Prologue
The night before Midge’s retirement party, Bridie convinced her to go to bed with a cucumber and mint face mask on.
‘Please try it, Midge. Sylvia swears by them.’
‘Who’s Sylvia?’
This produced the slightest of sighs. ‘From my amateur dramatics group. Apparently, the polypeptoaminoacids get rid of large pores.’
Bridie, it turned out, had no idea what a polypeptoaminoacid was, and never, in Midge McGowan’s fifty-five years, had she been aware of her large pores. But it wasn’t often that Bridie asked something of her and she had been so dreadfully excited about the retirement party that Midge didn’t have the heart to say no. It took her approximately fifteen minutes to apply the mask, which left her with only thirty minutes before bed to work on her handkerchief embroidery. With a base of white linen and edged with lace, the handkerchief was a canvas for a vibrant canary, embroidered with meticulous care, perched near one corner. It was the final one in a set of six canary hankies and involved a rather complicated lazy daisy stitch. Only having half an hour meant she made a mistake with the cross-overs, ruining the entire birdcage and forcing her to start afresh with new material, which was bothersome to say the least.
While she slept, Midge had a dream.
She was sitting in her rocking chair, inside a locked, gilded cage.With each movement of the chair, a tiny bell connected to a circular mirror beside her rang out. As she rocked, her face in the reflection changed. Just when she was pulled from sleep by Bridie’s gentle shaking, she recognized the features. She’d seen the eyes, nose and mouth many times before in her dreams. But only once to touch in the flesh.
It was the baby.
It was always the baby.
The banner in the property office read, ‘Happy Retirement DS MAGOWAN’.
The party was more disappointing than the typo. They had put the food table upstairs so that by the time Midge had huffed and puffed her way up to it, her gouty knee was aching and she had to lean on the cane more than she wished. It was hardly worth the effort except that she found common dining areas fascinating. It was Midge’s opinion that the importance of eating habits in identifying personalities was greatly undervalued.
‘McGowan, there you are.’ Detective Chief Inspector Helen Goodall was standing next to the cupcakes but chose instead to pick up a carrot stick from the plate nearby. ‘Can’t stay for long. I’ve got an area meeting with the Gold Team.’
Midge nodded while she caught her breath, propping the cane against the table as she did so.
‘I just wanted to say thank you for all of your hard work and good luck with the retirement. Thirty years... Goodness!’
The look of pity said it all. DCI Goodall was only twenty-eight and already two pips above Midge. Of course, she had been fast-tracked, but she would undoubtedly finish her career as an area commander. This generation of women had no idea how good they had it, thought Midge. When she’d started out as a probationer, they were still pulling up the skirts of the WPCs and stamping their bottoms with the station property stamp. Nodoubt, her retirement as a mere detective sergeant was as distasteful to DCI Goodall as the carrot stick she was pretending to enjoy.
‘I expect you’ll be glad to get out of the property office, finally.’
‘Yes...’ Midge replied, unsure of what to say next. ‘... Helen.’
Midge had spent the majority of her career in what was really a civilian role, overseeing the evidential property office – the room where every item of physical evidence from a criminal case was logged and stored should it ever be required for trial. What had started out as a temporary secondment soon evolved into something more permanent with no one seemingly in a rush to ask for her back. Not that Midge had ever considered complaining. Despite the cold of the old sandstone building, she’d enjoyed the inanimate irrefutability of the property records, and before long she and the register book had become synonymous.Need to find the hairbrush in the Langham case for court? Ask Midge the Register!And so, she’d made it her second home; hidden away inside the endless rows of material evidence that had unlocked so many crimes. An alibi-wrecking train ticket, the misplaced knife in a rack, even the hidden clay on the soles of trainers... However clever the criminal, regardless of their meticulousness in covering up, there was always an object that didn’t fit or belong and that would eventually become their undoing.Thingswere far more reliable than people, Midge often concluded.
And there was something oddly comforting about the neat rows of identification labels attached to each evidence bag.
Labels were important.
Right down to the plastic hospital tag on a newborn infant’s wrist.
‘What a lovely dress,’ the DCI remarked.
Midge fiddled with the cuff of the rainbow-coloured smock which she had bought because she knew absolutely nothing about clothes and thought it practical to have a colour to match any jacket.
‘Yes.’
Usually, Bridie bought all of her outfits. But on this occasion, she had insisted on Midge going shopping by herself. Where was Bridie? Midge did a quick scan of the room. She would know how to keep the conversation going. Well, nearly always. At least, when she was on her uppers. ‘The art to small talk,’ she would say, ‘is telling them something about your day.’
Midge tried her best. ‘I wore a face mask last night. Cucumber and mint.’
The DCI blinked. ‘Oh.’
‘It had peptopolyaminoacids,’ she finished.
‘Well, fancy,’ responded the DCI. ‘Just think. Plenty of time for pampering yourself now. Hopefully, you’ll be able to rest up that knee and lose the cane soon enough.’
