Four Below by Peter Helton

off, and two or three journalists shouted questions at him, all of which he
ignored. The press office would give a sanitized version of what had been found and the papers would simply invent the rest – dead men don’t sue .
    The car was an ice box. With the heater on full, he bumped over the rough ground and on to the track, then drove off past the reporters as fast as the terrain allowed. Further on, close to the
junction with the road, stood a woman in a long black coat, her neck and chin muffled with a silver scarf. She was drawing large clouds of smoke from a hundred-millimetre cigarette without the aid
of her gloved hands. As he drew close to where she was standing, she took a step forward on to the track and stuck an ironic thumb out like a hitchhiker.
    Between cigarettes Philippa Warren worked as a reporter for the Bristol Herald . She was brighter, sharper and more dishonest than most of her colleagues; she and McLusky had made use of
each other in the past, in an easy-going atmosphere of mutual distrust.
    He stopped and rolled down the window three inches. ‘What do you want, Warren?’ he asked through the ungenerous gap.
    ‘Lift into town? My car’s at the menders and the guy who gave me a lift out here took off without me.’
    ‘Professional courtesy is dead.’
    ‘Thanks,’ she said when McLusky cleared papers and cigarette packets off the front seat for her. ‘Blimey. It’s colder in your car than out there.’
    ‘I can drop you at a bus stop, Warren, if you prefer.’
    ‘You can call me Phil, like everyone else.’ She drew her coat closer around herself. ‘First his hand, now the rest; tell me about it.’
    ‘Who told you about the hand? That’s not supposed to be general knowledge.’
    ‘Responsibly sourced. Like line-caught fish. And we’re not printing it until you release it, that’s how responsible we are at the Herald .’
    ‘Naturally.’ McLusky turned on to the road and speeded up. He wondered how Warren had got hold of that information. Pym? Purkis? She probably paid retainers to several officers who
sold information to the papers. It could never be stopped completely, not while the rank and file felt undervalued and underpaid. McLusky himself occasionally leaked bits of information to the
press, but only if he thought it helped his own investigations. ‘It’s a dead male. Shallow grave. Hasn’t been there all that long. We’ve no idea who he is yet.’
    ‘Not even a suspicion? Who’s missing?’
    ‘Someone’s son, that’s all I know.’
    ‘Cause of death?’
    ‘That I genuinely don’t know.’
    ‘Meaning the rest you just told me was lies?’
    McLusky didn’t bother to answer.
    ‘You’re smiling, that’s always a bad sign. A body in the woods is what people want to read about. No one wants to know about dead junkies in toilets.’
    ‘You know about that as well?’
    ‘Come on, he was found in a public toilet. Funny thing was, though,’ she said with exaggerated carelessness, ‘he was rushed off to the mortuary, where he was autopsied
immediately. Not normal procedure, is it? Who cares about dead junkies? I wonder.’
    McLusky was further peeved by Warren’s knowledge of the immediate autopsy, and kept quiet while he mulled this over.
    ‘Hey, talk to me, I’m a journalist. It’s my job to know stuff.’
    ‘It’s your job to help sell advertising. I’m not concerned with dead junkies. Not my department. You’re talking to entirely the wrong guy here.’
    ‘I’m beginning to think so myself.’
    They were approaching the triangle. ‘Where do you want me to drop you?’
    ‘Anywhere near Brown’s, actually.’
    ‘Sure.’
    ‘Thanks for the lift, Liam,’ she said and waved McLusky off from outside the restaurant. Then she took the first cab she found back to Leigh Woods, where her car was parked.

Chapter Seven
    ‘You won’t get much out of him today, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said. They were standing in intensive care, separated from the