Those Who Feel Nothing Read Online Free

different man, then, Stanford?’
    The constable looked from her to Heap. ‘Quite possibly, ma’am.’
    â€˜I was wondering if it somehow was linked to all that black magic stuff of a few months ago,’ Heap said.
    â€˜We’re pretty confident we got everyone involved in that,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Aren’t we?’
    â€˜We are, ma’am,’ Heap said. ‘But it remains a good possibility that this grave being disturbed is not about metal theft.’
    Gilchrist nodded slowly. ‘Look through those names, Detective Sergeant. See if any of them stand out.’ She gestured to Stanford. ‘You could have something interesting here.’
    He didn’t look interested at all.
    When you land in Nha Trang you take the next flight to Saigon where you rent a car at the airport and drive six hours to Can Tho. It’s hot and humid as hell out there but you move from one air-conditioned environment to another, so by the time you check into a riverfront hotel at midnight your throat is dry, your nose is blocked and your head is thumping.
    You should do some yoga to right yourself but you collapse into bed. The air con is fierce and noisy. You can’t figure out how to turn it off so take the extra blanket from the cupboard and put a pillow over your head.
    After an early breakfast you make your way to the hotel’s short jetty. There are already five tourists on board the boat tied there: a German couple and an English couple with their sulky teenage boy. You nod at the adults as they greet you. The boy keeps his head down over his tablet. You sit at the back of the boat, your duffel bag beside you.
    Algae like giant cabbages and strange, foliage-like growths dip and bob on the surface of the water in the wake of the boat as you head up the Mekong Delta for Phnom Penh. You have seen similar pollution on the Nile but the Mekong is, if anything, worse: pesticides, mercury and other pollutants are at such toxic levels here that the famed freshwater dolphins of the river are almost extinct.
    You watch the slow water flow, occasionally glancing at the dopily smiling German couple leaning into each other. The sullen English boy is still focusing on his tablet, his parents gazing blankly out of the windows.
    Within an hour you reach the customs post on the shore at the Vietnam/Cambodia border. There is time for coffee in a small café overlooking the brown waters whilst the military fiddle with your passports. You step out into a small garden. Something in the trees is chirruping. The humidity feels like a wet sponge bathing your body.
    There is a barracks across a dirt yard. It looks big enough to house six, maybe eight men. The last time you passed through, there had been twelve men at this post, mostly sleeping in hammocks strung between the trees. You and your colleagues had narrowly voted not to kill them all.
    Bob Watts blethered on to the assembled coppers for a while, Chief Constable Karen Hewitt standing stiffly beside him with a fixed grin on her face. He knew from conversations with Sarah Gilchrist months ago that Hewitt’s fixed grin was as much to do with cosmetic surgery as it was with her gritted teeth at the fact his role challenged her autonomy. He could still vaguely smell the alcohol on her from the champagne breakfast.
    He saw Gilchrist half-sitting on a desk near the back of the room. That likeable, fresh-faced policeman, Bellamy Heap, was standing beside her although he was scarcely taller than her seated. Gilchrist had told Watts the duo had been dubbed Little and Large by their ever predictable colleagues at the nick.
    His meeting with Karen Hewitt had gone … OK. Once he’d insisted he was not going to fire her – something the PCC had the power to do – she’d relaxed. A little. He’d assured her that he wanted to work with her, not against her. She had, quite rightly, pointed out that she’d been doing fine without any