Page 56 of Glasshouses

“Lily Goodhew.” He looked up at me with those dark eyes. “She’s named in the files on the pen drive.”

I realised what files he meant. “The ones I couldn’t access?”

A shrug, nonchalant. “I have a vested interest in this case being solved.”

Later, many weeks later, I’d go back to this moment where a man I didn’t know sat on the toilet lid of my wrecked bathroom and understand that this was when I probably knew.

I dialled Lily’s number, her voice shaking as she answered, high pitched and anxious.

“Hello? Detective Mia? I think someone’s in the garden.”

“I’m going to get a response team over to you. Where are you right now?” I rested against the door, watching Taz. He was still, elbows on knees, watching me right back.

“I’m in my bathroom. I locked the door.”

“Do you think anyone’s in the house?”

“No. I just thought I saw a torch in the garden, you know like from someone’s phone.” Her words were whispered. “I thought I heard someone.”

“Okay, Lily, I’m going to get a response team over to you now, so I’m going to come off the phone to call them. I’ll call you straight back.”

“Can’t you come over?”

I’d had this before, victims who struck up an overattachment to someone they perceived as being able to save them. I’d seen other coppers get taken in by it too.

“A response team can get there quicker, and if someone is in your garden, they’ll be able to deal with it. I will call you back.” I hung up before she could say anything else, dialling a too familiar number and calling it in.

I dialled Lily straight back, but there was no answer. Worry and irritation simultaneously cruised through me and I sat down on the floor, back still to the door, and put my phone down on the carpet that probably needed to be decontaminated before it went in the skip.

“Do you need to go to her?” Taz’s tone was measured and calm.

“No. It would be the worst thing I could do. She’s searching for people to anchor to. If she perceives me as her hero it will make things difficult.” Saying the words out loud made me actually hear them.

Taz stood up. “Turn your phone up, find some energy and let’s get these tiles off the walls.”

“I should check your pen drive.”

“What’s on it isn’t new. It’ll keep until Sunday. You’ll be more use to yourself if you can get these tiles off.”

“What do I use to do that?”

“Chisel, hammer, and an image of whoever’s head you want to cave in.”

That wasn’t a problem at all.

Chapter Sixteen

It had just been a woman and some bloke running last night, nothing to be bothered about. He’d crouched down and hidden in the smallest of the glasshouses, tucked under the bench where it was dark and full of spiders and beetles. Insects didn’t bother him; his gran hated woodlice because she said anything that had its skeleton outside of its body shouldn’t exist, but he liked them; they were the gardener’s labourer.

What he didn’t like was having other people in his space. They’d noticed the watering cans and the tomatoes. Hopefully they were just running through and wouldn’t think about here again and he could carry on growing things. He had wondered if they were looking for somewhere they could be private, and then he’d had to think about what he’d do if they started touching each other, you know, like that.

But they hadn’t and he didn’t know if he was disappointed or not. Maybe that would’ve made up for the scare he’d had the other night when someone else had been there and he’d legged it back home.

He’d crawled from underneath the table, happy to stand up again. His phone told him that he needed to get home quick else his gran would be serving him up for dinner, if she was back from her bridge night and there was a good chance she wouldn’t be since it was at Jill’s and Jill was serving her usual measures of gin and tonic. As it was, Gran had been at Jill’s and he did get home before her.

He'd spent the night worrying about whether he’d be found out, whether now was the time to harvest his tomatoes although he didn’t know what he was going to do with them, and stick to exploring other places, maybe join with another urban explorer so he wasn’t on his own so much. There were risks to doing this on your own; what if he injured himself – there’d be no one to find him and there was always the chance that some homeless person could be living in a place and attack him.

People had been back to the house today; he could tell with the amount of footsteps there were. There were new boards up as well, the place where he’d managed to get entry to the house was completely sealed now, so he wondered if it was the police who’d been today. Maybe the man and woman last night had been police officers and were worried about people breaking in here. He supposed it was a bit dangerous, if you didn’t know what you were doing.