Thicker Than Water

’

‘Don’t let the C2s in until we’re finished,’ Coldwood called out to him, and the driver relayed the instruction to whoever he was talking to. ‘C2s’ was an idiosyncratic abbreviation for celebrity chefs: it was what Coldwood and his Serious Crimes Unit muckers called their valued colleagues in the forensics division.

We drove through Newington as it was waking up: shopkeepers taking their armour plating down to greet the new day, or tipping buckets of foaming bleach on the dog turds in front of their doors; a sluggish street-cleaning van nosing its way along the gutters like a pig looking for truffles.

‘You didn’t seem surprised to hear that Rafi Ditko had gone walkies,’ Gary commented, looking back at me from the car’s front passenger seat. His face was so devoid of emotion that a passing artist might have mistaken it for a blank canvas. ‘We were only officially notified about it yesterday.’

‘Well, I keep my ear to the ground,’ I responded in kind.

‘Good way to get your face trodden on.’

‘If you catch me at it, feel free to cast the first boot.tice first’

Gary frowned. He hates being smart-mouthed in front of his chattels and gofers, and this probably rankled all the more because he was doing me a favour: letting me know, in his own winsome way, that Rafi’s disappearance from the secure care facility where he’d lived - if you wanted to call it that - for the past three years had now become a police matter.

Perhaps by way of clawing back some of the points he’d just lost, Gary switched to another topic. ‘So who is it that’s watching you?’ he asked.

I blinked, false-footed. ‘Who’s what?’ Now this was news to me, and I couldn’t quite get my guard up in time to hide it. ‘Two-man tag team,’ Gary said.

‘Probably the rent man,’ I said sourly. Jenna-Jane bloody Mulbridge, much more likely. Maybe this was why she’d kept Rafi out of the news: so I’d relax, get sloppy and lead her straight to him. But obviously it hadn’t worked yet, or they wouldn’t still be there. And now - well, forewarned was forearmed.