Free This Thing of Darkness by Harry Bingham

gardening bits and pieces. I take a vase, fill it from a water butt under the vestry roof. Settle the flowers properly back.
    Take a photo. I’ve never seen Moon’s actual corpse and that bothers me somehow, like a missing tooth.
    As I’m doing this, I realise that I’m being watched from the other side of the graveyard wall by a girl in a red coat. Big eyes, serious mouth.
    I say, ‘Those flowers. Did you leave them?’
    She doesn’t nod exactly, but her face is more yes than no.
    ‘They looked very nice, but they last a bit better in water. You can get vases from over there,’ I tell her.
    She nods.
    ‘So they’ll look nice for him,’ I add and, as I do so, have this vision of Moon. Bearded beneath the soil. The blood on his scalp crusted over. Black as tar in the deeper-lying wounds. The dead man himself looking upwards, through the soil and the worms and the stones and the grass. Looking at the yellow daffodils and a silent girl in a scarlet coat.
    When I get home, I find two missed calls. Penry’s number, no message. I don’t call back.
    What I do do, however, is address a niggle that’s been bothering me. Lockwood’s divorce from Evans was clearly amicable enough, as amicable as these things ever are. Yet Francesca chose to change her name rather than stick with the one she was born with. And Ollie’s first answer about his sister’s presence in the house on the night of the burglary was a strange one. She’s in London now. Art student . And there was something gap-toothed about Lockwood’s photo collection, the one that contained no pictures of the daughter, Francesca, with her father.
    The daughter has a car registered to her name. A Fiat Punto hatchback, forty thousand miles on the clock. I use the national number-plate recognition system to try and track times when Francesca Lockwood was in the same place as her father. Can’t do it. That doesn’t mean they never have been in the same place – there are trains and taxis and buses and friends’ cars and a million other possibilities for interaction that I can’t trace. But still. He has a car. So does she. Yet the two things have never been in the same place at the same time, not even around Christmas.
    Another item for my to-do list, I fancy.
    As I’m getting to bed later that evening, the phone goes again. I answer it.
    ‘Brian,’ I say.
    ‘Fi.’ His voice is slurred. Beery.
    I imagine him standing upright, but leaning up against a wall. He has prison skin, too pale for the world.
    I didn’t call him, he called me, so I don’t see any need to make conversation. Just sit on my bed listening to the crackle on the line until he gets to what he wants to say.
    He says, ‘Your question. About what to do if you thought an investigation was going nowhere.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I didn’t give you an answer. Not really.’
    ‘So . . .?’
    ‘Look, I think coppers need to obey rules, I really do. The rules aren’t stupid, not most of them. But then, why become a copper at all? Why become a copper unless you want to deliver justice? And the rules don’t always help. Usually, yes, but not always.’
    That’s still not an answer, I think, but I don’t say so. Just sit listening to that crackle and thinking of Moon’s churchyard at night.
    Clay against the dead man’s lips. Daffodils yellow against the wheeling stars.
    Then Penry speaks again.
    ‘This investigation of yours. The security guard. You think that investigation is going nowhere?’
    ‘Maybe. Yes. Maybe.’
    ‘And you want to do something about it? Take action outside the rules?’
    ‘Maybe. Possibly. I’m not sure.’
    A pause, a short one. Penry winding himself up to an actual answer.
    ‘Fi, I think the justice comes first. It has to.’
    ‘Yes. Thank you. I think so too.’
    ‘But don’t fuck up. You’re still a police officer.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And you don’t want to end up like me. A copper and a convict.’
    I say yes. Tell him thanks.
    He says the same to