‘Annabel?’ he asked, holding out his hand for me to shake. ‘I’m Sam.’
‘Nice to meet you,’ I said.
‘Shall we go in here?’
We headed inside a café called the Lunch Box. Once a greasy spoon that had catered for the taxi drivers and bus conductors on their breaks, it had been redecorated and refitted and now served panini and salad alongside the traditional full English breakfasts and chip butties.
I found a table near the back and, while Sam ordered for us at the counter, I watched him standing there and thought for a moment that he looked a little lost. I didn’t know what I had expected a journalist to look like, but he probably wasn’t it. I’d been wondering why he looked familiar, and then I realised he was the journalist who had knocked on my door on the day I’d found Shelley Burton. The one who’d come with a photographer.
‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘how much was it?’ I had my purse out ready, but he waved me away.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.
He probably got it all on expenses, anyway, so I put my purse back in my bag without further argument. It was warm in here after the chill of being outside, and I felt my cheeks glowing with it. This was probably a bad idea, I thought. I shouldn’t really be here with this man.
‘So,’ he said, as the man behind the counter brought two coffees and set them down in front of us on the table, ‘you’re working on the decomposed bodies, right?’
‘I wouldn’t say I’m working on them, exactly. I’ve been trying to establish how many of them there are and looking for patterns. Look, I really think you need to be talking to Media Services, don’t you, rather than me?’
‘I tried Media Services; I know that’s how it’s supposed to be done. They had no knowledge of it at all. Either that, or they just didn’t want to talk about it.’
‘Really?’
‘You may not realise this, but your organisation’s media relations policy is pretty restrictive. They only tell you things they want you to hear. Which isn’t very much.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘I went to school with Ryan Frost. Andrew Frost is his dad. I see Ryan all the time – we still go out some weekends. Last Saturday I was round his house and Ryan’s dad – sorry, I find it really hard to think of him as Andrew – was there, so I asked him about the bodies. I’ve been looking at it for a while, in fact. I did a Freedom of Information request to get the numbers, talked to the Coroner’s Office as well.’
I looked at him. He was flushed, leaning across the table towards me. Excited about it all.
‘How many did you find?’ I asked him. ‘I haven’t seen today’s paper.’
‘Nineteen,’ he said.
‘I found twenty-four, including the one last week.’
‘This is bad,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think this is really bad? All those people. There has to be something linking them.’
‘That’s what I keep looking for, but I haven’t found it yet.’
‘I mean, they’re all so different – different ages, different social backgrounds, family, no family. I can’t find anything about them that’s similar.’
‘I thought it might be something medical. I wondered if they were all at the same doctor’s surgery, or they’d all been seen at the hospital, or they’d – I don’t know – engaged with Social Services, or something.’
‘Have you heard of the
hikikomori
?’
‘No, what’s that?’ I said.
‘It’s a phenomenon in Japan. A whole section of society – usually teenagers, specifically male teenagers, withdrawing. They shut themselves up in their rooms and don’t come out for years.’
‘Why?’
‘Lots of theories, but nobody really knows. They reckon it might be a backlash against the high-pressure educational system in Japan. These kids are generally high-functioning, wealthy backgrounds, stable home life – no apparent reason why they should want to rebel. It’s like they just give up on life. But there are so many of them now that they’ve actually given it a name. Estimates vary as to how many of them there are, but it’s probably somewhere around three million. Out of a population of 127 million.’
‘But they don’t stay in their rooms till they die?’
‘Usually their families keep feeding them, or they go out in the middle of the night to a
konbini
– a sort of convenience store. But it’s the choice they make that intrigues me.’ He took a drink from his coffee, which was growing cold on the table in front of him. I’d finished mine, drunk it in a couple of gulps.
‘The choice to withdraw?’
‘Yes. The choice to withdraw – for whatever reason. Maybe apathy, or as an act of rebellion. Maybe our cases are similar.’
‘Rebellion against what, though?’
