FIVE
Over the years, Miller had found himself in more than his fair share of tricky situations, many of which had demanded tremendous care and delicacy.
He had once spent twenty tense and agonising minutes at the top of the Tower, attempting to talk down a jumper, and even though he now realised that Get a shift on, mate, I’ve got a pasty in the oven had not perhaps been the wisest thing to say, he still thought it had been some of his best work.
The first nineteen and a half minutes, anyway.
This, though …
This required a level of precision beyond anything he could think of.
Admittedly, Miller had never defused a bomb or performed open-heart surgery, but he couldn’t imagine that they were any more exacting or required a greater degree of skill than was nece-ssary to give medication to a jittery rat with a skin condition.
‘Easy, girl … there you go. Just a few more mouthfuls …’
For the first couple of days, Ginger had seemed happy enough to take the antibiotic from a syringe.
Then she had become stressed suddenly and stubbornly refused to entertain the idea any longer, leaving Miller with little option but to feed the liquid directly to her from a spoon.
He’d tried mixing it with baby food, and on one occasion – when he was feeling particularly creative after watching an episode of MasterChef – avocado, but now he was sticking with mashed banana, which was definitely Ginger’s favourite.
‘Nearly gone. Good girl.’
Miller stared down at the balding rat perched on his chest. He watched her slurping happily away until the spoon was empty, then lifted her up for a cuddle.
For a few minutes he let her whiskers tickle his neck and gently stroked the fur around the patches of pink skin.
He told her how brave she was, and promised that he wouldn’t love her any less if she went full Kojak, before lifting her up and laying her back down in the cage/playpen/expensively equipped rat mansion that took up nearly a third of Miller’s front room and which Ginger shared with her best mate, Fred.
Fred, short for Frederica. So there would be no X-rated ratty shenanigans.
Miller slumped back on to the sofa, grabbed his phone and began to check his emails.
There was a message warning him that his Facebook account was about to be deleted, which might have been alarming save for the fact that he didn’t have a Facebook account, on top of which it looked to have been written by a six-year-old who didn’t speak English.
You’re account going to be deleeted. Urgent! This not to be ignored!!
Miller shook his head, despairing at the glaring flaws in the machinations of the average scammer.
Over his many years as a copper, he’d come to understand and even, on occasion, to sympathise with a certain sort of criminal, but he could simply not forgive a failure to check basic spelling and grammar. He carried on scrolling and deleting …
A delivery company had been unable to deliver a parcel (click on the link).
He’d won an air fryer (click on the link).
The next email also contained a link, but, noting the address of the sender, Miller decided that binning it would be over-cautious, so opened it to reveal a confidential message from Dr Priya Acharya.
Yes, it could have been an extremely elaborate phishing attempt and there were one or two questionable choices when it came to syntax, but he felt on safe enough ground.
The pathologist was still working to identify the weapon that had killed Ezra Simmons, she said, but would hopefully have more information tomorrow.
There was a smiley-face emoji after that.
Acharya was a fan of emojis, and was always complaining there weren’t any that were more useful to her as a pathologist; that it would be nice to occasionally sign off with a cute emoji of a bone saw or a dissected lung.
It was definitely something heavy and blunt, though.
Miller fired off a quick and cheery reply, grabbed the pile of that morning’s unopened mail from the table by the front door and sloped into the kitchen to make tea.
Having taken three attempts to successfully toss a teabag into his mug from the other side of the room (about his average success rate), he flicked through the junk mail while the kettle grumbled behind him.
Unrequested credit-card applications, faintly disturbing brochures for retirement homes, restaurant flyers—
He stopped when he saw the official-looking envelope bearing the logo of the Lancashire Constabulary.
His immediate thought was that Tim Sullivan had made some sort of official complaint.
If it wasn’t him, there were any number of other candidates – coppers and members of the public alike – who might have felt that Miller’s interactions with them had been less than satisfactory.
Taking a more positive if somewhat far-fetched, approach, he considered his next move should the envelope contain the surprising news of his immediate appointment to Chief Constable.
He would make sweeping changes, obviously. Shake things up a little.
He’d swiftly replace all sirens on police cars with jangly bells; maybe even the sort that played tunes, like the ones on ice-cream vans.
