Lying Beside You (Cyrus Haven #3)(9)

I type a text message: On my way.

Lenny responds: About time.

My ageing Fiat doesn’t have a satnav, so I use my mobile phone, which is suctioned to the dashboard, and has a female voice that sounds uncannily like a patient of mine, Ursula, an occupational therapist suffering from apotemnophobia – a fear of missing limbs.

Forty minutes later, I reach the outskirts of Nottingham, having skirted the eastern edge of Sherwood Forest, an ancient woodland that doesn’t seem big enough to hold its own history; the folklore not the facts.

Police cars are parked at the ends of Beaconsfield Street, using the cross-streets to divert traffic. Two uniformed constables are manning the western barricade, which is threaded with police tape that twirls in the cold wind.

‘DSU Parvel is expecting me,’ I say.

The female PC makes a note of my name and points me to a parking spot. She’s new – fresh out of training – and her face is full of excitement and gravitas. One day, crimes like this will sadden and horrify her; when she’s seen too many bodies pulled from wrecked cars, or carried from bloodstained bedrooms, or collected from the base of cliffs, or cut down from rafters.

I study the houses. Most are detached or semi-detached. Red brick. Two storey. Built during the fifties and sixties. This is a working-class area, but clearly some owners are aiming higher, having renovated and added loft conversions.

‘You took your time,’ says Alan Edgar, a sergeant in Lenny’s squad. His nickname is Poe, for obvious reasons.

‘How bad is it?’

‘Messy.’

A ghostlike figure walks from the house. Lenny Parvel is dressed in white forensic coveralls, latex gloves and a plastic face shield. She pushes back the hood and appraises me with hazel-coloured eyes. Warm. Intelligent. Judgemental.

‘Where have you been?’

‘Rampton.’

‘Are they letting him go?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘Nervous.’

‘That’s understandable.’

My relationship with Lenny is difficult to label. She was the young police constable who found me hiding in our garden shed, wearing muddy football socks and armed with a mattock, convinced that Elias was hunting for me. It was Lenny who coaxed me out and wrapped me in her coat and sat with me on the swings until back-up arrived.

Later, she chaperoned me during the police interviews and watched over me when I fell asleep on a foldout bed at the station. Over the next few months, she escorted me to the funerals and the coronial inquests and when Elias appeared in court. And later still, during my wilderness years, it was Lenny who came to find me when I was cutting, drinking, injecting, and vandalising my body with home-made tattoos.

Although only in her mid-forties, she has been like a mother to me, and maybe I’m like a son. Lenny didn’t have children of her own, having married an older man and helped raise his two boys, who are not much younger than me. One is a doctor, the other a dentist. A credit to them both.

Lenny hands me a set of white polythene coveralls and I shimmy inside them, pulling elasticised plastic booties over my shoes.

‘What do we know about the victim?’

‘Rohan Kirk. Aged sixty-seven. Disability pensioner. His wife died in a car accident ten years ago. Rohan was at the wheel and suffered brain injuries. They have two daughters. Twins. Thirty-two. Maya lives with her dad and runs a mobile dog-grooming business. Melody is married with kids. Lives two streets away. Maya hasn’t been seen since yesterday.’

A police siren approaches at speed. The car pulls up and a detective gets out. Dressed in a well-cut grey suit, he’s about five-nine with a wiry muscularity that will defy middle age if he stays off the booze.

He spies Lenny and something passes between them. Not so much a smile as a smirk.

‘I thought this was my case,’ he says, patting his pockets as though he misplaced the note informing him of the change.

‘I thought it might be something for SSOU,’ says Lenny. She means the Serious Sexual Offences Unit, a new task force that Lenny has been running in Nottinghamshire.

‘A man has been murdered,’ says the newcomer.

‘And his daughter is missing,’ replies Lenny.

‘That doesn’t make it a sex crime.’

‘Not yet.’

The stand-off lasts a few seconds and Lenny backs down. The detective turns his attention to me.

‘I don’t think we’ve met.’

‘DCI Gary Hoyle, this is Dr Cyrus Haven,’ says Lenny. ‘He’s our forensic psychologist.’

‘Yes, of course, I’ve heard of you,’ he says, pumping my hand. ‘You shot that guy in Scotland.’

‘In self-defence,’ I say.

‘Of course it was. His gun was empty, but you weren’t to know that.’

I can’t tell if he’s criticising me or making a genuine attempt to sympathise. I wish Evie were here.

‘Glad to have you on board,’ says Hoyle. There is something very American about his smile, broad and quick and full of optimism. In the next breath, he says, ‘I would prefer to limit contamination of the crime scene.’

‘I’m suited up.’

We match each other’s gaze for several seconds too long. Finally, he nods. ‘I shall value your input.’ Then he smacks his hands together, rubbing them as though ready to start work.