‘I don’t know. It might just be a side effect of the recession: economic meltdown, depression, despair. Or else it’s something in our society they don’t want to engage with. Which is why you might be right to look at public services, the medical system, Social Services, that type of thing.’
‘I can’t get access to all that,’ I said. ‘I’ve tried.’
‘Isn’t there anything on the case files?’
‘There aren’t any case files, that’s the problem. These aren’t murders. They aren’t even, for the most part, suspicious deaths. They are just people who have died. Once they’ve been collected by the funeral directors they’re no longer a police matter. The families, if we can find them, are informed, and that’s the end of our involvement in it. Nothing is recorded – there’s no point. For the people who do have families, I have next to no information at all – it’s only the ones who are unclaimed that still remain of interest.’
He was leaning forward in his seat, frowning. Listening.
‘You know it was me who found Shelley Burton?’
‘Really? I didn’t know that.’
‘I live next door to her. I could smell something. I thought the house was empty, but she was in there the whole time.’
‘That must have been a very traumatic thing to see,’ he said.
‘It was horrible. She was – ’
I’d said so much, and at that moment I realised that the excitement of having someone show an interest had made me garrulous. This wasn’t just anybody, either; this man was a journalist. He could even be recording our conversation! I hadn’t thought of that… I’d been an idiot. This was going to cost me my job. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You look – I don’t know. Worried.’
He was certainly perceptive. Probably that came with the job: the ability to spot discomfort in your companion; the ability to ask pertinent and impertinent questions; the capacity to memorise long sections of conversation and then subtly adapt them to make it seem that the person had actually said what you’d wanted them to say, without them ever actually saying it.
‘I should go,’ I said, heaving myself up out of the chair.
‘Annabel, wait a minute.’
‘No, really, thank you for the coffee, but I need to go…’
‘Can I see you again?’
I stopped pulling my coat around my shoulders and stared at him. It sounded so odd, that phrase. ‘What for?’
He stood up, blocking my route to the door of the café. ‘I know you care about this,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to compromise your job in any way, and I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable. Whatever’s going on isn’t just going to stop. We need to try to get them to do something about it, and the only way we’re going to do that is to find out what’s going on. Will you help me?’
I bit my lip. He was standing close to me and I didn’t like it. My back was against the wall in more ways than one.
‘I don’t know what I can do,’ I said. ‘I’ve tried
everything
.’
‘I’ll do all the hard stuff. I just need your data. The same data you’ve been looking at and dealing with every day. I can put pressure on the senior officers by printing more about the people involved, and I can get that information elsewhere. I just need to get a better picture about who they are.’
‘That’s all covered by the Data Protection Act,’ I said, lamely.
‘Not if they’re dead,’ he said. ‘The DPA doesn’t apply after death.’
‘I know that. It still applies while there’s an active investigation, though. And in any case it still applies to their families,’ I said, trying to recover. He knew the legislation better than I did. It would do me no good to try to look clever in front of him.
‘I didn’t think there
was
an active investigation.’
He must have noticed my discomfort then, because he stood aside to let me through. ‘I’ll walk you down the hill, OK?’
I mumbled something and he followed me out into the bright, crisp air on the main road. The pavement was crowded with shoppers and although he walked beside me we kept getting separated.
‘Look,’ he said at last, as we turned the corner into the wide pedestrian precinct leading down the hill to the river, ‘I’d just really like to stay in touch. You’re the only person I’ve spoken to who is taking this seriously. I’ve been trying to get my editor involved, too. She agreed to start up our campaign to get everyone to check up on their neighbours, but I’m still thinking it’s a bit more sinister than a lack of public-spiritedness.’
‘Sinister?’
‘You know. That they are being murdered.’
I stopped dead and turned to look at him. ‘I don’t think they’re being murdered,’ I said.
‘Really? You don’t think that?’
‘There’s nothing to suggest they were murdered. No break-ins – ’ Not apart from the house next door, I thought, remembering the crash of the pane of glass inside the kitchen. ‘No trauma, no violent attacks. They just died.’
