The Sleeping and the Dead Read Free Page A

but a record of the mouth, perhaps even an X-ray would have been taken. There was no guarantee
that the dentist was still in business or that the records had been kept but at least it provided an avenue of investigation. Porteous thought it would give his team something to do the following
day. He liked to keep them busy.
    He leant back in his chair and emptied the pot into his wide blue cup – part of the tea service which had been a present to himself when he moved into the barn. He stretched with
satisfaction. This was why he had joined the police. Not to save the world. Not to race around the countryside in fast cars or strut the city streets in a uniform. But to bring order, to solve
problems, to understand.
    He set the post-mortem notes to one side and pulled the first box file towards him, savouring a moment of anticipation before opening it. This was what he loved, this precise and meticulous
sorting of facts. He had never understood why his colleagues thought such work tedious.
    Each report was a minor human tragedy, baldly told, given a dignity because the facts were unembellished. He sorted them first into gender and age, rejecting the menopausal women with
depression, the elderly wanderers from care homes, the occasional heart-breaking ten-year-old who had gone to a friend’s house to play and never returned. Still he was left with a mountain of
paper. The majority of missing-person reports was for young males. They’d left home after problems at school, a row with parents, or in search of a more exciting life. He knew that many would
have returned or got in touch. The relatives, simply relieved that the panic was over, would never have thought to inform the police.
    He became engrossed in the task and couldn’t let it go. He had planned just to sort through the paperwork but began phoning the contact numbers for relatives. Inevitably some had moved or
died, but Cranford was the sort of town where people knew one another. Other phone numbers were given, alternative names suggested. The people wanted to talk. Porteous listened patiently to tales
of lads who’d been scallies as youngsters but who’d gone on to do well for themselves, who’d taken university degrees, settled down, had families. The worst calls were when boys
were still missing and no contact had ever been made. Porteous heard the flurry of hope in elderly voices.
    ‘Does this mean there’s some news?’
    ‘No, no,’ he said gently. ‘Just checking old files.’
    Some had heard about the discovery of the body in the lake on local radio and put two and two together.
    ‘But that can’t be our Alan,’ one said. ‘He could swim like a fish.’
    He stopped when the light faded and it was too dark to read the scrawled names and numbers on the copy paper. He had reached 1980. If nothing came of the names he had set to one side he would
check the files for 1980–1990, but he thought he had gone far enough. He had a picture of the victim in his head. A boy who was a teenager in the early seventies just after the lake had been
flooded; who wore desert boots and a leather bootlace bracelet; who had been stabbed in the back.
    He stood up and pressed the light switch. The room was lit by spots fixed to the ceiling beams. They shone through the rafters, throwing shadows on to the stripped wooden floor. He was hungry.
He loved to cook; the process of peeling and chopping relaxed him. But today he wanted something quick and simple. He filled a stainless-steel pan with water for spaghetti and sweated garlic and
red chilli in olive oil then covered the lot with freshly sliced Parmesan. He ate as if he hadn’t seen food for days, shovelling it in with a spoon and a fork. He was sitting at the table
where he’d been working and he looked out through the uncovered window at the lights which were all that remained of the roads and the farmhouses. Later he poured himself a glass of wine.
    He liked to go to bed early but tonight found it