Free This Thing of Darkness by Harry Bingham Page A

me.
    We don’t hang up straight away. Just stay there, listening to the crackle. Then one of us says goodnight. Then the other one does too. And then we are alone, as alone as Derek Moon, but without the clay, the worms, the stars, the daffodils.
    I think police rules matter and I’ll try to abide by them. But the dead matter more. Their rules are sacred and they last for ever.

 
    9
     
    The next morning. Ten o’clock.
    DI Watkins comes down to the exhibit rooms to get me. Knocks, because the entry system doesn’t allow her to walk straight in.
    I open the door. She looks around. Says, ‘Christ!’
    I look around too, sharing her joy.
    ‘I made some changes.’
    Turned off the overhead lights.
    Got rid of Ifor’s horrible waterfall poster. His loathsome pot plant.
    Put up the picture of Kirsty Emmett. Also the one of Derek Moon’s mashed skull. And also, because all inquiries are, for me, merely rivers that flow into the one great sea of investigation, other pictures too. A photo of Janet and April Mancini, the corpses that launched my CID career. Of Stacey Edwards, who was kind to Janet and who died the same way. Of Mary Langton: a photo of her head, the one I found, blackly dripping, in a barrel of old motor oil. Of Ali Al-Khalifi, a naughty boy who found himself chopped up and scattered across suburban Cardiff for his sins. Of Mark Mortimer, a man who would have had ethical issues with a roomful of bishops and died a suicide. Of Hayley Morgan, who died of starvation and rat poison, with plaster dust in her gums. Of Saj Kureishi, who died with his hands detached from his wrists, and a look of perplexity on his ash-grey face. Of Nia Lewis. A girl who died, tangled in nettles on a wet field margin, for almost no reason at all, except that I caused a scene and she was unlucky enough to witness it.
    My photo gallery, my friends.
    Watkins gapes and looks wonderingly at the space where Ifor’s desk used to be.
    ‘I got rid of it. It was annoying me.’
    In its place now, a nest of cushions. Some borrowed from home. Others bought for the purpose. I’ve got two laptops. Also Ifor’s old desktop, which I use mostly as a lampstand. A gizmo duct-taped to the ceiling that looks for the faint trace of a mobile phone signal and amplifies it, so I can use my own phone, even down here in the basement. The gizmo is an unlicensed transmitter and isn’t actually legal, but I can hardly arrest myself and I don’t think anyone else is about to do so. A catering size box of those oaty energy bars, a small kettle and a box of peppermint tea bags completes my domesticities.
    The only regular furniture is the bare wooden table on which the HOLMES terminal toadily crouches.
    I say, ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’
    Watkins chooses not to respond, but I’m genuinely proud of what I’ve accomplished. It’s the first room I’ve ever really furnished. I mean, yes, I own a house and there is stuff in there which I purchased, but I only bought a sofa and put it in my living room because I know that’s what people usually do with sofas and living rooms. Almost every choice I made, I made in order to bring myself closer to average. The whole place is beige and white and magnolia and chrome and so blandly inoffensive it’s like a museum of my opposite.
    Ifor’s dungeon now pleases me in almost every detail. I even like the exhibit shelving stretching into darkness. The knowledge that amongst those hairs and drink cans and casts of footprints there might lurk the clue that clinches a prosecution. I like the intimacy of it all. The secrecy and excitement.
    I stand there next to Watkins, almost absurdly house-proud. Bobbing up and down, awaiting compliments.
    Watkins isn’t the complimentary type, however. Her mouth moves, says nothing. A grim ‘Let’s go,’ is all she manages.
    So we do. Down to the Bay. Havannah Street. The sort of address that’s meant to have us drooling with desire and envy.
    No drool on me. None on Watkins.
    We