Blood On the Wall Read Free Page B

drunks arrested with a slight excess of zeal on a Friday night; drug dealers and muggers banged against a wall maybe a little too hard. But one thing was for sure: Georgiou wasn’t going to go down without a fight. He’d show the Parks family and Councillor bloody Maitland what they were up against.
    The phone ringing brought him out of his reverie.
    ‘Georgiou,’ he said.
    It was Armstrong.
    ‘The suspension’s lifted. You’re back on the job.’

FOUR
    G eorgiou drove from Bowness towards Carlisle along the coast road that ran alongside the Solway Firth. Colleagues in Carlisle asked him why on earth he lived out in such a remote place. ‘It’s the end of the earth,’ they said. ‘There’s a pub and that’s all. Nothing is out there. No takeaways , no chippy. You ought to be in Carlisle where things are happening.’
    You’re wrong, he thought. Bowness is where things are happening: real things. The magnificent sight of the thousands and thousands of geese that flew along the Solway at the start of every October, come from the Arctic to spend the winter on the Solway marshes. The herons. The wild swans. Oystercatchers, curlews.
    Five years ago, in London, he’d been barely able to tell a pigeon from a crow. Now he could identify a bird from a distance by the way it moved in the air, from its silhouette as it waded on the mudflats.
    The sun was hot through the car windows, and he opened them wide. Summer had started. He drove across the expanse of marsh, past the signs that said ‘Road liable totidal flooding. When water reaches this point it is two feet deep’. At least twice a year the road between Carlisle and Bowness flooded, the sea pouring across the marsh and over the road like a causeway. His colleagues in Carlisle said they wouldn’t be able to cope with it. It was another aspect of living out on the peninsula that Georgiou loved, the fact that the forces of nature were always present: flood and storm striking at will. You learned to live with it, and respect it.
    It had been Susannah who had first suggested they move here. They were both worried about what was happening in London: murder rates rising, violent crime, robbery. They agreed it was no place to raise children, and they both wanted children. They had decided on two: one boy and one girl. Or two boys or two girls. It didn’t matter. They just felt that they didn’t want their child to be an only child. Georgiou and Susannah had both been only children, and both felt they’d missed out growing up. A child needed a brother or sister as a friend, as a companion, or as someone else in the family to annoy.
    Susannah had suggested Cumbria. She said it was far away from everywhere, especially dangerous cities. Georgiou checked the crime statistics: according to them it appeared to be one of the safest places in Britain.
    Prices of property in the Lake District and south Cumbria came as a shock to both of them. The influx of southerners buying up properties as second homes or ‘investment opportunities’ pushed prices sky-high, so they looked further afield.
    They found a house they could afford in Bowness onSolway, a small village of some 250 people on the Solway coast, fourteen miles west of Carlisle. The house was one in a small terrace: three decent-sized bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen, plus a tiny room that would serve as a study for Georgiou. There was also a garden at the back that looked out across the Solway Firth to Eastriggs in Scotland.
    During the time they searched for their new home, Georgiou had applied for a transfer to the Cumbria force, and luckily for him, it coincided with the Home Office looking at Cumbria and deciding that the Cumbrian police force did not have enough officers from ‘minority or ethnic communities’.
    Georgiou had built up a good reputation as an efficient detective during his time with the Met, but he was sure it was the ‘ethnic’ tag that had landed him the job with the Carlisle force. He