Water's Edge

Chapter VIII

And, scene...

They'd hate the fact I found them.

I looked to the pile of fags between my feet; I'd chucked the Twin finger away, it had gone soggy, melted in my pocket. The Response Sarge had taken me to his car and I sat with the passenger door open, feet kicking around a white pebble in the muck. I looked into the tin: only one fag left. Damn. I rolled more in my lap, sat akimbo to the seat, to the radio buzzing and crackling.

He had taken a preliminary statement but it was obvious they weren't happy. It seemed everyone and their mother had come out of the woodwork. So much for handling the press.

Out the gloam a woman approached. She had eyes that could start heart attacks if she wanted. She wore a black turtleneck and thick jeans for the cold, "You the Runner?" She asked.

Runner. I hated the term. I had become a P.I. after I found my own constabulary too corrupt after #SpyCops went through, as had many of my colleagues all over England and the Deunited Kingdom. Some bloody journo had labelled us The Bow Street Runners, those who straddle the thin blue line; I hated the term. Made us sound like bloody superheroes. But if this plain-clothes copper was calling me that, she didn't trust me. Coppers hated Runners. Usually.

"P.I. Fields." I offered her a cig and she took a moment to consider rejecting it, but it was a cold night and she couldn't resist.

"You roll like you're from prison."

"I'm thrifty." I shrugged and stood up, kicking the cigs under the Sarges car, "Are you..." I retrieved the card from my jacket, "DCI Yazmin Womack?"

She nodded, "I'll need to get you to the station." She tossed half the cig away in disgust, "Take your clothes, record a statement—"

I interrupted, "I know the drill." I looked over the Humber, "Who are the bodies?"

"Can't tell yet, sodden."

She drove me to the station. For a second, I considered if she might be the sister of the lass who I'd bought the Twix off; her hair was coiled up like a spring though, not let loose. She must get a lot of shtick from her colleagues, brown lass in the force, especially nowadays. It was a half hour drive to the station, and I was getting antsy I hadn't checked on my Zee. Left it at the cheapest B&B I could have found, didn't even have a name. She'd be alright though? At least I could kip in the back of DCI Womack's car.

Right alongside the road before turning into the station, a community garden was being tended to by some of the whippersnappers of the surrounding village. It had become common practice to chastise the hungry by saying they should just go foraging, and the answer – rather than school meal vouchers and the like – had been to construct these council-approved foraging zones. Most of the time, you just found them vandalised, teenagers having no youth clubs to go to anymore. But this one thrived, with the brutalist glass of the station watching over it. They had evidently improved the exterior of the station, whether the interior, or the systems themselves, had been improved would be another matter: money was great at the signal, but not the virtue. As we pulled up the road, I watched two kids playing at scrumping, two coppers watching amused, as they shared a fag between them.

She pulled up and guided me round the back into an interview room and left me alone with a polystyrene cup of black coffee. It was too hot to sip. A no smoking sign over the door surprised me. Rarely saw them nowadays.

She returned with a silver case on a strap, and clipped it open. An old NEAL 7224 Cassette Recorder, clunking into life as she sat opposite with her own cup of tar. I leant forward, coughed into the microphone on it's little plastic stand, "All ok?"

She nodded, "DCI Yazmin Womack interviewing Licensed Private Investigator Harry Jake Fields, reference number—?" She paused and tapped the table with a biro she retrieved from her jeans. I put my badge on the table, and she scrawled it into a notebook, "Reference number 2241707." She took a deep breath. She was hiding a yawn. I cocked a brow. She gave me a look that shut me up good and proper.

I detailed everything I could remember, how we had found the bodies, the time, how Leo had been showing me around on the boat. I felt like protecting him – gut told me it couldn't have been him to stack up the bodies like that, and although it's bad practice to protect a suspect on a hunch, who's gonna sue me? – and logged all the names I could apart from who hired me. "Why won't you tell me?" She snapped.

"Confidentiality and all that."

It was true I had no legal obligation per new Private Investigation Legislation to tell DCI Womack who had hired me. But we both knew. I thanked her for the coffee and left down the drab beige halls. She escorted me out.

"You have a change of clothes at wherever you're staying?"

"Aye, but not with me." I spurned.

They gave me some awful hand-me-downs whilst they checked my clothes over. Usually it'd take a week, but they said it'd be a couple of days. It was odd, I could tell from the looks over the desks what people thought of the likes of me: a Bow Street Runner. The police either trusted you explicitly because you were ex-police, and everyone on the thin blue line helped each other, even those who left it behind. But some police saw us as traitors to the cause, publicly decrying the system. I had even asked for abolition when I first quit; gave up on that idea quickly. The public on the other hand either distrust you because you're police or honour everything you do. All I knew is here, in Humberside, they respected my badge but not the person. To them, I was taking liberties.

It felt too easy to fall back into the old blue patois. I wondered if they had filed a P62J, what SOCCO had found—I had left to exorcise myself of these things but once you know the words they stay with you, a fever that never breaks. At least on the porch of the building I could have another cig now. How many had I had today? I couldn't remember.

"Scab—" A bobby coughed as he brushed past me. Said it all really.