Until You're Mine by Samantha Hayes

comes out as ‘die date’. I nibble on a broken nail. Eventually, with my computer balanced on my knee, I fall asleep fully dressed.
    *
    I wake later with a stiff neck. The clock beside the bed blinks two-twenty a.m. I stretch and straighten and slip out of my clothes. Completely naked, I stare at my body in the full-length mirror. I am all skin and bones. My empty hips jut out and my flat, almost concave tummy would be the envy of most women. I can’t even begin to imagine myself pregnant.

6
    RUSS GOODALL WAS a skinny, nervous man. If he were a dog, Lorraine thought, he’d be a greyhound. Just being in the same room as him made her nervous, and that didn’t happen very often. She’d learnt, over the years – and especially recently – to emit a calmness and serenity that even Adam couldn’t upset. Not even his early mornings and ten-mile runs or the way he counted out exactly the right number of prunes and weighed muesli for breakfast, his obsession with drinking exactly eight bottles of mineral water daily as well as the routine thirty minutes of meditation (he’d even been known to do this at crime scenes) wavered her solid centre of gravity. But Russ Goodall, for all his puny frame and wispy orange hair, had her teetering in his skittish aura.
    ‘You sent her a good luck card.’ Lorraine was hedging her bets. Russ wasn’t such an uncommon name but unusual enough for it to be odd for Sally-Ann to have known two of them.
    ‘I told you, I don’t know anyone called Sally-Ann.’
    ‘You were named as next of kin in her pregnancy notes. Willow Park Medical Centre confirmed that you are the Russ Goodall Sally-Ann wrote in her file. You are also a patient at the surgery.’
    ‘They shouldn’t have. That’s a breach of confidentiality.’
    ‘Not when I have a court order it’s not.’ Lorraine was trying to breathe in the shallowest way she could without actually fainting. The room stank – a nauseating mix of body odour, rancid fat from a dirty frying pan on a single gas burner stove, and cigarette smoke. Sally-Ann’s parents must have been delighted when she brought him home for the first time. But oddly, the bedroom where Russ lived on the top floor of a large student-type house (even though he’d said he wasn’t a student) was incredibly neat. Just a million miles from clean.
    ‘Do you mind if I open a window?’ she asked. Russ shrugged and watched the detective struggle with the sash opening. Eventually it gave in to her determined shovings and slid up. Lorraine leant out and sucked in a lungful of fresh air. ‘So it’s easier for all of us if you just admit to knowing Sally-Ann. Then you can help me with what I need to know.’ She peered at the rubbish strewn on the flat roof below. Had Goodall chucked it there?
    ‘Why?’ he said. He lit a cigarette. He was sitting stiff and straight on the bed with his skinny and fragile-looking legs pinned together at the knees. His neck and shoulders shook, making his head tremble and bob like an ugly sweaty bloom. ‘What’s up?’
    ‘I’m so sorry.’ Lorraine turned towards him. She’d assumed he knew. ‘Sally-Ann is dead.’
    *
    ‘That’s when he started crying. Full on. The works.’ Lorraine bit into a sausage roll and Adam picked bits out of his shop-bought lentil and bean salad as if it were radioactive. He usually made his own. ‘How can you eat that shit?’
    ‘Surely that’s what I should be asking you?’ he said.
    They’d stopped at a bench. The morning’s skim of ice had dissolved in the sun that had eventually broken through the clouds. It was freezing – too cold to be eating lunch outside – but they wanted the fresh air, the space, somewhere neutral to discuss the case. Twenty-four hours since the discovery and they were no further forward. Along with the team, each of them had been back to the scene several times, interviewed the neighbours, taken statements. And Lorraine could still smell the stink of Russ Goodall’s