Free Remember Me This Way by Sabine Durrant

suppose, still flickered in my limbs. She stopped halfway along, rummaged in her bag for her keys, and went into a house. I gave her time to take her coat off, clean her teeth, make a cup of tea, and then I slipped along the road on the other side to see where she lived.
    Deal-breaker, I’m afraid. Even if Boxland or Moxton Eastfield had revealed untold delights – a Michelin-starred restaurant, say – I could never be happy with someone who had chosen a house like that. Ugly aluminium windows blocked by grubby net curtains, an elaborate front porch that wouldn’t have looked out of place at Versailles, an area for off-street parking that seemed to have been paved in shiny square bathroom tiles. Disappointing. But probably just as well. Not worth breaking in to check the interior. Sufficient danger signs – the job, The Economist , the clothes. If the property and its location had been tempting, I might have slipped up. I’m going to tinker with my profile. Probably best to find someone without a degree, narrow the field. I yearn for sweetness, I realise, not sassiness. I don’t need to be patronised. People with university degrees – medical or otherwise – think they know everything. Often they don’t have a clue.
    I didn’t feel guilty following ‘Cathy’. If you agree to meet a stranger, what do you expect? It probably would have given her a thrill if she’d known I was out there.
    I would never have imagined her living in a house like that. But of course the thing with people is, you never can tell.

Chapter Five
    Lizzie
    ‘I’d take a dead body over vomit any day. I’m not being funny. Last night, I was called to an incident at the Taj Mahal – some clever clogs had bitten off his mate’s ear – and I was taking down statements when this young lad leaned forward and puked over my shoes. I was almost sick myself. You know that thing? That other-people’s-vomit gag reflex? My mum said I had it bad even as a child.’
    PC Hannah Morrow, my Family Liaison Officer, is sitting at my kitchen table. There’s a cup of tea next to her, but she hasn’t had a chance to drink it yet. She hunches her shoulders and tightens her grip on her stomach to illustrate the horror of the experience.
    Jane, stilettoed feet on the bars of my chair, says, ‘I think I’d be better with puke than a corpse.’
    ‘Honestly? I’d rather have neither.’
    They’ve been here for at least an hour, talking away like this. I’m like a ghost. I’m hardly here.
    It was past eight when I got back, already dark. Jane was waiting outside the house, pacing up and down to keep warm. Hannah arrived shortly after. I wanted her here because she might be an unofficial social worker (we have that in common), but as a policewoman she has resources. I figured she would help.
    But now she is talking. This chatter – it’s been her way from the beginning, from that night she knocked on the door. She was only twenty-five then. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her. The inanities about what she had eaten that day, what her mum had said or thought, made me want to scream at first. I thought it was stupidity. Now, a year on, a year in which she has bought her own flat and lost five pounds and bobbed her hair, I understand what she’s doing. It’s a coping strategy. She is letting the mood in the room settle.
    Her boss, DI Perivale, gave a talk on Internet safety at school last month and I told him how brilliant I thought Morrow was, how calm and constant even when other people were falling apart. He said something sniffy about how young officers are often better at ‘doing an agony’ than officers with more experience. ‘Doing an agony’: the phrase stayed with me.
    Tonight she was off duty, but she still came. ‘Are you kidding?’ she said. ‘I was bored out of my skull. Nothing on but Antiques Roadshow . It was either you or a phone call to my nan.’
    ‘Was the ear salvageable?’ Jane has leaned across to rest her