Little Darlings. Melanie Golding
case, a heroin user, turned out to have taken an accidental overdose, but the police couldn’t identify her. All they found on the body was a silver heart necklace, probably left behind by whoever took her wallet and phone because of its unusual engraving, which would have made it tricky to shift on the black market. On the back of the heart was a date, and the name Holly-May.
The name didn’t match any missing person’s report. Accidental death, not being a crime, didn’t come under police budgets for investigation, and the DI reassigned Harper the moment the coroner’s verdict was reached. The dead woman might never have been identified if the frustration of being pulled from the case hadn’t still been on Harper’s mind the next week, when she’d bumped into Amy at a crime scene.
‘They won’t let me investigate, because of budgets. Ridiculous. The body will just stay in the morgue indefinitely.’
‘Can I see the necklace?’
Harper didn’t see why not.
She’d almost forgotten about it by the time the journalist came swinging into the office in her heels, handing over the address of the dead woman’s parents with a flourish.
‘How did you get this?’
‘Persistence,’ said Amy, shrugging. Then she told Harper how every day, for twenty minutes, she’d sat down with a list of jewellers and called them, one after another until she found the one who had engraved the necklace. It had taken four months. ‘You owe me a drink,’ she’d said, smiling in a way that made Harper wonder about what she meant by ‘drink’. A drink between friends? Colleagues? Or something else? There’d been a pause, a moment, when the two women had locked eyes and something had passed between them. Harper had felt it, a low, melting sensation in her belly. She could have reached across, touched the other woman’s hand, said, Sure, let’s meet up later, and that would have been that, one way or the other. But something stopped Harper from following her usual script.
Every time they’d met since, Harper had thought about making the date. But she hadn’t done it, and it hung between them, an unspoken thing that Harper thought about more often than she felt she ought to. She thought about it now. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for. She only knew that she liked Amy. Probably too much. It felt dangerous, that feeling, something she couldn’t control, that got bigger even as she tried to banish it, to tell herself that these were the feelings that hurt you eventually, that destroyed lives, that needed to be ignored. She’d followed her heart once, when she was too young to know how completely a heart could be shattered. She wasn’t going to do it again. Besides, they had something good going, professionally, and it would be a shame to spoil it.
Amy glanced towards the uniforms loading the van, and Harper could tell she was already checking them out, trying to discern who might be likely to fall for those charms and spill the beans.
Then Amy looked back at Harper and frowned. She stepped up closer, close enough that Harper could smell her perfume. Her eyes sharpened as she examined Harper’s face. ‘What is it?’
‘What’s what?’ said Harper.
‘There’s something the matter. Tell me.’
‘I’ve just had a bit of a shitty day, I suppose.’
‘Oh? You mean, apart from this?’ She gestured over her shoulder at the two council workers hosing the road.
Harper nodded. She pondered how much she ought to tell Amy about the Lauren Tranter case; she didn’t want her thinking it was a story she could report in the newspaper. ‘Can we speak as friends?’ said Harper.
Amy said, ‘Of course.’
‘First thing this morning, there was this attempted abduction at the maternity ward. Identical twins.’
Amy scrabbled in her bag for the recording device. ‘Now, this is news. Tell me everything.’
Harper grabbed hold of Amy’s arm. ‘No. I can’t. I mean, it was a false alarm. There’s nothing to report.’
‘So why are you telling me about it?’
She had a point. ‘I don’t know.’
Amy looked down at where Harper held her by the wrist. She gave a half smile, raised her eyebrows. Harper let go, her cheeks flushing. Amy’s skin was warm and soft, and Harper’s grip had left a small pink mark that she wanted to stroke. Maybe even to kiss it better. Harper said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and searched Amy’s face, wondering what was happening, if anything was happening. But the moment, seemingly, had passed.
‘Come on, Joanna. You’re usually so pragmatic about the job. Just now, you went right up to that poor dead guy and closed his eyes. With your bare hands. I couldn’t have done that.’
‘I guess we all have our soft spots. Suicides, I can just about handle. But anything to do with babies being abducted, well. It gets to me.’
They held each other’s gaze for a moment, and Harper thought, this is it. She’s going to ask me the question, right now. And I’ll spill it, every bit. She’ll say, why does it get to you, Joanna? You don’t have any children, do you? And I’ll say, I did once, but I lost her. I was too young to know what it would mean, or that I even had a choice. I let them take her, and it was like part of me had been taken: a limb, or half of my heart. After that I stopped thinking about it, because I had to, in order to survive. But sometimes I forget to not think about it, and it’s like it happened yesterday. It’s like I have to get her back, and the feeling won’t go away until I do. Even though it’s twenty-six years too late to change anything.
Behind them the van doors slammed shut. Only a couple of officers remained, and they were heading towards their vehicles, speaking into radios, off to the next thing.
Amy said, ‘Look, I just need to have a quick chat with one of these guys before they disappear. How about we meet up for a coffee? Tomorrow? Next week? I’ll be in touch.’
‘Great,’ said Harper, watching as Amy scooted across the road after one of Harper’s colleagues, already clutching the recorder. ‘Text me?’ said Harper, but Amy was too far away to hear.
Those who are carried away are happy, according to some accounts, having plenty of good living and music and mirth. Others say, however, that they are continually longing for their earthly friends. Lady Wilde gives a gloomy tradition that there are two kinds of fairies – one kind merry and gentle, the other evil, and sacrificing every year a life to Satan, for which purpose they steal mortals.
FROM Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland
BY W. B. YEATS
July 19th
Six days old
Mid-morning
The house was one of a thousand two-up-two-down stone terraces lined up on one of the city’s eight hills, built a hundred years ago for the families of the steelworkers and the miners. Now it was all students, couples and young professionals, those with a modest budget looking to buy in a nice bit, not in the centre but not too far out.
When they moved in together, Patrick and Lauren had been lucky to bag a house in the area that didn’t face another row of houses; opposite the front window was a cluster of trees and bushes, beyond which the land fell steeply away before levelling out to a small playing field, then dipping down again to a basketball enclosure. Upstairs, the main bedroom had far-reaching views of the other side of the valley, where the derelict ski village dominated the landscape. A pity, but the beauty and variety of the sky made up for it.
From her position on the low couch under the windowsill in the front room, the sky was all Lauren could see, a wild blue, fading dusty at the edges, swept with wisps of white cloud and etched with vapour trails.
The tide of visitors had ebbed away with the passing of time – a flood on the first day to a trickle yesterday, and