Murder Mile by Tony Black

intact, was showered in bright blood. On the back seat his head had come to rest in a pool of crimson.
    ‘No. No.’ Elsie appeared behind him, became hysterical.
    ‘It’s OK.’ Brennan didn’t know what to say. She was in shock. He turned her away from the car. ‘Don’t look, don’t look.’
    But she had looked, she had seen a severed head, doused in a profusion of blood, the arteries of the neck still pumping it out. Brennan remembered Elsie now, she was barely twenty at the time. She left the force soon after. As he recalled the accident he knew there were some things no one should have to see, and knew he had seen more than his fair share of them.
    ‘This is the worst part of the job,’ said McGuire.
    Brennan turned in his seat; they were coming into Pilrig. ‘I can think of worse.’
    McGuire flitted eyes towards the DI, seemed to be assessing him. He quickly returned his gaze to the road, negotiated a speed bump. ‘Well, what I mean is …’
    Brennan cut in, ‘I know, Stevie, it’s not a favourite task of mine.’
    ‘There just never seem to be the right words.’
    ‘To tell a parent their child is dead … no, there never are the right words.’
    It was one of those unseen aspects of the job, the kind of thing that Brennan had done a thousand times without blinking. There was no way of knowing how to conduct yourself in such situations, he had seen parents fold, crumple, dissolve before his eyes and he had seen others react with utter disbelief. Some had even laughed, thought it was a joke. No two were the same. They all required a different approach, it was about looking into their eyes and delivering the worst piece of news they had ever encountered and understanding that any reaction – even violence – was justified. There was no training manual that could teach you how to do it.
    Brennan knew his world – life on the force – was tough, aggressive. It was the pressure of policing, it caused those on the job to change whatever they were before they joined up and become like the rest. It was the culture, but it was a self-defence mechanism too. You smoked, drank, cursed and talked crudely, acted aggressively because that’s how the people that inhabited this world acted. The stress levels rose, the tension rose, and you had to find a way of releasing the valve that held them inside.
    What continued to surprise Brennan, the longer he was on the force, was the sympathy, the heartfelt sorrow that officers showed those in grief; it affected those on the force every bit as much as the family. Even old hands, those who had learned to compartmentalise the job, showed their hurt, their disgust, from time to time. Grief could seep out over a pint or after revealing the death to the victim’s family, but the abreact came and, when it did, it drew a squad closer together. The family’s pain touched you, became your pain.
    Brennan knew that another family’s hurt was about to become his own. It was a perverse form of vicarious sadism, to know that he was about to share the burden of strangers’ misery, worse was to know he had done it before and continued to do it. How could he remain human, how could he continue to function? At times like this, the job was a test of sanity. He could halt his reaction, lock it away and forget about it. But he knew he was kidding himself, it would still be there, and would surface at some moment when he was unawares. It didn’t matter how it was triggered, over a crossword puzzle, a familiar patch of carpet that reminded him of the victim’s home, it didn’t matter, it would be waiting, and that was that.
    ‘Over here,’ Brennan pointed to a small end-terrace house on the road McGuire had just turned into. The garden was neatly tended and the property looked to have been well cared for, one of the few in the street. ‘One with the silver Corolla outside.’
    ‘I see it,’ said McGuire. He pulled up behind the car.
    Brennan nodded, released his seatbelt. ‘Well,