‘Maybe it was a slow-acting poison,’ he said, ‘or they were gassed by their boilers, or something.’
‘It’s a bit far-fetched,’ I said. ‘And there’s no evidence. What makes you think they’re being murdered?’
His cheeks were flushed and he dropped his voice so I had to move closer to hear him. ‘Well, alright, then, maybe not murdered. But someone else is involved with this. They haven’t all just spontaneously decided to die, have they?’
‘Why not? That’s almost what your Japanese teenagers did.’
We carried on walking. At the bottom of the hill I would cross the road at the pedestrian crossing, and then I would be at the police station. I didn’t really want to be seen talking to a journalist, and was trying to work out a way of parting company with him before getting to the main road.
He had his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched. He looked thoughtful, as though he was trying to come up with some conclusive argument that would put an end to the difference of opinion.
I stopped at the corner. ‘I need to go this way,’ I said, in a tone that suggested a firm goodbye. ‘It was nice meeting you.’
‘Sure,’ he said.
Was that it? After all that pushing, he’d given up, then, so easily?
‘Goodbye, Annabel.’ He held out his hand and it was warm, his grip firm.
‘Goodbye. Good luck.’
‘You too.’
I watched Sam walk away, and then I turned and pressed the button for the crossing, waiting for the traffic to stop so I could cross and go in to work.
The only one in the office was Kate.
‘I thought you were off sick?’ she said. ‘What are you doing coming in?’
‘I had a headache,’ I said, taking off my coat and hanging it on the rack by the door, ‘but it’s worn off now.’
I sat down and turned on the screen at my workstation, put in my user number and password and waited for it to go through the checks before I could start working. As usual it took an age. ‘I’m just going to go and see someone,’ I said to Kate, who was now gazing out of the window, deep in thought.
‘Right,’ she said.
Frosty was in his office, the door half-open. I knocked and pushed it a little. ‘Are you mad busy?’ I asked.
He looked up from the screen. ‘Never too busy to see you,’ he said. ‘Come and sit down.’
I slid into the chair opposite his desk.
‘I just met a friend of yours,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Sam Everett.’
Frost laughed. ‘I’ve known Sam since he was tiny.’
‘You know he’s interested in the bodies,’ I said. ‘He’s trying to get his editor to make a bigger story out of it.’
‘So what did you tell him?’
‘Nothing,’ I said quickly. ‘There’s nothing I can tell him, is there? Shouldn’t he be talking to Media Services, not me?’
‘It’s the same old problem, though, I’m afraid. Media Services have their own agenda, and I’m sorry to say that our bodies aren’t on it.’
Our
bodies? Was he starting to take an interest in this now? A serious interest?
‘Did you know I found the latest one?’
He sat forward then. ‘No, I didn’t know.’
‘It was next door to my house. It was what got me started on all this.’
‘Oh, Annabel. That’s rough. Are you OK?’
He meant it. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so. The smell – it stays with you, doesn’t it?’
‘It does,’ he said. ‘My first body – I was eighteen, two weeks into my initial stint on patrol as a probationer. Been trying to prepare for it, but you can never do that, not really. I went to this house and the neighbours said they’d not seen this old lady for three weeks. I could smell it before I got to the back door. When I went in – well, it was bad. She was lying on her bed, and when they finally moved the body her scalp was stuck to the headboard and came away from the skull. I threw up in the back garden.’
‘I didn’t throw up. Maybe it would have been better if I had. I just had lots of showers. And I had to bath the cat, she’d been rolling in it.’
‘Yuck.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Do you think they are going to start taking this seriously? That’s the twenty-fourth. The next one will be along soon. There are lots of people out there, waiting for us to find them, you know that, don’t you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to indicate that we’re going to find any more.’
I bit my lip. This was so frustrating – just a moment ago I’d thought he was on my side, more than any of them. The others didn’t get it, but I’d thought he did. He knew that this was a problem that wouldn’t go away.
‘You know that’s not right,’ I said, ‘don’t you?’