White Crocodile Read Online Free Page B

everything out here. Khmers have a weird fatalism.’
    The tone of his voice, slightly distorted by the distance, made her skin tingle. Sliding the chair back from the desk, clutching the receiver to her ear, she had moved over to the window, stared over the endless green of Salisbury Plain. A man and his dog appeared over the brow of a distant hill; a pair of buzzards circled; the white wisps of a jet engine’s contrail streamed across a cloudless sky. Everything felt so normal, so dull and predictable and achingly safe, that she just wasn’t able to go there, to push her mind to the place where Luke was. Wasn’t sure that she even wanted to.
    It was when he called the following week that she realised he was frightened.
    A few weeks later, he was dead. And she had known, in that instinctive, organic way that someone so familiar with another person knows, that, despite what she had been told, his death couldn’t have been an accident. He was too controlling for that. Too good . One of the best mine clearers that the army had ever seen, precisely because he was so controlled and precise, every single time.
    And now Johnny. Another army-trained, experienced mine clearer, in the same minefield, just a few months later.
    A coincidence? No. She didn’t believe in coincidences.

6
    Manchester, England
    From Rose Hill woods, Detective Inspector Andy Wessex watched the sun edge up into the sky beyond the M60, the light glancing off the windscreens of cars speeding southeast. It reminded him of Morse code exercises he used to play as a boy: his older brother hiding in the branches of the copper beech at the foot of the garden, him leaning out of their bedroom window flashing a torch to signal. Dot dot dot. Dash dash dash. Dot dot dot. Save Our Souls. The imaginary enemy massed below them on the dark lawn.
    Rose Hill was an offbeat description for this parallelogram of scrappy woodland jammed between two motorways, this one and the M56, the hum of traffic a reminder – even cocooned in the trees as Wessex was – that it was slap bang in the middle of south Manchester, surrounded by industrial estates and a spider’s web of terraced streets. The wood was predominantly conifer, with some ancient oaks scattered amongst the evergreens, their remaining leaves curled and yellow.
    ‘Morning, sir.’ Detective Sergeant Harriet Viles joined him, rubbing her hands together and shivering.
    He stifled a yawn. ‘I hope you haven’t had breakfast yet.’
    ‘That bad?’
    Andy tapped a finger on his nose. ‘Looks like something’s had a nibble.’
    ‘Just what I wanted to hear. Teach me to nip into the service station for a bacon sarnie on the way here.’
    ‘You’ve got a cast-iron stomach, Viles.’
    They had to stop talking while an aeroplane roared overhead, its wheels lowered for landing at Manchester City Airport, just a few miles south; so low that Andy felt he could stretch his fingertips up and touch its shimmering underbelly.
    ‘Be a bugger to live around here,’ Viles said. She lived in a tiny house in Saddleworth, in the Pennines, with her girlfriend and six rescue cats. Wessex had been there once when they’d first started working together last year, to collect her when her car had failed to start. She’d invited him in for a coffee to meet Serena, but he’d had to leave after five minutes because he’d broken out in a rash from the cat hair on the sofa. Back in his spotless warehouse apartment, sandwiched between bankers and lawyers, as central as he could afford without living with the tramps in the city station, he shuddered to think about the mess in that house.
    ‘So what have we got, sir?’
    ‘Young female, teenager or early twenties, Pakistani or Indian most likely, though it’s hard to tell without an autopsy. Been here a few days from the look of her.’
    ‘Who found her?’
    ‘Dog walker.’
    ‘Ah. Who’d be a dog walker? As I’ve always said, cats are the way forward. Just remember that when you