Dead & Buried

Chapter 3

3

Wendy rolled over and looked at Xav. He always looked so peaceful when he slept. She’d have to wake him up for work soon, but she figured she could let him sleep a little longer.

They’d tried to keep their relationship fairly casual, mainly for his sake. He’d been hurt in his last long-term relationship and neither of them had any major desire to rush into anything.

Wendy knew only too well what it was like being with a police officer — she’d seen enough of her colleagues’ marriages fall apart to know that she didn’t want Xav to have the same resentment of her job. Besides which, Xav was a member of civilian staff based at county police headquarters and was actively looking to qualify as a specialist officer himself, so would soon enough realise what pressures police officers came under, both at work and in their private lives.

Enough of Wendy’s colleagues and senior officers had told her she should put her career first. Maybe that was self-preservation on their part, but there was no arguing against the fact that she was a good police officer. Her dad had been a detective, too, reaching the rank of Detective Inspector before dying well before his time was up.

If Wendy was honest with herself, it felt wrong for her to even consider outranking her father. Bill Knight had, she was told, been the best-loved officer at Mildenheath CID. His humour, charm and wit had only served to accentuate the fact that he was one of the area’s most successful police officers. There was no doubt he would have soared much further up the career ladder if not for his untimely death.

From what Wendy had been told, her father always put his family first, and that was one of the reasons why he hadn’t surpassed the rank of Inspector. Friends and family spoke of his wasted talent, and their opinions that he could easily have made Detective Superintendent or higher. Wendy didn’t want people to speak that way about her after she was gone.

An incident a few months earlier had put that all into perspective, though. Facing her own almost imminent death at the hands of a local ex-con, she had since wondered whether she should pursue her career progression.

She’d already had to abandon her plans to take the exams once, which had given her mixed feelings. She couldn’t deny it had felt somewhat like a blessing in disguise and had backed up her theory that it was wrong for her to outrank her father. But her views on things were changing, and she was starting to wonder whether she should take the exams when the next openings occurred.

She’d spent countless nights trying to analyse it all and figure out what might be driving these feelings, but she couldn’t. She wondered if perhaps her body was telling her she wasn’t far off being too old for marriage and children, and that she should focus on another goal instead. Not that a husband and kids had ever been a specific target she’d had — it was just something she expected, something she saw as a normal progression, but which had never happened.

There’d been men, of course, but it had almost always ended in disaster. The last few years had been pretty barren on that front, apart from a brief relationship with a local accountant who’d ultimately become the final victim on the first serial murder case she’d investigated — a case which had landed far too close to home for her liking, in more ways than one.

The closest she’d come to feeling anything approaching long-term comfort with a man was here and now with Xavier Moreno. It was still far too early to talk of any sort of commitment, although she was acutely aware that she wasn’t getting any younger.

She’d never looked twice at a young mum walking down the high street with a pushchair. She didn’t get broody and wasn’t worried about her ticking body clock, but she knew that she didn’t have years to waste. It was an unfortunate fact that if she was going to have a family, it needed to happen within the next couple of years.

That was the big word, though. If. Right now, Wendy didn’t know what she wanted. She was being pulled in different directions by different people, and each day brought with it a different perspective. Just as she thought she was ready to make a decision, something would happen to change her mind. That led her to think it was probably best she didn’t make any rash decisions just yet. She needed to be totally sure of what she wanted first.

She rolled her head to look at the ceiling, wincing as the pain in her neck reminded her that her injuries hadn’t quite healed yet. She hadn’t told work that, though. She’d managed to get through her back-to-work medical through sheer bloody good acting. Certain movements still gave her pain, but that was to be expected. An ex-con plunging a kitchen knife into your neck tended to cause a bit of ongoing pain, she was sure. But she couldn’t bear it any longer. Sitting around the house on her own was sending her stir crazy, and she had to get back to work. Had to get back to the life she knew.

She’d never been good at doing nothing, and there were only so many trashy novels she could bear to read. She wasn’t the sort of person who benefited from rest — she liked to get up and do things. The doctors had told her otherwise, and for a while she’d taken their advice, but she couldn’t stand it any longer. Besides which, she still had a decent stash of cocodamol in her wardrobe from a couple of years back, not to mention the supply they’d given her when she left hospital after the stabbing, so she was pretty sure that would take the edge off until she was fully healed.

Wendy wondered whether she would ever consider herself to be fully healed. The scars ran deeper than the one on the side of her neck, just below the collar line. She looked at Xav, then leant over and kissed him on the forehead.