Читать книгу The Perfect Widow - A.M. Castle - Страница 11

Becca Holt stumped into the station building and dropped the results of her shopping trip on her desk. It was cluttered already with clumps of empty Costa cups and plastic bags as shrivelled as autumn leaves. Tutting audibly so her colleagues wouldn’t think it was all her rubbish, she shoved the lot into the nearest bin, hesitating only briefly over whether it should go into ‘recycling’ or ‘general waste’. Even throwing stuff away was complicated nowadays.

Once the decks were cleared to her satisfaction, she snuffled in the pristine white paper bag she’d brought in. Just inhaling the doughnuts calmed her, the reassuring, wholesome smell of vanilla undercut with the hidden raspberry jam. She breathed in a bit too hard and had to splutter, finding a sudden unwilling sympathy for the coke addicts they were constantly moving on from under the arches down near the station.

She darted a quick glance around. At most of the desks, her fellow PCs were sprawled flat or had their noses pressed up against screens. Opposite, Burke was knocking a biro against his teeth in a rhythm that was doing his dental work no favours and would soon be messing with her head. She’d bought the doughnuts to share. She knew she should be tearing open the bag, leaving it on the side of her desk, making a general announcement of her largesse. Getting them all to love her. But bugger that. She wanted them all to herself.

She carefully edged a doughnut up a tad in the bag, ducked her head down, bit and sighed. It was good. So good it was bad. A bead of jam oozed down the side of her mouth and she licked and rubbed ferociously. Didn’t want to look like Dracula, did she? Or be caught snacking, either. She could do without being teased. As she’d discovered, the banter here wasn’t imaginative. Give them a stick, and they’d be beating you with it until you collected your pension.

She chewed carefully and swallowed, the movement making her waistband dig in that little bit more. She felt a prickle of shame. It suddenly made her think of that woman’s thighs. Her first and only knock, and as such seared on her memory. But she didn’t think she’d have forgotten it anyway, even if she’d called on as many of the recently bereaved as the Co-op Funeral Service.

Louise Bridges. That had been her name.

There’d been something about her, for sure. She couldn’t say it had been eating away at her. She was the one who had been eating away, and not at that case, but at mounds of stuff she shouldn’t even be looking at. She knew that. But this was a tough job, physical. She could walk it off. In theory. Unfortunately, her beat didn’t cover Land’s End to John O’Groats. As often as not, she was welded to the seat of her patrol car, and even that was stationary in traffic.

The truth was, it was the kind of work that you wanted to compensate yourself for doing. Demanding, sometimes demeaning. Requiring a lot of patience. Being polite, however absurd the calls on her time. Stepping in to defuse rows between grown men that would have shamed toddlers. Picking drunks up out of the gutter, and still treating them with respect, even when they hurled all over her clodhopping shoes. She needed a treat after a long day – and sometimes in the middle of a long day. And occasionally, like now, right at the beginning of what was, after all, bound to be a long day.

Unbidden, that woman’s legs unfurled in her mind again. How did you even get legs like that? Genetics, that’s how. Her own tree trunks would always be just that, even if she ate nothing but tofu and quinoa from this day forth. She knew that to be the truth. Yet there were steps she could take, to make sure the rest of her didn’t run the same way as her legs. She didn’t need Mrs Bridges rubbing it in.

But that wasn’t really why the woman had stuck in her mind. Or wasn’t the only reason, at any rate. Something didn’t stack up. Whatever her partner said, Becca hated a loose end even more than she hated an untidy doughnut. She lowered her head to the bag again, and nibbled the corner until it was flattened off. Perfect. But was that another bit poking up? She sighed. And nibbled again.

Even the hit of sweetness wasn’t enough to keep her mind off Louise Bridges for long. With a powder-white thumb she prodded her terminal into life. Burke would kill her, but he didn’t have to know. Thanks to her IT degree, she could just sneak a quick peek, set her mind at rest. Then enjoy her snack for as long as the job would let her. She licked her fingers, pressed a couple of keys, realised they were getting sticky and shrugged. This wouldn’t take a sec. Then she could give the whole keyboard a good wipe down. She fumbled in her drawer, found a piece of paper, studied the letterhead and tapped in the name.

A few strokes later and she was in. The doughnut, jam haemorrhaging away quietly inside the bag, was forgotten.