Free Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre Page A

suspects there might be more to know about the man himself. You’re the expert. What do you say?’
    She held up a small, transparent-plastic tube.
    ‘Yeah, I’d say there might be more to know.’

NINE
    ‘Removing evidence from a sealed police crime scene. You’re showing prodigious potential. So what is it?’
    ‘It’s a plastic drug ampoule. NHS standard. The label’s been removed. I can get it analysed to find out what was in it.’
    ‘Jenny Dalziel mentioned that naughty doctors have been known to deal drugs, but that looks to me more a receptacle for prescribed rather than proscribed substances. What’s the deal? He was a doctor. Don’t you have these things around?’
    Sarah shook her head. ‘Not at home, you don’t. You get glass ampoules which you have to chuck straight in the sin bin – the sharps bucket – when you’ve emptied them. The plastic ones can just go in any bin, but you still wouldn’t stick one in your pocket or anything. The lack of a label is very suspicious. I want to know what this was and what he was doing with it at home.’
    ‘The police found a needle but no syringe, so they figured the missing syringe was taken by the killer. What if the ampoule was his too?’
    ‘Then he’s no junkie,’ she said. ‘Smackheads don’t shoot up mid-burglary, I don’t imagine. And heroin doesn’t come in these.’
    ‘So what’s your angle on all this, Jack. Is it just a good story? Is that all it takes to get you involved?’
    They were sitting on the bare floor in the living room, their backs to opposite walls, drinking more coffee. The room was lit by streetlights from the open-curtained window, as the only alternative was the bare bulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling, which was a little oppressive and hurt the eyes at this time of night. It was almost pleasantly conspiratorial. They had grown tired of standing in the kitchen, and although the living room had no furniture either, it felt a more natural place to squat down.
    Sarah was interested, concerned, maybe even excited, but too tired to exhibit strong symptoms of any of the above. She stared across at Parlabane in the half-light, that shock of fairhair occasionally falling over his eyes in a way that seemed to be irritating him too much for it to be an affectation.
    He had scored high marks for not saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t think you had to be a doctor to do that’ when she said she was an anaesthetist, and had trumped it by failing to remark at all when she told him her surname, which made her professional title Dr Slaughter.
    He seemed sharp, attentive and perceptive; he listened not only to what she was saying, but what she was telling him. However, when he stared at her with those mischievous hazel eyes, she had an uncomfortable feeling of being robbed. She had no idea who he was, where he came from, what was in his past, which had made it strangely easier to talk to him initially, but there was an inescapable feeling that he was hiding something.
    ‘Is a good story not enough?’ he asked. ‘It’s my raison d’être, remember.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she stated flatly. ‘I’m not sure who you’re asking. Is a good story not enough to explain your involvement to me, or not enough to explain your involvement to yourself?’
    Parlabane shook his head and smiled, hiding.
    ‘Now that’s a whole other mystery: he said.
    But Sarah wouldn’t back off.
    ‘Oh no. You don’t get to be the stranger with a past here. You’re asking me to trust you, but I don’t know anything about you. You’re sitting here in a flat without furniture, for God’s sake. What are you actually doing here?’
    ‘I’m here because it wasn’t wise to stay in LA any more.’
    ‘And why were you in LA?’
    ‘Because it wasn’t wise to stay in London any more.’
    ‘And what were you doing in London?’
    ‘Wasting my time.’
    Sarah smiled, but it was not a happy smile. ‘You know, every day I find myself running round in circles