Guilty Conscious, Oliver Davies [small books to read TXT] 📗

A few jumpers, several shirts and trousers all neatly hung up, two coats, and an England rugby jersey pushed into the corner. I squatted down to the base, looking at the shoes all lined up in a row. A pair of leather boots, a pair of Converse trainers, a pair of rugby boots, all with their laces tucked out of the way, cleaned and polished. I pushed them aside and reached through, my hand fumbling along the dusty back of the wardrobe, not sure what, if anything, I would find, but determined to look anyway.

I came out with grubby fingers, but nothing else. Wiping my hand on my trousers, I stood up, checked the empty shelf above, then closed the wardrobe door and turned to my next port of call, the chest of drawers.

I didn’t particularly want to rifle through a dead lad’s underwear drawer, but it’s as good a place to hide stuff as anywhere else, so I opened the top drawer. Unsurprisingly, it was also organised, with those little compartments you could buy to separate things. He’d needed one for his drawer of wires too, but who was I to criticise?

I had a brief search through, finding nothing, and closing that drawer, I opened the next. A few tops were folded up, t-shirts and long sleeves, nothing else. The next two drawers were the same, clothes folded up that didn’t get hung up and a bottom drawer of sports clothes, but nothing else.

I stepped away, letting out a sigh, my eyes drawn to the window as the campus slowly awakened. Students were starting to emerge for their morning classes. I turned to the bookshelf and walked over, taking each book spine by spine, thinking about Sharp again and good old-fashioned police work.

Most of the books were fiction, several things that I imagined he had for his subjects, but a few made me stop and pause. I didn’t stop to hesitate or wonder why they made me pause. I just took them off the shelf, flipped the pages to see if anything fell out and slowly perused them, looking for any notes, dog-eared pages or underlined extracts. A few caught my eye, and I added them to my pile, not bothering to read each one here and now when I had Mills and the station, which was better with all this than I’d ever be.

When I had a good collection of things, I gave the walls a once over, pulled down a few handwritten quotes or extracts stuck up there, bundled everything into a bag from my coat pocket, and shut the curtains, returning the room to its dark and dusty state of mourning. I let myself out, locking Edward’s door, then the building’s door. I joined the mingling groups of students as I headed back out to the exit, dropping off the key with my new friends Greyson, and walked over to where I’d left the car. After carefully placing everything in the boot, I then peeled my gloves off with satisfaction, the cold air wiping away the sweat that had gathered on my palms, and jumped into the car, starting the engine.

My phone rang as I pulled from the stop, Mills’s name flashing up on the Bluetooth.

“Morning, Mills,” I said cheerily as I got onto the road.

“Sir,” he replied, sounding dubious. “Everything alright? You’re usually here by now. Sharp’s asking after you.”

“I’m heading in now, ten minutes. I’ve been in Edward’s room,” I told him.

There was a pause, and I could picture him standing wherever he was, the office, from the lack of noise around him, frowning for not being invited along.

“Oh?” he said eventually. “Find anything?”

“I think so. I’ll need your clever eyes with a lot of it, though. Any word from Wasco?”

“He’s in the laptop. I have it now.”

“Brill. Get the kettle on then, Mills, and I’ll see you in a jiffy.” I hung up before he had time to start questioning my sudden flip in mood and concentrated on the road. The city was buzzing now. Commuters heading here and there, children skipping on the pavement, their parents trying to wrangle them to safety, older school children waiting for the bus with their headphones in and their faces bleak. I didn’t envy them; school wasn’t the easiest for everyone.

I reached the station, parked quickly and grabbed my bag from the boot, whistling as I strode inside, nodding to a surprised looking desk sergeant and jogged up the stairs. Mills was waiting, two mugs in his hands, a bewildered look on his face.

“You’d tell me if you were on drugs, wouldn’t you?” he asked as I pried a mug of tea from his hand. “You’d let me get you help.”

“I would,” I answered, “so you can believe me when I say I’m not.”

“What are you then?” he asked, following me through the desks and discarded chairs into our office. I held up the bag.

“On to something.”

I shouldered my way through the door and plopped the bag on Mills’s desk beside Edward’s laptop, put my mug down, and shrugged my coat off, draping it over the back of my chair. Mills walked in, cradling his mug and eyeing me warily. I picked up my mug, slurped the tea, and nodded to the bag.

“Sally said something to me last night, in the coaching house,” I decided to offer him some explanation before he called in Crowe to give me an examination. “About guilt and the strange things people do because of it.”

Mills gave me an understanding nod. He didn’t know the extent of my attachment to the coaching house or to the guilt I alluded to, but he’d seen the place and understood well enough.

“Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt,” he recited.

“Who’s that then?”

“Plautus, I think,” he murmured, setting his mug down and taking everything out of the bag, picking up one of the well-read books and raising an eyebrow. “Atonement.”

“I think Sally made me watch the film once,” I