Never Forget Read Free

love life was so easily solved.’
    ‘Or this murder, you jug-eared halfwit.’

Chapter 2
    ‘H ow long are we going to give this bloke to come home?’ I asked Wingsy, forty minutes later. Our first enquiry had taken us to the registered home address of a vehicle seen travelling close to Amanda Bell’s body. We were sitting in our unmarked car outside an attractive, well-kept detached house on one of the county’s many new housing estates. The lights were off and it appeared to be empty. There were only a few other vehicles parked on the street: a painter and decorator’s van about five doors away from our target premises, and a couple of other cars outside various houses.
    ‘We’ve only been here twenty minutes. Stop being such a miserable fucking cow and have some patience. No wonder blokes keep chucking you.’
    ‘I think you’ll find, dickwad, that I finished with the last one.’
    ‘What, the married last one?’
    ‘Yes, the married last one. I’ve missed working with you, you know. Why’d you leave our team?’
    Wingsy and I had known each other for about ten years and had a pretty good working relationship. You couldn’t really call it a friendship as we never saw each other out of work, apart from the occasional leaving do, but whenever we worked together we got on well. It was just… easy being with him.
    Wingsy let out a lengthy sigh. My attention had been focused on the house so I turned my head sharply to look at him and saw something flicker across his face: exasperation?Annoyance? I waited for him to speak. When at last he did, it wasn’t what I was expecting him to say.
    ‘Remember Amber?’ he asked. I probably looked puzzled, partly because I wasn’t quick enough to stop my facial expressions reflecting everything I was thinking when I was in the company of someone I completely trusted, and partly because I really didn’t know who this Amber was. I gave a small shake of my head rather than speaking; I didn’t want to stop him from telling me something that was clearly troubling him. ‘The PC who came to work with us for about two months in the summer? Pretty, redhead, well fit.’
    ‘Oh, John, you didn’t?’ Wingsy was married with three kids; I hadn’t had him down for that sort of thing.
    ‘No, I bloody didn’t. I’m not you, you old slapper.’ I laughed, then punched him on the arm. ‘No,’ he continued, ‘haven’t got the fucking energy for an affair. I walked in on her and someone else. Someone else who should have known better. I immediately asked for a move. Well, not immediately, ’cos he still had his dick out at that stage.’
    ‘Oh, crap, Wingsy. Would this person happen to be your father-in-law?’ No wonder he’d gone so quickly and it had all been kept so quiet.
    ‘Yep, Inspector Matheson. Makes family Christmas a bit awkward. But he did buy me a new golf driver this year. Definitely the most expensive present ever. Oh, and Mel doesn’t know. Apart from an old schoolmate, me, you and the guilty parties, no one else knows.’
    I watched Wingsy run his hands through his thinning, greying hair. He let out another sigh, then he seemed to pull down the shutters that twenty years of policing had forced him to acquire.
    I wasn’t really surprised that he had confided in me. I was used to hearing gossip and I never passed it on. I liked to hear juicy titbits of other people’s lives, but I’d also done some stuff that I wasn’t particularly proud of, and I always put myself in the position of the person being talked about.To be fair, if you were embarrassed about something and didn’t want others to find out, you shouldn’t have done it in the first place. However, police officers were only human and that meant weakness. Chris Matheson was a pretty decent man. I’d worked for him from time to time and found him reasonable and approachable. A bit patronising, but fundamentally a decent bloke. Perhaps it had been a mid-life crisis, a one-off? I hoped so, as I