad Things by Gary McMahon Page B

through the glass and out onto the street. I followed the imaginary line made by her broad, stiff finger. All the way to the first floor massage parlour on the other side of the street.
    Â Â Surely it couldn't be this easy.
    Â Â "She's a working girl?"
    Â Â The waitress laughed. She wiped down the counter with a grubby blue cloth. The surface was already clean. The motion was like a nervous twitch. "Of course not, deary. She works on the top floor – above the knocking shop. Immaculee is a psychic."
    Â Â My head went cold; my brain froze. My heart turned to ice. I felt it dripping, dripping, and beginning to thaw.
    Â Â The dead; it always comes back to the dead.
    Â Â The waitress laughed again, and then she began to sing along to the old man's whistled tune:
    Â Â "… and I'm feeling good ."
    Â Â I wished that I could join in, but any attempt at harmony would have been a lie.

 
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SEVEN
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    As a rule Sarah rarely drank anything stronger than cranberry juice before lunch – and then only sparingly, because she'd heard somewhere that too much of the stuff rotted your insides. Today, however, she was drinking whisky. She needed it just to get through this task.
    Â Â She stared at the floor, frowning at the pile of creased paperwork she had pulled from the drawers: faded envelopes and dog-eared manila folders, all making her wish that she could set fire to the whole fucking lot. Yes, that would be good; send the old bastard's legacy up in flames. But she wouldn't, of course. She could tell herself that destruction was the way to go, but the reality of the situation was that she needed to know what was in there. Those photographs had piqued her interest; they had triggered her mental twitch and the only response was to investigate. After all, didn't she want to be a detective?
    Â Â The backbone of any case, as her father had said many times, was the careful sifting of information.
    Â Â Somewhere outside a dog barked. The sound was snappy, incessant, and before long it began to play on her nerves. The familiar sound of a police helicopter flying overhead drew her focus. She wondered who they were after, and had to restrain herself from going to the window to take a look outside. She was off duty: let the others deal with whatever was happening out there. She needed a break from other people's problems so that she might concentrate on her own.
    Â Â Slowly, she began to play her fingers through the grubby folders and loose sheets of paper, flipping the edges. There were receipts from restaurants she'd never heard of, and from towns she had never visited. The dates on the scrappy tariffs were ancient – going back decades. For an organised officer, her father's personal files were chaotic. She remembered that he'd been in some kind of blues tribute band when she was a kid, playing rhythm guitar to ease the stress of the job. He'd given it up when she was aged about ten, and she knew that he'd continued to miss gigging for the rest of his life.
    Â Â Freedom, he had always told her, was when the people you loved couldn't be with you. It had sounded like an insult, but her mother had always just laughed. Well, at least her mouth had: her eyes never quite seemed to get the joke.
    Â Â "What were you hiding in here?" The question, spoken aloud in that way, took her by surprise. She had not expected it. Despite the fact that it must have been on her mind, she had no idea where such a blunt query had originated.
    Â Â "Hiding…" The word tasted bad, like bitter spices in a day-old curry. Deep down, even when she was much younger, she had always known that her father enjoyed a hidden life – an existence even more degraded than the one he let her see at home. Did the evidence of this other life lie somewhere within the stuff he'd left behind, stashed away like the bent evidence of a forgotten crime?
    Â Â Sarah closed her eyes.