Steven Dunne - Deity

‘Oh,’ replied a miffed Higginbottom. ‘And do we know the deceased yet?’

‘Not yet,’ said Brook.

‘Well, it shouldn’t be hard to find out,’ continued the doctor. ‘Prison looks likely — he’s had a hard life. I suspect he’d be homeless and he’s a part-time drug abuser — probably alcohol too. His teeth were very rotten, worn down by the acids in alcohol, and there’s evidence of intermittent needle-marks. My guess, he took drugs when he could get them, but not as a matter of course, which probably means he couldn’t afford to buy very often — hence homeless, indigent, delete as applicable.’ He grinned. ‘Contrary to popular opinion, most regular addicts hold down jobs. Thanks for the tea, Inspector. I’ll let you have my report asap.’

Brook winced faintly at the assault on the English language as Higginbottom marched back to his car to remove his Wellingtons. His eyes followed the doctor, then moved to his empty cup, then settled on Noble’s untouched drink. Taking the hint, Noble hastily drained his own cup before it could be sequestered.

Back in his car, Brook didn’t turn towards Borrowash to follow Noble to the A52 and back to Derby. Instead he followed the road south towards open country and the parklands of Elvaston Castle. When the road turned sharply, Brook pulled his car to the kerb and hopped out. He did a quick search of the ground, both on the pavement and the road. In a patch of mud at the side of the road he saw a circular mark that might have been caused by a traffic cone being placed there. He looked back up towards the river bridge but it had been obscured by the bend.

Brook took out his basic mobile phone and switched it on. As usual, there were no messages — only DS Noble had the number. He spent several minutes trying to work out how the phone’s camera worked, then took a rather grainy picture of the mark in the road and, after storing it, turned the phone off again.

He jumped back in the BMW and drove on into the leafy hamlet of Thulston, looking all the while for a stack of road-traffic cones at the side of the road. There were none. Leaving Thulston, he arrived at a T-junction. He looked left then right.

‘So which way did you go from here?’ A car horn sounded behind him so Brook swung right to pick up the ring road back into town.

As the mid-morning sun streamed over his shoulder, Adam Rifkind pulled a hand through his tinted blond hair to move it away from his face and show his handsome features to best advantage. The thirty-five-year-old lecturer eyed the handful of bored-looking A-level students scattered around Derby College’s Media Suite, slumping in their chairs, exhausted from having to drag themselves out of bed at eleven o’clock in the morning for a seminar.

Few returned eye-contact. Some stared glassy-eyed into space, while others nodded their heads to iPods and texted friends they would see in an hour — assuming they weren’t already in the same room.

Though he prided himself on his youthful appearance and outlook, Rifkind experienced an unexpected stab of yearning for his own carefree youth. He knew most of his students would deny it, but they didn’t have a care in the world. No work, no marriage, no mortgage and no self-loathing — the bright futures they imagined for themselves were not yet behind them.

Rifkind looked at his watch and stifled a yawn. It had been a tough academic year, and finding time for his novel was getting harder. Late nights didn’t help. At least that was one problem he’d finally solved.

He surveyed the apathy before him — Derby’s finest preparing themselves for the outside world with a gentle snooze in Media Studies, the course which always attracted the oddest blend of students. Half of the group were padding out a vocational timetable of bricklaying and construction with the easiest-sounding course they could find and, unfortunately, no matter how much the prospectus emphasised the opposite, Media Studies would always appeal to those who thought it consisted entirely of watching films and TV.

The bear-like Wilson Woodrow and his cronies were part of that crowd. Derby’s future builders, bricklayers and jobbing gardeners sat together on a row, riffing about whose parents had splashed out the most money for their offspring’s phone.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. The brightest members of his English Literature set made up the numbers and raised the level of debate whenever the need arose to discuss or, God forbid, write about what they had discovered during a particular unit of study.

Russell Thomson — Rusty, for obvious reasons — was one. A bright boy, he sat alone and seemed in no need of the distractions of his peers as he looked saucer-eyed at the blank screen dominating a whole wall of the media suite. He was relatively new to the area and had moved with his mother from Wales, for what reason Rifkind didn’t know — though he had heard a rumour about bullying at his previous college. He wasn’t surprised. Rusty was a strange and introverted boy who seemed to have very few social skills and held the majority of his conversations with himself.

Tall for his age but thin and stooping, his eyes were either gazing off into space or fixed on the ground as though he’d lost something. Rusty rarely looked people in the eye and this social failing was reinforced by a more tangible barrier — the ever-present digital camcorder which was always strapped to his hand, and invariably raised in front of his face on the rare occasions he lifted his head.

Strangely, he seemed to possess the intellectual skills of a more mature person when producing written work, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of films which he unveiled at the most inappropriate times. On a recent careers evening, he’d informed Rifkind that his ambition was to work in the cinema, and the lecturer had been unable to stifle the unworthy thought that Rusty would indeed make an ideal usher. Naturally Rifkind hadn’t voiced this opinion. At least not in front of Rusty’s gorgeous young single mum — a MILF indeed.

In front of Rusty now sat the strikingly pretty Becky Blake conversing with Fern Stretton, her best friend. The pair chatted as though alone in the universe, about everything from boys to their annual X Factor applications. Becky was fixated on fame and fortune and she certainly had the looks, though her in-your-face attractions had never been a draw for Rifkind. Until recently her superficial charms had been twinned with that air of unabashed expectation that clung to so many of her peers — a serenity derived from unbroken dreams.

But Rifkind had the sense that something had shifted within her. He often noticed it with students around this age. For a couple of years in their teens the most promising carried that galling conviction that they owned the world, believing their lives would proceed exactly as they wished. Then, one day, an unforeseen setback would rouse them from their slumber and they were forced to face a future of hard graft and disappointment.

Well, Rifkind was convinced that reality had sunk its teeth into Becky recently because she carried with her now that slight bruise of knowledge that her life would not be quite as predicted, as though something in her carefully gilded future had been stepped on.

Rifkind looked at his watch again and fired up his laptop to register those present. Jake McKenzie hadn’t yet put in an appearance. McKenzie was a blue-eyed, dark-haired Adonis, as talented academically and athletically as he was handsome, and Rifkind had heard that every girl in the college had thrown herself at him at one time or another. And yet he seemed to be a thinker, rising above the petty obsessions of teenage life, absorbing himself in his studies and his sport, at which he excelled.