fats but he was still as compact and wiry as he'd been when they were rookies together. She just had to look at a fully leaded Coke to feel herself gaining inches. It definitely wasn't fair.
Phil narrowed his dark eyes and curled his lip in a good-natured sneer. "Whatever. The silver lining is that maybe the boss can screw some more money out of the government if he can persuade them there's an increased threat."
Karen shook her head, on solid ground now. "You think that famous moral compass would let Gordon steer his way towards anything that looked that self-serving?" As she spoke, she reached for the phone that had just begun to ring. There were other, more junior officers in the big squad room that housed the Cold Case Review Team, but promotion hadn't altered Karen's ways. She'd never got out of the habit of answering any phone that rang in her vicinity. "CCRT, DI Pirie speaking," she said absently, still turning over what Phil had said, wondering if, deep down, he had a hankering to be where the live action was.
"Dave Cruickshank on the front counter, Inspector. I've got somebody here, I think she needs to talk to you." Cruickshank sounded unsure of himself. That was unusual enough to grab Karen's attention.
"What's it about?"
"It's a missing person," he said.
"Is it one of ours?"
"No, she wants to report a missing person."
Karen suppressed an irritated exhalation. Cruickshank really should know better by now. He'd been on the front desk long enough. "So she needs to talk to CID, Dave."
"Well, yeah. Normally, that would be my first port of call. But see, this is a bit out of the usual run of things. Which is why I thought it would be better to run it past you, see?"
Get to the point. "We're cold cases, Dave. We don't process fresh inquiries." Karen rolled her eyes at Phil, smirking at her obvious frustration.
"It's not exactly fresh, Inspector. This guy went missing twenty-two years ago."
Karen straightened up in her chair. "Twenty-two years ago? And they've only just got round to reporting it?"
"That's right. So does that make it cold, or what?"
Technically, Karen knew Cruickshank should refer the woman to CID. But she'd always been a sucker for anything that made people shake their heads in bemused disbelief. Long shots were what got her juices flowing. Following that instinct had brought her two promotions in three years, leap-frogging peers and making colleagues uneasy. "Send her up, Dave. I'll have a word with her."
She replaced the phone and pushed back from the desk. "Why the fuck would you wait twenty-two years to report a missing person?" she said, more to herself than to Phil as she raided her desk for a fresh notebook and a pen.
Phil pushed his lips out like an expensive carp. "Maybe she's been out of the country. Maybe she only just came back and found out this person isn't where she thought they were."
"And maybe she needs us so she can get a declaration of death. Money, Phil. What it usually comes down to." Karen's smile was wry. It seemed to hang in the air in her wake as if she were the Cheshire Cat. She bustled out of the squad room and headed for the lifts.
Her practised eye catalogued and classified the woman who emerged from the lift without a shred of diffidence visible. Jeans and fake-athletic hoodie from Gap. This season's cut and colours. The shoes were leather, clean and free from scuffs, the same colour as the bag that swung from her shoulder over one hip. Her mid-brown hair was well cut in a long bob just starting to get a bit ragged along the edges. Not on welfare, then. Probably not a schemie. A nice, middle-class woman with something on her mind. Mid to late twenties, blue eyes with the pale sparkle of topaz. The barest skim of make-up. Either she wasn't trying or she already had a husband. The skin round her eyes tightened as she caught Karen's appraisal.
"I'm Detective Inspector Pirie," she said, cutting through the potential stand-off of two women weighing each other up. "Karen Pirie." She wondered what the other woman made of her-a wee fat woman crammed into a Marks and Spencer suit, mid-brown hair needing a visit to the hairdresser, might be pretty if you could see the definition of her bones under the flesh. When Karen described herself thus to her mates, they would laugh, tell her she was gorgeous, make