James had been a detective for nineteen years.
In nineteen years he had learned three things that no training manual ever taught him.
He had learned that people lied the most when they thought they were being helpful. He had learned that the first person to cry at a scene was rarely the most broken by it. And he had learned above everything else to trust the feeling in his stomach.
Not the evidence, not the reports, the stomach.
Right now his stomach was saying something he wasn't ready to hear.
His phone rang at six forty-three in the morning.
He was already awake, sleep was something that happened to people with quieter minds and James had never been one of those people.
He was sitting at his kitchen table in the small terraced house on Mill Lane with his second coffee and a case file he had been staring at for forty minutes without reading. Outside the window Ashford Hollow was still dark and still quiet.
He picked up his phone and answered the call
"James."
"It's Sara." She was already moving he could hear it in her voice, that forward momentum she carried everywhere, the sound of someone whose brain arrived at the scene before her body did. "Body in Kelmore Park, young woman, no visible trauma found by a dog walker about twenty minutes ago."
"How young?"
"Very, early twenties maybe."
James was already standing.
"I'm on my way," he said.
Sara was waiting at the park gate when he arrived.
She was twenty-nine and looked younger and hated that people said so.
Four months as his partner and she already had the habit of showing up first everywhere first at the scene, first with the facts, first with the questions nobody else had thought to ask yet. She had her notebook out, pen clicking against her palm, eyes moving constantly even while she talked to him.
"Medical examiner is coming," she said, falling into step beside him,"No ID yet but the neighbors say she lives on Clover Street. The yellow building on the corner, name might be Nadia nobody knows the last name."
"Anyone see anything?"
"Yes that's the interesting part," She flipped a page in her notebook, " A young man says he saw her last night outside the grocery on the high street around nine o'clock, she was talking to a man, Older, tall, grey coat."
"Did she know him?"
"Hard to say, he said she didn't look comfortable. Kept looking away. Like she wanted to leave."
"Where is he now?"
"Waiting by the gate. I told him not to go anywhere." She paused. "He feels guilty. You can see it all over him."
"He should have stayed outside?" James said.
"That's what he keeps saying."
They walked in silence for a moment. The wet grass soaked through James's shoes. The park was the kind of place that looked harmless in every season old oak trees, a small pond, benches with plaques dedicated to people nobody remembered anymore. The kind of place where nothing was supposed to happen.
"Sir," Sara said.
Something in her voice made him look up.
They had reached the treeline.
The girl was lying exactly as Carol Webb had described dark hair, coat buttoned wrong, one shoe, eyes closed, face empty in that final particular way.
James crouched beside her.
He looked at her face for a moment, God she was young he will never get use to that part. Nineteen years and he never got used to how young they always were.