After the Fire by Jane Casey Read Free Book Online

if she was finally at work after extensive sick leave. Her hair was neatly plaited, her coat immaculate. She looked as if she was in control, but there was something different about her – a fragility that hadn’t been there before. I recognised it like an old friend: fear.
    ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
    ‘Are
you
? You look like death warmed over.’
    ‘To think I missed you.’ I shook my head.
    She handed me a steaming cup of tea. ‘I thought you might need this.’
    ‘And all is forgiven.’ I held the cup in both hands, warming them. ‘Seriously, this isn’t too much for you, is it?’
    ‘Not so far.’ She put a hand to her stomach. It was a habit with her now, I’d noticed, whenever she thought about the knife wound that had almost ended her life, not to mention her career. When she felt threatened. When she felt uneasy. It was quite a giveaway, once you knew what it meant – a tell, the gamblers called it. I’d been meaning to mention it to her. In our job, giving information away could be a liability.
    But when her confidence was so fragile, criticising her felt wrong. It felt like the kind of thing Derwent would do.
    Derwent would say it was for her own good, that a weak member of the team put us all in danger. Derwent would say she should find a job in a quieter part of the Met – missing persons, maybe, or working on cold cases. Fraud. Following paper trails, not killers. And it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe, if the biggest hazard you faced every day was a paper cut.
    I still couldn’t do it. I knew Liv well enough to believe she would step aside if she wasn’t happy with her work on the murder team. She was her own fiercest critic. I knew her partner, Joanne, and she was a police officer too. She would see the signs if Liv began to crack up. So all in all, there was no need for me to intervene.
    Especially since I needed Liv’s presence more than ever. She was the best friend I had made in the job. She was reasonable where Derwent was perverse, supportive when he was undermining me. I had missed her very badly when she was on leave. I still hadn’t told her all the details of how my life had managed to come apart so spectacularly in such a short space of time. All she knew was that Rob, my handsome, funny, clever boyfriend, had gone on leave after his colleague was killed. She knew that we weren’t in touch, but she didn’t know why.
    The funny thing was, neither did I. I’d have spoken to him, if he’d contacted me. I’d have forgiven him if he asked me to. I’d forgiven him already, in fact.
    I still hadn’t quite forgiven myself, but that was another story.
    ‘Who are you working with on this one?’ Liv asked.
    ‘Derwent.’
    Her eyebrows went up. ‘Does Una Burt know?’
    ‘It was her idea. She sent him to collect me.’
    ‘I thought she wanted you to stay away from him.’
    ‘So did I.’ I’d been thinking about that, off and on. Almost the first thing Una Burt had done on taking over the team was to make a point of telling me I wouldn’t be working with Derwent. We were too close, she thought. He impaired my judgement. He slowed me down.
    Which, translated into plain English, was:
you keep him on the straight and narrow but I want to get rid of him, so let’s see what happens if you’re not holding him back from self-destruction
.
    To everyone’s surprise, not least mine, Derwent had behaved impeccably since Una Burt took over. I wasn’t convinced he’d changed, or that he was capable of changing. To me it felt like the false, uneasy peace that comes after a war has been declared, before the first battle. He wasn’t ready to fight her yet, but it was only a matter of time.
    I looked for Derwent in the crowd and found him almost immediately. He took up a lot of space, somehow, and it wasn’t that he was tall or broad-shouldered, although he was both. Even where people were gathered close together, he stood apart. Instinctively, everyone around him gave him plenty of