Free Chimera by Celina Grace Page A

I’m right, next time we have lunch, you’re buying.”
    Kate smiled reluctantly. “You know I don’t gamble, Stuart. But I don’t mind shouting you lunch.”
    Stuart laughed and, thankfully, Kate could see him dismissing the subject. “Can’t believe you don’t gamble. Don’t you have Irish heritage? It should be in your blood.”
    “That’s why,” said Kate, standing up to leave. “Thanks, anyway. Let’s meet up soon, yes?”
    “You got it.”
    They hugged goodbye and Kate made her way back to the office, thinking about what Stuart had said. He was right. Why had she been so shocked by Doctor Telling’s findings on the pathology table? Her, a seasoned police officer? With a pang, she recalled that Stuart had lost a brother to heroin addiction, years ago. No wonder he was more attuned to the possibility. She wished she’d remembered that at the lunch so she could have talked to him about it. But perhaps that would have been too painful.
    Kate ran over the details of the case in her head. Even if Trixie had been an addict, it wasn’t that straightforward, was it? What about the bruising on Trixie’s arm? Kate pondered the questions as she walked back to her desk. Who had cleared away the syringes, the drugs, the tourniquets? She wondered whether Anderton had interviewed Jacob Arlen yet and whether anything interesting had come to light. She had a flashback to sitting at the Arlens’ kitchen table, watching Arlen’s face as he recounted his journey up to the bedroom, through the silent house, to find his wife’s dead body on the bed. Kate remembered the blonde neighbour, the friend – what was her name? Kyla Mellors – and the slight hesitation in the woman’s answers. There was something there, something to be further investigated. It could be nothing, but then again… Kate added interview Kyla Mellors to her ever-growing checklist of things to do.
     
    Doctor Telling had emailed through the information on John Henry Miller and Kate spent the rest of the afternoon reading through it. He’d been born in 1960, had gone to school in London, and joined the army at sixteen. Reading between the bare facts, Kate could see a man who’d lost his place in the world once he left the Armed Forces – a sad fact that was more common than people thought. There were several reports which detailed his arrests for vagrancy, for being drunk and disorderly, for possession of a class A substance. She flipped forward to the photo that Missing Persons had forwarded. A non-descript man, weathered by years of rough living, brown eyes, greying hair. Someone had obviously reported him missing at some point, for MISPER to have his details, but who? And did it really matter? Kate did a quick calculation and worked out that his parents were almost certainly dead, given his age. Was it worth trying to find out? This wasn’t even their case anymore.
    After a moment, she slowly clicked the mouse to close the PDF and exited the email, with a faint feeling of guilt. She wondered how long Miller had lain dead in that cottage. Had he actually died from the overdose or had he succumbed to exposure, lying there comatose in the filth and the cold? It was horrible to think of, almost as horrible to think that there was no one left to mourn him. She made a resolution that she would go to his funeral. She would probably be the only one there, apart from the celebrant, but that made it even more important. Kate made a quick mental note to find out when the council-funded funeral would be.
    Miller’s grizzled old face kept recurring to Kate that night as she relaxed at home. She had lit a fire, the first of the season, as the warm autumnal weather had suddenly given way to a chill. Her living room was neat, as usual, and filled with objects of comfort and sentimental value. She should have been happy, or at least relaxed, but somehow the image of the derelict cottage kept intruding, Miller’s remains in a nauseating puddle on the filthy