Keeping Read Free

case that will break but Langham’s neck. That would be nice.
    Anyway, getting away from MySelF here.
    #5. That bloody cow with the Yorkshire Terrier. MaRia. Irritating. Noisy. Didn’t stay long. Can’t even bear to write about her. The worst one yet.
    #6. CherYL. The current bird. Now here’s another fucking funny thing. That Langham—he’s bent by the way, paper said so, and he lives with this bloke—he works with this fella, the one he lives with, who also works for the local newspaper. You following me? Well, CherYL only bloody works at the paper too! Receptionist, she said, doing a second job in the café, mornings and evenings. Oh my God. That is such a classic!
    More on her as things progress. I have to go. She’s banging on the wall for a bit of attention. But as I said at the start, I am the man. Yes! The fucking man!

Chapter One
    Langham stared around the incident room. It needed painting. The pea-soup green walls were peeling and scuff marks made them look shabby. A couple of posters—men wanted from God knew how long ago—had curling corners, the faces of the criminals going cream in places where they’d been on show since before the no-smoking-in-the-workplace law. Nicotine, it got everywhere. Like the scum of society. The bastards who kept him in a job.
    The officers on shift stared back at him, expressions ranging from bored to weary to blank. All they had to deal with at the moment were on-going cases, small shit that shouldn’t take long to wrap up but did, or the big case involving the missing women that had gone stone cold. If he were honest, it had never even come close to being hot. The people sitting before him looked like they could do with an honest-to-goodness massive case to get their teeth into. He knew how they felt. It wasn’t that they waited for murder, longed for it, but when one cropped up everyone went into a different zone.
    More alert. More focused. More on the sodding ball.
    He’d saved the missing women’s case discussion until last. It was the biggest on their list, but they weren’t getting anywhere with it. Women went missing, were found dumped in the stream a few days later, and nothing he or his team had done had come up with anything to help them find the killer. No evidence of where they’d been prior to being killed and dumped—except the snippet Oliver had been given from one of them while she’d still been alive. Other than that? Sweet fuck all.
    Langham turned from his officers and dragged across the largest board on wheels, which had several victims’ pictures pinned along with their information scrawled in marker underneath. He thought about what had happened that day a while ago—him and Oliver eating lunch in Langham’s office and some woman speaking to Oliver in his head. How the fuck Oliver dealt with that went beyond anything Langham could imagine. Dead people speaking to you all your life, then suddenly people who were alive? He couldn’t explain it, could find no rational explanation either, just that it happened and had provided crucial information on previous cases.
    He wished it would provide crucial information now. Before some other poor bitch got offed.
    Langham sighed and faced the group again. Some of them had perked up a bit—a few pictures of dead, water-bloated bodies could do that to a copper—but the rest appeared as though they wanted to get up and go home. He didn’t blame them. He wanted to go home, and they’d only been here an hour. Go home to Oliver and fuck his arse, lay in bed all day then fuck him all over again.
    “Yeah, yeah,” he said, holding up a hand as if that might stop anyone walking the hell out. “We’ve been through this before, I know. But it’s Friday, recon time—same thing every week—and something we just have to get on with. Now, I’ll be honest with you. This case is pissing me the fuck off. As you know we have no new leads—none whatsoever. So we’re dealing with a man—yes, or a woman but