Free Kind of Cruel by Sophie Hannah Page A

staggeringly improbable that I’m going to stick my neck out and say it didn’t happen. Sergeant Kombothekra and DC Sellers would do well to extend their respective necks in a similar direction, if they care about their careers.’
    Proust walked towards Simon slowly enough to make clear his disgust at the prospect of arriving at his destination. ‘You don’t, evidently,’ he said. ‘You let it be known – with no explanation or apology, as if it might have nothing to do with you – that Sergeant Zailer is familiar with a sequence of words that she has no right to be familiar with. An apathetic confession-by-omission: we infer from your story that you’ve breached the Data Protection Act – the Official Secrets Act, too, if we want to be pedantic about it . . .’
    ‘Charlie’s not just my wife,’ said Simon. ‘She’s a police officer.’
    ‘Barely, these days, from what I hear.’ Proust snapped. ‘Isn’t she part of the team that’s been leased out to some crackpot feelgood think-tank and charged with discouraging the inhabitants of the Culver Valley from committing suicide? That’s work for unpaid shoulders-to-cry-on, not for the police, even if idiots in police uniforms are doing it.’ Turning to Sam and Sellers, Proust said, ‘Does anyone but me think it’s noteworthy that Sergeant Zailer’s professional interest in suicide followed hot on the heels of her marrying Waterhouse?’
    It was like having the whole of Hell in the office with you, Simon thought. ‘Charlie used to work with us, and she’s a better detective than most of the people in this room,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what the Data Protection Act says. We all know there’s no good reason why I shouldn’t discuss Katharine Allen with Charlie, and it’s lucky I did. If I hadn’t, we wouldn’t have got this lead. What are you talking about, it didn’t happen? Are you saying Charlie’s lying?’
    The room filled with the sound of everyone breathing too loudly. If Simon had been asked to guess with his eyes closed, he’d have said twenty people hiding from a predator. Or leaping off the top of a mountain . There was something enlivening about refusing to be intimidated by an objectively intimidating person. Simon was surfing the crest of an adrenaline wave; he hoped it wasn’t affecting his judgement.
    ‘Let’s not malign poor Sergeant Zailer, in her absence,’ said Proust. ‘Why would she lie? Mistakes have always been her speciality, even when she was on the right side of her sell-by date, and she must have made one in this case. The Hewerdine person saw the words in the notebook – all the words, together, at the same time. There’s no connection between the Hewerdine woman and Katharine Allen’s murder.’
    Simon had foreseen that the Snowman’s response would be grudging and unhelpful, but he hadn’t predicted outright denial. He stood his ground. ‘Charlie’s sure. When Hewerdine saw the notebook, there was no “Kind of Cruel” on the page, only “Kind” and “Cruel”. If you want to talk about staggering improbability, how about the likelihood of improbable things happening every second of every day? How likely was it that you’d be born – you, Giles Proust, exactly as you are? Or any of us. How likely was it that the four of us would end up working together?’ Simon had to shout louder than he wanted to because he was shouting for everyone: all the people who had ever wanted to scream in the Snowman’s face but hadn’t dared do it. He was their representative.
    ‘The four of us working together?’ Proust said tightly. ‘Is that what you’d call it? Not three of us trapped in an enclosed space with a delirious zealot?’
    Simon forced himself to wait a few seconds before speaking. ‘Is it really all that unlikely that a woman who lives in Rawndesley might be connected in some way to a murder that happened in Spilling, twenty minutes away? Or that that woman would bump into Charlie in Great