LAST RITES. Neil White

startled. She could hear the buzz of speakers. Sarah shielded her eyes to see past the lights, and then she saw them, dark shapes behind the brightness. She sat still, waiting for whatever was going to come out of them. Then the sound came out at high volume, so loud that she had to cover her ears. It was the sound of a heartbeat, fast and anxious, a relentless thump-thump, the noise pulsing around the walls.

      Sarah clamped her hands tighter over her ears and screamed, tried to drown it out, but the sound still made it through, making her own heart race to keep up.

      She looked back to the box. Maybe it would be quieter in there.

      She turned away. She couldn't go back in there, she knew that. Her life had once been normal, but those days in the box meant that it would never be the same again.

       Chapter Seven

      Laura McGanity swung her bag onto her desk and sat down with a slump. She leaned back and closed her eyes for a few seconds.

      ‘I'm not sure I can cope with another day of this,’ she said, almost to herself.

      Pete Dawson grinned at her. ‘Turning on tape machines and filling out forms not exciting enough for you?’ he said.

      Laura looked at him, took in his crew cut, and the scar over his eye that was a remnant of his last jaunt with the Support Unit in the Saturday night van.

      ‘Don't be offended, Pete, but you don't look the agony aunt type,’ she said.

      Pete laughed. He had been Laura's sidekick for most of her time in Blackley. He was an old-style detective, a head-cracker who had not yet accepted the committee style of police politics, and Laura liked him for that. Pete had learned one thing in his police career: criminals are ruthless and devious, and don't feel much remorse for those they hurt on the way. So Pete liked to let them know what he thought. Sometimes it was just a quiet word on a dark street, although it came with a snarl. Mostly it was just about being relentless, so that the criminals knew that if he became an enemy it was time to change their turf.

      ‘This was your choice,’ he said. ‘Regular hours.’

      She rubbed her eyes. ‘It's not just that, though.’

      ‘If you want to have a moan,’ he said, ‘you've got around ten minutes, because the cells are full, and if we're ever going to see daylight today we need to get the first one out of the way.’

      Laura shook her head. ‘I'm not talking about it,’ she said, and then she turned her head quickly when she heard laughter further along the corridor. It was the murder squad, assembled for the Luke Howarth murder, all chasing down Sarah Goode.

      ‘It's not just Bobby's custody case, though, is it?’ he asked. ‘Or Jack?’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      Pete pointed towards the door. ‘I thought maybe you'd grown tired of me, but it seems like you just want in on the big case.’

      Laura didn't answer straight away. It was more than being out of the loop, she was about to say. It was about Jack, and Bobby, and home, and Geoff and the custody case, and missing London. But she didn't say that. Instead, she exhaled and forced out a smile. ‘You've got me, Pete. Maybe we should get into interview quickly if you're in this kind of detecting form.’

      ‘You don't want to be with them,’ he replied. ‘The creases are too sharp in their trousers.’

      ‘Is that how you judge people?’

      ‘It's just one way.’

      Laura sighed. ‘C'mon then, what have we got first?’

      Pete tossed over the papers. ‘A fight in The Trafalgar. Someone almost lost an eye.’

      ‘Is this a joke?’

      ‘It's barely a case,’ Pete replied. ‘We've got the right man, but no one is making statements, not even the victim.’

      ‘Let me guess,’ said Laura, smiling now. ‘An argument over a woman, and the victim is married?’

      ‘And you said I was the great detective,’ Pete replied, standing. ‘C'mon, let's turn the tapes and see what we get.’

      I sat in my car and pondered the view.

      I had made a few calls around some contacts to get the address, and so I was outside Sarah Goode's house in Blackley, the scene of the crime, in the middle of a long terrace halfway up a steep hill. Or down it, depending on your outlook on life. It seemed like nothing out of the ordinary. The street was long and straight, its lines broken only by the roads that crisscrossed it, so that driving down became a game of dare, a dicey rat-run for those trying to avoid the town-centre jams. The houses were in traditional glazed red brick, with the doorframes picked out in painted white stone, no gardens, the front doors straight onto the street, and the slope so pronounced that it took only a tilt of my head to make the street look like fallen dominoes.

      I looked along the street, trying to gauge the neighbourhood. I felt my car windows vibrate from R&B played too loudly on bad speakers, and a car filled with young Pakistani men drove past slowly, all of them staring at me. Their community had grown in the sixties, when the cotton mills needed night-shift workers and the newly prosperous white working class didn't want to do them. The Asians worked at night, the whites during the day. When the mills closed down, both communities had found themselves jobless.

      A group of women watched me from further up the street, as the wind pushed their silk pants against their legs and made their headscarves flap around their faces. I took some pictures. Maybe there was something here. How Sarah came to be a killer, an analysis of small-town murder. Truman Capote for the industrial north. I could follow the investigation, something in the bank for after Bobby's custody case, a story better than the ones I churned out most days.

      Sarah's house looked still. There were wicker blinds in each window, all down, so nothing about the house gave away its secret. I decided to leave the neighbours for a while. There'd been a flurry of interest just after the body was discovered, and not all journalists were courteous. There's no story in a slammed door.

      I checked my watch as I pondered where I should go next, and then I saw something, some movement in my peripheral vision. I stepped out of my car and moved closer. Sarah's house looked the same as before, deserted and cold, the blinds still closed.

      Then I saw it again, in the front-room window, just a finger on the blinds. Somebody was watching me.

       Chapter Eight

      Inspector Lucas looked at the floor as he was led through the ward. There were the usual smells, antiseptic and illness, but it was the hopelessness that made him look away. The ward was a series of rooms, each containing four beds, the occupants old and disinterested, just staring into space. He was on the dark side of fifty. How long was there until this?

      He noticed that the nurse had stopped walking and was gesturing towards one of the rooms. The occupants were all women, with no empty beds, but he guessed which one was Abigail from the freshness of the bandages. He followed the nurse into the room. No one looked at him as he went in. He saw that Abigail was sleeping.

      ‘How is she?’ he asked.

      ‘The cuts on her legs have been stitched, and the burns are not too bad,’ the nurse replied, her voice low. ‘Superficial mainly. But she's in shock, and we're worried about her sight.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Some of whatever it was that exploded hit her in the eyes. Her right eye is just sore, but she might lose her sight in her left.’

      Rod didn't want to tell the nurse that it had been pieces of Abigail's