The Society by Karen Guyler (best ebook reader android txt) 📕

covered in blood, says there’s another one knocked over in the street. You’ll call it in and all that cop stuff?. . .Innit. . .Yeah, I can do that.” He hung up and gestured at the phone. “My cousin, he’s a copper, he’ll sort it out.”

“I need to check her—”

“You need to sit. Here,” he was in front of her brandishing a handful of what turned out to be freezer bags. “I have to bag your hands for evidence. It’s okay, he’ll be here, he only lives round the corner. He’ll check the lady, do all his cop stuff. You let me, yeah?” He gestured with the bags. Eva nodded. “Sit, come on.”

She sank onto the chair as though her knee had given way again and held out her bloody, shaking hands.

“I’m Rajiv, what’s your name?”

“Eva.” She focussed on Rajiv, not looking at the table where Charles had broken her heart.

Happy that he’d done a good job of encasing her hands in the freezer bags, tied at her wrists, Rajiv brought her a cup of tea that looked like it could dissolve the straw in it.

“Strong and sweet, my mum swears by it. Tell you a secret, yeah, tastes crappy but it works.”

They both looked up at the sound of more than one siren. “See, my cuz has got it.”

Customers came and went, a surprising number considering it was still the middle of the night, tea and coffee drunk, bacon sandwiches, the smell of which made Eva’s stomach churn harder, eaten, all satisfied with Rajiv’s explanation, ‘incident, yeah’.

“Eva,” her name pulled her from her half-dozing state. “Are you hurt?” The man sitting opposite in a bright blue down jacket asked.

“Detective Elliott? Smith, I mean.”

“Are you hurt?”

“The woman?”

He shook his head. “No visible blood on her, so where did this come from?”

“The man I saw kill her, he attacked me. Did you find him?”

“There’s a unit outside, they’ll take you to the station where you’ll be forensically examined for evidence. Then I have a few questions.”

Eva put her hand out to cup the empty mug, the freezer bag reminded her not to. “I couldn’t save her, I would have, even though.” She couldn’t make herself say it, but that half sentence was enough for DI Smith to pay her more attention until she had to ask.

“Am I under arrest?”

“One thing at a time.”

30

Eva stared at the table in the police station interview room at which she was sitting. Its hard rigidity looked ridiculously inviting. She wanted to cross her arms on it, lay her head down. She put her fingertips over her eyelids, rubbed them. It was going to take a lot more to get rid of the grittiness.

A sudden knocking at the door jerked her into her present. Thud, thud, thud.

“Eva, open up.” An urgency not quite muffled through the wood.

She did as asked and DI Smith burst into the room, depositing two vending machine cups onto the table. He flicked his hands up and down.

“Coffee, not that great, but it’s hot. Milk, no sugar, right?” She looked her surprise at him. “I watched you make us a drink.”

“That’s observant of you.”

“That’s what they pay me for. So,” he closed the door and sat opposite her. “talk to me. You’ve had an extraordinary week, you’ve been around more murders than I have.”

Eva focussed on the coffee. If they’d discovered the man who’d come after her at Charles’ lab, he wouldn’t have tied it to her yet. Either way there was no explaining that. Self-defence again, but from some shadowy secret order of assassins trying to kill her. Who would believe that? His next question would be why, and she couldn’t tell him something she didn’t know.

“Tell me why you were there in the middle of the night, when you’re struggling to walk.”

“I didn’t—I forgot it.” She went to rest her forehead in her hands, remembered her stitches. “I used my daughter’s bike. I left it there, outside the café.”

“A bike ride, that’s still going to need some explaining.”

She let her explanation drop onto the table, each word destroying something inside her. “I followed my husband, he’s having an,” she whispered the most terrible word as if it could make it untrue, “affair.”

“With the victim?”

Eva nodded, swallowed hard. “I realise that makes me a suspect, but I didn’t hurt her, I just wanted to talk to her. It sounds awful and you probably don’t believe me.”

“So tell me what happened.” With a weighty sense of déjà vu she gave her statement while he wrote it down. His face remained deadpan, impossible to tell what he was thinking, where the questions would go next. Eva’s gaze dropped back to the tabletop, the pen looked small in his hands.

When he’d read her the events of the night, encapsulated in the dry black and white of her statement, and had her sign it, he sat back in his chair, watching her.

She had to ask. “Are you going to charge me for what I did to that man? I carved him up quite a bit.”

“From the look of your neck I’m minded to believe it was self-defence, but we’ll see once we’ve accumulated all the evidence.”

She touched her throat, another soreness. She was a limping injury.

“Once we’ve been through the CCTV footage from the area, we’ll have a better idea of how things played out. In the meantime, don’t leave the country.”

She shook her head; he didn’t need to know she couldn’t.

“I’ll take you home, you’re probably still in shock, so go to bed. In fact, I’d say stay in bed for the rest of the week.” His smile was more surprising.

Eva hesitated outside her front door. This was her home, it should be her sanctuary.

It would be again, once this was over. Part of finding out what the ‘this’ was might be found inside, if Charles had come back. And, if he hadn’t, that confirmed her worst fears. Then how would she find him? Should she try? She hiccupped in a breath, her