First One Missing Read Free Page B

one who’d had to break the news to them when they found the body two days later. It wasn’t something you’d wish on your worst enemy. The SIO had offered to be with her while she did it, but he’d done so in a way that left Leanne in no doubt that he’d rather pull his own toenails out without anaesthetic, as she’d told Pete later on.
    So she’d done it on her own, leaning forward on the Reids’ brown leather sofa to touch Emma’s knee across the coffee table. They were taught about body language and comforting gestures. They weren’t taught about how it looks when the life drains out of a person right in front of your very eyes, or how it feels to be looked at as though you yourself were responsible for the very thing you were describing. They weren’t taught how inadequate the word ‘sorry’ can seem.
    By 7.45, Leanne still hadn’t called her.
    At least she’d started to get dressed by then. Normally she’d just pull on the first things out of the ‘work’ side of her wardrobe but today she chose more carefully. Clearly this was not going to be an ordinary day and she wanted to be armoured up, by which she meant wearing clothes that didn’t look like they’d been scraped out of the bottom of the dirty-laundry basket. One thing about Emma Reid – even in the depths of her grief, she still matched her socks to her outfit. Leanne was lucky if she even matched her socks to each other.
    Leanne was just digging through her underwear drawer in search of a pair of tights without a hole when her phone rang again. Desmond.
    ‘I hope you’ve called her, because we’ve just found out the news is already out.’
    Shit.
    ‘I was just ringing her now.’
    Desmond was unimpressed.
    Hanging up, Leanne scrolled immediately through her contacts list. Reids was the landline number, she remembered that much. Scrolling down one further to Reid Emma , she pressed the green phone key.
    While waiting for Emma to pick up, Leanne tried to remember the stress-management techniques they’d been taught during training. Deep breath, concentrate on your breathing, not on what’s around you. Not on the crack in the ceiling above the bedroom window which, come to think of it, appeared to have got wider in the last month, not on the fact that the tights she’d chosen turned out to have a ladder near the top (she made a quick judgement call that the skirt would just about cover it), not on the image of Emma Reid going about her morning business serenely unaware, or of Jemima Reid’s face, blotchy with fear and frustration.
    ‘Emma? I’m so sorry …’

3
    ‘Quite frankly, I don’t give a fuck about your profit margins, Mr Bellows. When one commissions a water feature, one expects it to feature water. Not just a few drops here and there, but a great big fucking cascade of water.’
    Sally Freeland noticed the man sitting across the table from her on the crowded train was nudging his wife but it didn’t bother her. What did bother her, however, was Mr Bellows trying to tell her it was her own water pressure that was to blame.
    ‘I’m a journalist, Mr Bellows. If I tell my editor I’m going to write fifteen hundred words on “MPs on the Make”, and then I turn in a thousand words instead, and say, “Oh, but my desk was a bit rickety so I couldn’t write as much,” he’s not going to be very fucking happy, is he?’
    Mr Bellows didn’t see the analogy, apparently. Frankly Sally doubted if Mr Bellows would recognize an analogy if one punched him in the face. Pressing ‘end call’, she yanked aside the mouthpiece of the hands-free headset.
    She was having a pig of a day already, and it was barely ten o’clock. She’d kill for a cigarette.
    ‘I am a person who doesn’t smoke,’ she reminded herself, trying to remember the exact wording Sebastian the hypnotherapist had used. ‘I can think about having a cigarette but I make the choice not to have one.’
    It wasn’t working.
    Sitting back in her seat, she looked