He would compel any officer placing a suspect in handcuffs to wink and say ‘I borrowed these off your wife’.
He would allow pets into Incident Rooms, demote any detective with a knitted mascot on their computer and attempt to soften the public’s often antagonistic reaction to police on the street by instituting ‘Casual Friday’ for all uniformed officers.
Miller opened the envelope and began to read.
He sucked in a fast breath and held it.
In compliance with the protocol following the death of a serving officer …
He glanced up, thinking he’d glimpsed a shape moving past the doorway, then went back to the letter. When he’d finished reading and folded the letter up again, he raised his eyes to see Alex leaning against the worktop.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Oh yourself,’ Alex said.
‘You’re back.’
‘You don’t exactly sound thrilled.’
‘No … I am, obviously. I thought you’d gone, that’s all. I watched you leave.’
‘You imagined that I’d left, same as you’re imagining I’m back again and stood here in the kitchen, which is filthy, by the way.’
‘Now, hang on—’
‘The state of that bloody grill pan!’ Miller’s wife shook her head and sighed. ‘I can’t believe you haven’t worked this stuff out yet.’
‘What stuff?’
‘The whole imagining business.’
‘I have.’ Miller was struggling for words. ‘Course I have. It’s just, I thought, you know …’
Alex smiled and stepped towards him. ‘Relax, my love, I’m just winding you up. Not about the grill pan, though. That really is disgusting.’
Miller bent down to open the cupboard under the sink and began rummaging in search of Brillo pads, tossing aside bottles of bleach and washing-up liquid. ‘I definitely bought some,’ he said.
He knew exactly how Alex came to be there now; how he’d been able to have so many conversations with her in the weeks after she’d been killed, so many debates and even the occasional argument.
She’d made it perfectly clear on day one that she wasn’t a ghost, and therefore, as nothing but a figment of his over-active imagination, was wholly unable to answer questions that Miller himself did not already know the answer to.
They’d discussed several cases, including the investigation into her own murder, but all the time he’d essentially been talking to himself.
Seeing and hearing her whenever he needed to; feeling her presence, the comfort of it, while the agony of her absence raged inside him.
That pain had not yet gone away and he wondered if the day would ever come when it might start to ease, even a little.
He longed for that day, and dreaded it.
‘I thought you stopped being around just because we’d caught the bloke who … did it,’ he said.
‘Murdered me, you mean?’
‘Yeah, that.’
‘You can say his name, you know.’
‘I’d rather not.’ Miller grimaced. ‘Just thinking about him makes me feel a bit gippy.’
The man who had been charged with Alex’s murder was yet to stand trial, and though there was more than enough evidence to put him away, Miller was not looking forward to the moment when he would have to step into the witness box and stare across at him.
Now, looking at Alex, trying to keep his breathing nice and even, he pictured her killer’s face and -reflexively stretched out the hand in which he’d broken several small bones during the somewhat over-zealous arrest.
‘Yes, well it was rather a pussy-arsed punch,’ Alex said.
‘Charming,’ Miller said. Abandoning the hunt for a scourer, he stood up and nodded, remembering how good it had felt to finally confront the man responsible for her death, the broken hand notwithstanding. ‘Anyway, that’s why I thought you’d gone.’
‘To be fair, it did seem like the right time to disappear for a bit.’
‘Made me wish it had taken me longer.’
‘It took you quite long enough,’ Alex said. ‘Some bloody detective.’
Miller was grinning as he reached to tear off a square of kitchen towel and dabbed at his eyes.
‘Oh, pull yourself together, you big soft bugger.’
‘Sorry,’ Miller sniffed.
‘I’m back, aren’t I?’
‘Yeah, and I’m, you know …’
‘Thrilled. Yeah, you said. Well, let’s see how thrilled you are after I’ve given you a decent bollocking or two.
’ Alex put on her stern face, or tried to.
Stern and sexy enough to make Miller catch his breath again.
‘I mean, someone has to keep you in line, my love. Tell you when you’re cocking up a case or upsetting more people than usual, or just reminding you to put the bins out. ’
‘I can’t wait.’ Miller turned to flick the kettle on again. ‘Why now, though?’
‘I can’t think of a more suitable time, can you?’ Alex nodded towards the letter that was still folded in Miller’s hand. ‘Because I am dead and I was that serving officer.’