The Burning by Jane Casey Read Free Book Online

rung her landline on my walk from the station, so I had known she wasn’t likely to be there, but when my key turned in the lock, dead air came out to meet me and I couldn’t suppress a shiver. The flat was empty, I knew without looking. The question was whether she had left any clue as to where she’d gone, and if she had, whether I could find it. I had spent a lot of time tidying up after Rebecca, one way or another. Covering up. I knew things about her that no one else did – that no one else should. And she knew a fair bit about me.
    Shaking myself out of my trance I closed the door behind me, took off my coat, and started to search.

Chapter Two
    M AEVE
    It wouldn’t have been such a nightmare to get out of the hospital if the press hadn’t already picked up on the fact that we had a suspect in intensive care. They were on us like a pack of dogs as soon as the boss showed his face outside the back door of the building. A babble of shouted questions exploded from the far side of the road, where the media had been corralled behind metal barriers.
    ‘Superintendent Godley! Over here, sir.’
    ‘Have you got him?’
    ‘Is it true you have a suspect in custody?’
    I slipped past the massed press, my presence unremarked, heading for my car. I’d be on the news, probably, but only my mother and her friends would spot me. I went out of my way to avoid seeing myself onscreen, as a rule. Untidy light-brown hair, a set expression, hunched shoulders: none of these things fit in with my image of myself, but undeniably they were what appeared on the TV every time I stalked across a cameraman’s field of vision. My mother’s voice was ringing in my ears: Ah, Maeve, if only you’d remembered to stand up straight . I bent my head, looked at the ground and kept going, hearing the slap of Rob’s shoes on the tarmac as he strode out to keep up with me. Not for the first time, I was glad to be out of the limelight, glad that Godley was the star of the show, even though he hated it. For such a high-profile senior officer, he wasn’t the sort to court attention. His statements were businesslike, his press conferences orderly, and if he had nothing to say, he said nothing. But everything he said and did was news, especially at the moment. The level of interest in the Burning Man was nothing short of hysteria. Godley spent a great deal of time on the phone to newspaper editors and TV bosses, begging them for a bit of sensitivity and responsibility in the way they reported on the case. We needed space to work in, but if they had the opportunity, they dived straight in. All in the public interest, apparently – and if they meant that the public was interested, they weren’t wrong. But I couldn’t see how conjecture about our lack of success helped anyone.
    Today, I doubted Godley had much he wanted to share with the press. Particularly today, when all the news was bad. An hour earlier, he would have been planning his speech at the press conference where we were to reveal the good news.
    Don’t worry, everyone. It’s all over. You can get back to enjoying the run-up to the festive season. Don’t mind us; we’re off for a pint .
    All of that was on hold, indefinitely. I couldn’t help feeling cold at the thought of where we were going and what we were going to find there. Another body. Another woman, brutalised and burned beyond recognition. And who he was – why he even did it in the first place – was as much a mystery now as it had been four bodies ago.
    ‘You OK?’ Rob had caught up with me at the pay station, where I was feeding an extraordinary number of coins into the machine. Surely I hadn’t been there for that long. I excavated the last few coins from the bottom of my bag, disentangling them from an old shredded tissue and pushing them bad-temperedly into the slot. The machine burped. I stabbed the button for a receipt and managed a smile.
    ‘Of course. All part of the job, isn’t it?’
    ‘It’s me you’re