Neil White 3 Book Bundle. Neil White

      ‘Ma’am?’ Sheldon said, appealing to Dixon.

      She exhaled wearily and then shook her head. ‘It’s time to hand it over. We don’t have the resources. Take some leave, Sheldon, until I decide otherwise. Full pay.’

      ‘What, I’m suspended?’

      ‘No, just sick leave. Here’s the number of the welfare officer,’ and she passed over a leaflet that Sheldon had seen pinned to noticeboards around the station. ‘Speak to him, take some advice. Go on holiday. Just get the old Sheldon back.’

      Sheldon didn’t know what to say. He looked at the leaflet, turned it over in his hand. ‘So this is it?’ he said.

      ‘Only for now,’ Dixon said.

      Sheldon rose slowly out of his chair. The silence seemed heavy in the room. He looked at Williams, who simply crossed his legs in response, his lips firm under his moustache. Tracey looked embarrassed, but her position in the room, just behind Dixon, told Sheldon where her allegiance lay. He turned away and went towards the door. As he stepped through and clicked it shut, the corridor felt empty and quiet. The light reflected from the blue and white tiles that ran along its length seemed to guide him towards the exit at the other end.

      His footsteps were hesitant as he passed the doorway to the Incident Room. There were a few detectives in there, and they stopped whatever they had been doing as he went past. The ones that caught his eyes turned away when he returned their stares.

      Sheldon kept on walking until his hand thumped on the final door, and then it was bright outside, making him squint, the hum of traffic breaking the echoes of the corridor. He went towards his own car but didn’t climb in. Where would he go? He couldn’t go home. There was nothing for him there. Instead, he kept on walking, going past his car and towards the road that ran in front of the station, where the traffic noise got louder.

      Sheldon stared ahead, not sure what he was going to do, or where, and finally set off walking, the buzz of the investigation replaced by the sound of his feet on the tarmac. The further he got from the station, the more certain he was that he was never going to return.

      Charlie sank to his knees and closed his eyes. He got the acid burn in his mouth and knew that he would struggle to keep down whatever was left in his stomach, but he gritted his teeth and tried to get through it.

      Oh Amelia, he thought to himself. Oh Christ, what had he done?

      He braced himself before he opened his eyes, knowing what he was about to see.

      Amelia was on her back on the floor. She was virtually naked, her clothes ripped off, her blouse in shreds around her wrists, as if it had been pulled off her shoulders from behind. Her skirt was pushed up her legs, her knickers in the corner of the room. The long tanned legs that he had admired during slow afternoons looked stiff and lifeless, although crooked, so that in death she retained some modesty. Trails of blood had run down her thighs and onto the floor, where it pooled in a dark stain and merged with the streams that had run from her chest and torso.

      Her chest was exposed, but it was hard to make out the smoothness of her skin for the dried blood. It was smeared, like finger painting, with long streaks running to her neck, where an electrical flex from a lamp had been tied tightly around it. But it was what was above the flex that he knew would haunt him for the rest of his life.

      Where there had once been Amelia’s face, there was now just bloody flesh and the protrusion of bone. Her eyes stared at the ceiling like two glass balls, her teeth set in a permanent grimace. Her face had been cut away.

      He closed his eyes again. He couldn’t look. He hadn’t done this, he just knew it. He would have been covered in blood, and he hadn’t been, except for the stains he had made as he brushed against the knife as he slept. But the missing carving knife was in his dishwasher. How would he explain that? And his clothes? How could he say that his clothes were not covered in blood when he had put them in the washing machine?

      Then something else occurred to him. Billy Privett, then Amelia. Would he be next?

      Charlie sat back against the doorframe, his hands on his head. There were photographs behind Amelia, lined up along the mantel over the fire. Her parents mainly, Amelia looking much different to the person she had been around the office. She was laughing, her arms wrapped round her father, his face brown and deep-lined, love and pride etched into every wrinkle to his smile.

      He shook his head. What had Amelia gone through in her final moments? The flex was around her neck like a dog lead – not to mention her face. Charlie hoped fervently she had been dead when that happened.

      Charlie put his hand over his mouth and looked back towards the kitchen. But if it wasn’t him, how did he end up with the knife? Then he noticed that he had been stepping on patches of blood, and so there would be blood on his soles. Just tiny traces, but enough for a forensic scientist to find. And then there was the sweat on the wall where he had put his head back.

      He had to think like a lawyer. There is always an alternative theory.

      He should call the police and brazen it out, he knew that. But they would spot the missing knife, and so they would guess that it had been used. And he would have to stay with them, to tell them what he saw. They might even ask where he had been? He couldn’t just tell them that he couldn’t remember. If he tried to make something up, someone else somewhere might contradict it, and then he would be a liar. They would ask about the business, because that is what tied him to Amelia, but what could he say? That they were losing money and surviving on an overdraft, and that Amelia blamed him for the partnership failings, that their relationship was not always harmonious? And then the rest would come out. How he looked at her when she was in the office, and the more drunk he got, the more it was a leer. How he had acted strangely earlier in the morning. Vomiting in public. Sleeping on the office floor. Bloodstains on the cord on the Venetian blind, which would be Amelia’s blood, because it came from the knife. It will start to add up against him, and so they’d lock him up just so that they can have a poke around. And what would they find? The clothes he wore the day before in the washer, matched against the CCTV from the court waiting room, and the knife missing from Amelia’s knife block in his dishwasher. It would be like writing his own prison sentence.

      Charlie was being selfish, he knew it, but he couldn’t bring Amelia back. He had to look out for himself, because they wouldn’t get any nearer to finding out who killed her if the police focus was all on him.

      Except that what he was about to do could look even worse, because if he just left and someone remembered him through the twitch of a curtain, they would want to know why he hadn’t called it in. Charlie felt like the last piece on the chessboard, the white king being pursued around the board, with no winning move possible but not willing to give it up.

      He looked at Amelia and told her that he was sorry, that he hoped she would forgive him if it turned out that his religious views had always been wrong, and that she was looking down on him. Then he backed out of the room.

      Charlie was about to go to the back door when he heard a car pull up outside.

      He went to the window, stepping round Amelia. As he looked through, he saw the two men in suits who had been at the office the day before, the private payers, emerging from a silver Audi. What were they doing here? They were clients, Amelia had said that.

      They were talking to each other, looking around, and then they set off towards the front door.

      Charlie panicked. He looked down at Amelia, and then back at the two men getting closer along the path. Did they have something to do with it?

      He bolted for the back garden, the patio door opening with a swish. There was a knock on the door as he ran along the lawn, the pounding of his feet loud in his ears. He scrambled over the fence at the back, and then lay on the floor as he tried to get his breath back. He waited for a shout from one of the neighbours, but it was quiet.

      The grass tickled his cheeks, his breaths hot as he panted into the ground. There was the sound of cars in the distance and the loud thump of his heart, and then he heard the