Free The Affair by Emma Kavanagh

The bodies are still inside. I’m not even sure how I know that – whether I heard it ripple through the crowd, the whispers carried on the breeze, whether I saw it on the face of the waiting police officers, or whether it is simply that I have been here, or a variant of here, so many times before.
    I squeeze my way through the throng of people, wishing that I had remembered my press pass – Charlotte Solomon,
Swansea Times
. That it wasn’t currently languishing in amongst the Twix wrappers and the scrambled scraps of paper on my desk. But then in all likelihood my press pass would make very little difference to the crowd that has gathered. So what that I have a job to do? They live here in Harddymaes with its boxed-up council houses and its harsh scrubland, and right here, on their doorstep, they have a murder. Not just a murder. A double murder. They’re not moving for anyone.
    I shimmy in between a thick-chested man, smelling sickly-sweet of stale booze, and a narrow woman with a large, hook-shaped nose, who has wrapped her arms so tightly around herself that it is a miracle she can breathe. Not for the first time, I thank God for the five-foot-two-inch frame that allows me to slip into places normal-sized people wouldn’t be able to go. Rather like a rat up a drainpipe. The booze-soaked man glances at me, leers appreciatively, and I suppress a shudder, instead forming my face into what I’m hoping is a charming smile. You never know who your source is going to be. He winks.
    The call came in to the
Swansea Times
offices from a ‘concerned’ citizen. A believer in the freedom of the press, someone not at all out for a reward – is there one, by the way? The twin dead bodies had been found in a terraced house, in the heart of Harddymaes, a house registered to a Mr Morris Myricks and his wife, Mrs Sian Myricks. Now, said the caller, don’t quote me on this, and I couldn’t tell you for sure, but it definitely looks like old Morris has had it. My boys, said the caller, well, they were just in the Myricks’ back garden to get their football back. Perfectly innocent, like. Only the thing was, they couldn’t ’elp looking through the window, and that’s when they saw them lying there – two of them, in all that blood.
    I’ve been to these houses before. The back windows are six feet off the garden. Perfectly innocent, my arse.
    I glance around the crowd. A couple of teenage boys, younger than they look, hang at the edge of it, leaning against bike handles and trying to look worldly. One of them has been crying. The footballers, I presume.
    The police tape lines the front garden, roping off the knee-high grass, the rough concrete path, the window beyond. I bounce on my toes slightly, trying to get a view, to see beyond the cordon into the darkness beyond. But there is nothing. Flowers have been left already, a mass of cheap carnations in cellophane wrap. They have been propped against a neighbouring wall, a makeshift shrine in this most unlikely of temples. It always mystifies me, how these things are gathered so fast. Do people keep a handy supply of carnations and sad-looking teddy bears around, just in case?
    My gaze shifts from the flowers to the uniformed officers. There are three of them, standing with arms folded, serious faces. I study them, looking for a face that I recognise, but these ones are young, preternaturally so. The one nearest me has his arms folded across his chest, but his pallor is grey. I’m laying odds on him being the first on the scene. I study him for a moment: double or nothing, it’s his first dead body. Two for the price of one. Lucky boy. I sigh, settle back to wait.
    I recognise the odd face in the crowd. After all, I am here in Harddymaes a lot. Rampant car-crime; an off-licence that has been knocked over more times than I’ve had hot dinners. I know the area, I know the wide-splayed roads with their views down to the sea, which anywhere else should cost a fortune, but here