‘What about Fin?’ Kate asked.
Kelly gripped the wheel.
‘Jesus, Kate, I should have brought somebody else. I’m not in the mood to examine the men in my life. Your turn, any action recently?’
Kate smiled and sipped her coffee. ‘Not likely.’ She’d split with a long-term partner recently too. They were both single and pretending to be independent warriors in no need of a bloke. ‘I know you too well, Kelly Porter. Come on. What’s on your mind?’
Kelly stared out of the front windscreen and pretended to concentrate on the road. Then she gave in.
‘I’ve thought about moving Fin on, you know, getting him out of the office. I told him it’s over, I just can’t work with somebody I’m sleeping with, it’s distracting, and I haven’t got time.’
‘Or, you could just be honest and admit he was just a plaything all along. You needed to get over Johnny, and now you’ve had some space, and another bloke to keep you entertained, it’s time to think about what you really want.’
Kelly nodded to herself, but Kate saw it too.
‘It’s been fun,’ Kelly said.
Fin Maguire had moved to their team last year. Just as she was breaking up with Johnny. The timing sucked and it had been messy but now it was time to move on.
Again.
‘He doesn’t like Lizzie.’
‘What?’ Kate was indignant.
‘I don’t mean he actively dislikes her; I can just tell he’s not that into babies. I get it. It’s a drag. He’s too young. He finds her boring, I can tell.’
‘Fuck him, then,’ Kate said.
Kelly laughed. She could almost see Kate dusting her hands without a side glance for proof.
‘Johnny’s still single,’ Kate added.
‘And how would you know?’
‘Millie told me.’
When they pulled into Grasmere, the roads were busy with travellers seeking food for the evening or returning from walks around the surrounding fells. They parked along the road and already they could see a small group had gathered outsidethe Faeryland café and the uniformed coppers were trying to maintain some kind of order.
A journalist snapped pictures of Kelly and Kate as they approached the entrance. Kelly put up her hand to hide her face. She hated attention, especially from the press.
Word had got out fast.
A dead body on the side of a lake was big news in Cumbria. Something about the beauty of the place being sullied with death encouraged armchair analysis from all corners of the villages in the park. Unsolicited theories were highly unwelcome by Kelly most of the time, but particularly right at the beginning of an investigation.
They dipped under the police tape and approached the witness.
The unfortunate waitress looked deathly pale. She was a small slip of a thing, as her mother Wendy would have said. Fragile. Breakable. Unreliable.
She’d been given strong coffee and the owner of the café sat with her. He was introduced to Kelly by a uniform, and she thanked him. She could see a SOCO had already begun her work. Scenes of crime officers were specialists in the layout of a moment in time, left forever behind as a reminder of what had gone before. Reading a scene was a science. It was mechanical, cold and clinical. Every aspect of expiry that could not be explained was dealt with in a dispassionate flurry of words and diagrams until they had all their information neatly expressed in a report. It was Kelly’s job to bring the human touch to the inquiry. Interpretation was for the lead detective. Gathering information, submitting samples to labs, measuring blood spatter, taking fibres and putting them in plastic tubes, all of that was subsidiary to Kelly’s central duty. She enjoyed doing all those things, and it satisfied her scientific brain, but the real work was in reading the hints and the character of a scene.
So, she stopped short of the witness and studied her for a split second.
The girl was probably in her twenties, and she looked terrified. People thought dead bodies were simply inanimate objects, devoid of all life, but they weren’t; they were reminders of life itself and what had been lost. Kelly could tell just by looking at her that it would take her a long time to recover from what she’d witnessed here today.
Kelly smiled at her warmly and introduced herself to the owner.
She heard cameras clicking in the background and the waft of tarpaulin as a SOCO erected a barrier over the upturned rowing boat called theWater Nymph.
