In Cold Blood

Chapter 2

2

Caroline Hills sat down at her desk and opened her email inbox. She was glad she’d just had a few days off, because she was feeling tired enough as it was.

If she’d thought the exhaustion from chemotherapy had been bad, nothing could have prepared her for how absolutely bloody knackered she was following the hysterectomy. The six weeks off work had been hellish from a psychological point of view, but physically she knew they’d been necessary. The doctors had told her how much energy the recovery would take, but she’d presumed they were just being overly cautious. That was until she’d realised that even making a cup of tea had felt like running five circuits of Rutland Water.

If she was honest with herself, she struggled to remember the last time she’d had any real energy. The family’s move to Rutland had been intended to re-energise and invigorate them all, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. She just hoped they were now through the worst of it and that things would start to look up for them all.

Her recovery from the operation meant Christmas at home was a given, and it had the added benefit that Mark’d had to do all of the cooking and preparations. Still, Christmas seemed a long time ago now, and it wouldn’t be long before they were looking forward to their summer holiday. Based on the arctic conditions she’d experienced that morning, though, summer seemed a whole lot further away than it really was.

Everything looked so bleak in the winter, and she found it hard to even visualise what things looked like in July. Just walking through her frozen back garden to the compost heap earlier that morning, it seemed impossible to even imagine she’d be sitting out in the sun just a matter of weeks later. Not that she’d ever get the time or five minutes’ silence to actually do so, but that was beside the point.

She’d been gradually eased back into work, not having realised just how bloody exhausted she was going to be. She wondered how much of it was because she’d been sitting around for six weeks as opposed to being a result of the operation itself, but she supposed it didn’t really matter. Either way, she’d suffered the crushing realisation that she wasn’t Superwoman after all.

The lack of energy was offset only by the overpowering, overwhelming boredom. Since she’d been on reduced duties, she’d felt her brain going to mush, and she knew that’d take much longer to overcome than physical tiredness. She’d been playing it down at work, showing Chief Superintendent Derek Arnold that she was perfectly capable of taking on bigger, beefier work. So far, though, there hadn’t been anything particularly beefy to take on.

Mark and the boys had been wonderful. Mark had told his clients he’d be working shorter hours and taking some time off, and he’d been good to his word. She couldn’t grumble about any of that; she just wished she’d never had to have the operation in the first place.

She and Mark had only ever wanted two children, and there’d been no question of having a third, but she couldn’t deny it felt like a violation to have that choice taken away from her. It was something she couldn’t put into words, which was the main reason she hadn’t brought it up with Mark. She’d gone down her usual road of pretending everything was fine. Often, that was easier than bringing up issues or concerns. After all, what was the point? It wasn’t going to change the material facts of the situation.

She selected a batch of emails she wasn’t interested in and shouldn’t have been sent anyway, and deleted them. The vast majority of stuff that got sent to her was completely pointless. She often wondered how many work hours were lost in police stations across the country because of needless emails. Someone had to sit down and write the things in the first place, then countless people had to open them, realise they were either nonsense or had been sent to the wrong person, then delete them. Even rounded down to five minutes a day, multiplied by however many police officers there were, spread across the year, would surely add up to enough money to at least fix the sodding coffee machine. Or, at the very least, they could avoid having to sell off police land to the private school next door.

By the time Caroline had reduced the number of unread emails in her inbox from 196 to 181, there was a knock on her door.

‘Come in,’ she called, watching as the door opened and Detective Sergeant Dexter Antoine poked his head round the door.

‘Morning,’ he said. ‘How you feeling?’

‘Morning, Dex. Depends who’s asking.’

‘A dead body.’

Caroline c****d her head slightly. ‘Well, well. Medical science never ceases to amaze me. What do we know about our talking corpse?’

‘Not a huge amount. Family out for a morning walk down near Harringworth Viaduct found him. Middle-aged guy in running gear, sitting up inside one of the arches.’

‘Heart attack?’

‘Doesn’t look like it. Trauma to the head. Frozen solid, apparently. No idea how long he’s been there.’

‘At least fifteen minutes, judging by the weather out there this morning.’

Dexter chuckled. ‘I don’t fancy it much either. I presume it’ll be going up to EMSOU, but thought I should let you know, anyway.’

It was normal for major crimes to be taken on by the East Midlands Special Operations Unit, but this was far from canon, and Caroline’s background as a DCI with the Metropolitan Police before coming to Rutland meant she was always keen to take on cases for herself.

‘Actually, isn’t Harringworth in Northants?’ she asked.

‘The village is. Most of the viaduct is, too, but the northern part’s in Rutland. Guess where our man is.’

‘Typical. How far in?’

‘Barely two hundred and fifty metres inside the county, believe it or not.’

‘How inconsiderate.’

‘I know. Still, it makes it even more fun to drag the EMSOU boys down from Derby or Nottingham for it, eh?’

Caroline thought for a moment. ‘Actually, no. Don’t do that.’