Running Girl by Simon Mason Read Free Book Online

mother – and think of something else to talk about for twenty minutes before we head off.’
    Garvie didn’t move. He stood there scrutinizing his uncle in silence.
    â€˜What is it now, Garvie?’
    â€˜How old are you, Uncle Len?’
    Taken by surprise, his uncle hesitated.
    Garvie said, ‘That inspector, that Singh guy, he thought you were coming up to retirement.’
    Uncle Len made a small puffy noise of indignation.
    â€˜I told him you’re a lot younger than you look.’
    â€˜I’m not sure that’s much of a compliment.’
    â€˜It wasn’t meant to be a compliment.’
    â€˜No, well. I’ll be fifty in August. Born in Barbados, as you know. On Grand Kadooment Day, if you know what that is.’
    â€˜I can find out,’ Garvie said, and went with the drinks into the living room, leaving his uncle, who was preparing to explain all about Grand Kadooment Day, standing bewildered in the kitchen.
    After they had gone Garvie Smith sat alone in his uncle’s front room, thinking. He thought about complex numbers. They were interesting, the way they didn’t add up. Like a very noticeable girl going missing without anyone noticing. Like her body turning up in a place at a time when she would never have willingly gone there. He thought too about the dead body itself: a simple nought, a brute fact, a thing on an autopsy gurney. Perhaps even that wasn’t as simple as it sounded.
    Time passed slowly in Uncle Len’s house now that Garvie was on his own. He ate all the snacks that Aunt Maxie had left for him, and settled Bojo when he woke up, and watched the usual crap on TV. He even thought about getting out his maths revision until he realized he had forgotten to bring it. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Chloe Dow’s dead body, about autopsy reports and confidential preliminary reports. Photographs. He was pretty sure Uncle Len hadn’t been telling him the truth. After all, he had examined the body. Photographs had definitely been taken. Information existed, even if it wasn’t officially ‘available’.
    At ten o’clock the television news came on, and inevitably the main story, much extended, was the Dow investigation. Garvie watched an awkward interview with Detective Inspector Singh, who appealed again for witnesses to come forward, and footage of Mr and Mrs Dow disappearing through a media scrum into the police station. There was an emotional interview with Chloe’s ‘best friend’, Jessica Walker – a slim, dark-haired girl whose pretty face was blurred with leaky mascara – sobbing her way through the questions, repeating over and over that Chloe was the best, the kindest, the most beautiful friend she could have had, and blurting out at the end that she would love her for ever. Garvie snorted; he knew what sort of friend Jessica had been. More interesting to him were the factual reports. The murder was being treated as a sex attack. The cause and mechanism of death were announced as strangulation and asphyxia, the estimated time of death between 4 and 9 on the Friday evening, but more probably between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. Prolonged immersion in the water made it difficult to be more exact, a spokesman said, a fact which might have been deliberately exploited by the murderer. Chloe’s body, fully dressed, had been weighed down by an iron bar, though the source of the bar remained unknown. Her mobile phone, found submerged in the pond near her body, was being examined; inevitably data on it had been destroyed.
    The now-familiar photograph of Chloe appeared several times during the programme, as if to corroborate not only her beauty, which was plain to see, but her kindness, her popularity and her heartbreaking girlish charm. Every time it appeared Garvie flinched a little. He knew the photograph. He remembered taking it.
    He shut off his memory. When the news ended he turned off the television too and