Free Off Minor by John Harvey Page B

her job at first, trying to get her to relax a little, some chance.
    “There isn’t anything else I can tell you,” Sara said, selecting a strawberry fizz. “About finding that poor girl’s body. I’ve been over it again and again in my mind.”
    “I wanted to ask you about your boyfriend,” Lynn said.
    “Boyfriend?”
    “Yes, Raymond.”
    “Raymond isn’t my boyfriend.”
    “I’m sorry, I thought …”
    “That was the first time I’d ever seen him. That evening.”
    “Oh,” said Lynn, looking at her half-profile, Sara less than keen on eye contact, “I thought …”
    “I’d known him longer?”
    “Yes, I suppose …”
    “Because I went with him?”
    “I suppose so.”
    Sara looked at Lynn then, a dart of the head, round and away.
    “We didn’t do anything, you know.”
    “Look, Sara …”
    “I mean, nothing happened.”
    “Sara …”
    “Nothing serious.”
    Just for a moment, lightly, Lynn touched the girl’s arm. “Sara, it’s none of my business.”
    Sara Prine got to her feet, brushing puffs of pink sherbet away from the front of her uniform. Higher up the street, outside C & A, a busker wearing a comic hat and a red nose was singing “There’s a Blue Ridge Round my Heart, Virginia,” accompanying himself on banjo. It wasn’t the version Lynn had heard in the station canteen.
    “Sara,” she said, trying for the intonation of a friend, an older sister.
    Sara sat back down.
    “Where you and Raymond went, the sidings, did you get the impression he’d been there before?”
    She thought it over, nibbling at a hangnail on her little finger. “I hadn’t really thought about it, but, yes, I suppose … He knew where he was taking me, yes. I mean, he wasn’t stumbling around in the dark.”
    “And the building itself?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. He could’ve. Yes. Though we didn’t really go far in, you know, not at first.”
    “When you were …” Lynn paused “… kissing?”
    “Yes.”
    “So up until the time you suspected there might be something very nasty in there as well, what would you say was Raymond’s mood?”
    Sara chewed at the flesh inside her lower lip. “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Well, was he, for instance, was he excited, was he nervous?”
    “He wasn’t nervous, no. Only after.”
    “After you found Gloria’s body?” Sara nodded.
    “Up to that point, then, he wasn’t apprehensive at all?”
    Sara frowned, not certain she understood.
    “Raymond, he wasn’t frightened?”
    “No. He had no need to be, did he? Specially not when he had the knife.”
    Lynn was aware of the skin at the back of her neck beginning to prickle. “Knife, Sara? What knife was this?”

    “So,” Alison Morley said, hands on the table, fingers spread, “shall I be talking to you again?”
    “I don’t know,” Patel said. “If we find somebody, make an arrest, then yes, it is possible.”
    “An identification parade?”
    “Possibly.”
    Alison Morley nodded once; getting to her feet, she gave the sides of her skirt a discreet downward pull.
    “Thank you for your time,” Patel said, suddenly self-conscious that she was watching him stow away his notebook and pen, push back his chair.
    “You’re not from here, are you?” she said.
    Patel shook his head. “Bradford. My family, they come from Bradford.”
    Alison nodded. “I thought it was more a Yorkshire accent.”
    “Well, yes.”
    “I’ve a cousin, comes from somewhere outside Leeds.”
    “Yes.” He glanced round at the door, began to back away. “Well, thanks for being so helpful.”
    “Wait a minute.”
    She took a small handkerchief from her pocket and nodded at the lapel of his jacket. “You’ve got something down you.”
    Patel watched as, carefully, she dabbed it away. The badge engraved with her name was so close to touching his other lapel. She had, he noticed, a tiny mole immediately below one corner of her mouth and level with the cleft of her chin.
    “There,” she said, satisfied,