Page 17 of The Man Made of Smoke

“Obviously not.” Fleming leans back up and looks at Watson. “We need to cordon off the path. North and south end of the trail. South is the priority, but there might be a few campers closer to the Reach, and we don’t want anyone else stumbling into this.”

“Yes, sir.”

John fights to keep his patience.

“There’s the Brady path too,” he says.

“What about it?”

“It connects to the road a mile or so that way.” John nods to the east, even though Fleming still isn’t looking at him. “Not that many people use it. Quiet place to park, I reckon. It would still be a risk for whoever brought her out here, but I think it’s the most likely route they’d have taken. Less chance of being noticed.”

Finally, Fleming turns to him, angling his body slightly. Fleming is a big man, used to his physical presence holding center stage and pushing others away to the wings.Once a bully, always a bully, John thinks. The old red mist begins to rise, and he forces himself to keep his fists unclenched.

“That should be cordoned off too,” he says. “It’s crucial to preserve evidence.”

“Yes,” Fleming says. “I know that.”

“Because this is awrongfuldeath.”

“I know that too.”

They stare at each other for a couple of seconds.

Then Fleming looks away and breathes out, so long and hard that John can smell a hint of last night’s drink on the man’s breath.

“We’ll need you to make a statement, Mr. Garvie.”

“I know that,” John says.

“A sergeant will talk you through the process. We’ll want a record of exactly what happened. The route you took and anything you saw along the way. However inconsequential it might seem to you, it might be important to our investigation. And your whereabouts over the last twenty-four hours, for what that’s worth.”

“Yes,” John says. “I know that too.”

“But the first thing I need you to do is remove yourself from my crime scene immediately.”

Fleming looks back at him.

John makes a point of staring back. The humiliation stings, and there’s a moment when he wants to swing for Fleming. But there’s nothing he can do. As much as it burns him, he isn’t police anymore. He has no authority here. And if Fleming is the kind of man to rub his face in that fact, there’s nothing much he can do about that either.

Nothing much he can do about anything these days.

So he turns and walks away down the trail. But he feels that sense of duty pulling at him, like a rope tethered to his chest, and he glances back. Watson is on the radio, following his orders. Fleming is squatting down on his haunches, peering at the dead woman in the undergrowth.

Both men appear to have forgotten him already.

John looks up. A small black arc flits across the sky above the trees: the crow, flying away now. Taking its cargo off to the underworld, if that’s what you believe. And although John doesn’t, it’s difficult to shake the sensation that the bird had been perched there the whole time waiting, wanting to watch the encounter that was about to unfold below.

To see who this man was that had found the woman’s body.

What he was going to do.

And if so, he wonders what it thought of the little it saw.

Times passes.

That’s what it does, if you’re lucky. Which is exactly the kind of homespun aphorism that John has always despised and yet has found himself deploying more and more recently.I’ve gotten so old, he’ll think, and then a voice in his head will answer back,Better than the alternative. But is it? As though that’s some kind of comfort. It’s like he’s trying to find something positive in a life that increasingly feels lived for the sake of it. There’s no real consolation to those phrases. Ultimately, they all mean the same thing.

What—you expected something more than this?

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