The Missing Hours Read Online Free

know, to end up here?’
    ‘Well, I …’ Then I hear what it is that he has said.
    He.
    My thoughts sputter, and now I feel like I’ve been walking down a staircase and the bottom step wasn’t where I was expecting it to be. I take a long breath, sucking in the smell of death.
    ‘Finn?’ calls Willa. ‘Detective Sergeant! Any chance?’
    ‘Stay here, please,’ I mutter.
    I head back to the car, pull on the white Tyvek suit, the cold wind wrapping its way along the mountain road, tugging at it. Place a mask over my face.
    Willa studies the scene at her feet, her head circling as she scans it for any details she may have missed, her lips moving in private calculation. I step closer, feeling the tension race up my back, across my shoulders. Knowing that at any moment she is going to turn and walk back towards me and tell me what she has found, and then, just like that, it will become my problem. Well, not my problem. The problem of about forty of Hereford’s finest. But it will feel like my problem.
    I guess that’s the trouble with having been a sergeant for eighty-two days. Everything feels like your problem. There has been no time for the shifting ground to settle beneath my feet, no time to settle in, to establish myself in this new role amongst the people who were my friends eighty-three days ago. They look at me differently now, like dug-up World War II ordnance. It may be harmless, inert, just a lump of old metal. On the other hand, it may blow up and take your leg off. Who knows?
    Willa waits, looking at home here, in amongst the death and the odours. An attractive girl, dark and, appropriately, willowy. You wouldn’t look at her and think that she spends her days surrounded by dead people and bodily fluids.
    I cough, awkward suddenly. ‘You all done?’
    ‘For now.’ Her voice is muffled by the forensic mask. ‘You want to see?’ She doesn’t wait for me to answer, just moves aside, pointing towards the inert form.
    The body is lying on its side, and for a moment, you could fool yourself that he was asleep, curled in on himself as he is. I see dark hair, cut neatly, a steel-grey suit, skin so white that it seems to glow. Oozing darkness, blood that has seeped from a wound in the neck, settling around his collar.
    ‘Can you believe it?’ asks Willa.
    ‘No. Well, yes.’ I feel like I have walked in halfway through a conversation. ‘What?’
    ‘Well, I mean, I don’t know him well, but still …’
    I move, with careful footsteps, closer to the dead body and the edge, closer to the drop down below. His eyes are closed, his face is slack. He looks different to the way he looked when I saw him last. More dead, mostly.
    ‘Shit,’ I say.
    ‘Yup.’

Auntie Orla
    DC Leah Mackay: Tuesday, 10.12 a.m.
    I CLOSE THE front door softly behind me, ease it on to its catch. I cannot bear to let it slam, to have the Cole girls be startled by the sound. They have enough to be afraid of. It’s stopped raining now, but the memory of it still hangs in the damp air. I stand there on the doorstep and breathe in the chill autumn air. Look to the mountains, their peaks lost in cloud. I feel like I am waiting for her, that if I just stand here long enough, the low metal gate will swing open and Selena Cole will come walking through it. That there will be a reason, something that explains and absolves this vanishing.
    Selena Cole has been missing for two hours. Two hours away from her little girls. She doesn’t know where they are. She doesn’t know that they are safe, that they aren’t just sitting in the playground, on the rain-sodden grass, waiting for her to return. She has to return. She has to come back so that she can find them, usher them into the warm.
    But it’s been two hours and she hasn’t come back. Which makes me think that she cannot. Which makes me think that something is very badly wrong here.
    Heather sat, her sister curled into her so close that there was no daylight between them, watched me