Already Dead by Jaye Ford

But not here. You’ll feel better when you can get away from all this. Do you think you can manage that?’
    She wanted to hold Zoe, hug Tilda, have a stiff drink. She also wanted this over. ‘Yes.’
    â€˜You’ll have to leave your car here, so an officer will drive you to the station in Newcastle. One of my detectives has spoken with your aunt but you can call her yourself on the way in. I’ll see you there in a while.’ He shifted on the seat, getting ready to leave, paused a second and looked back. ‘What did you say to me in the car park?’
    The moment flashed through her memory. Spine-stiffening terror, the risk of trying to catch his attention, the relief when he was waiting for her eyes. ‘Help me.’
    He nodded once. Followed it with a sudden smile and a quiet huff of a laugh, as though she’d confirmed what he wasn’t sure he’d seen. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t make it end there – I didn’t want to get you shot.’ It was an aside, a sentence in parenthesis without the police-business tone. Maybe a message from Aiden Hawke, guy in the wrong place at the right time, instead of the detective who’d done his job.
    â€˜Nothing to be sorry about there,’ she told him.
    Nodding again, he banged twice on the chassis as he got out, and was pointing and talking again before he’d left the doorway.
    Â 
    A uniformed officer told Jax her car would be towed to a police compound, fingerprinted and searched. Her handbag, when it was passed in to her, had clearly been through the search process already. The contents looked like they’d been tipped out and stuffed back in, and she wondered if it had happened before or after Aiden Hawke decided she was a victim and not an accomplice. There was no sign of her mobile. She guessed they’d find it in the glove box if they hadn’t already, probably fingerprintit too. What would the detective make of Brendan’s prints all over it?
    Dusk turned the afternoon to early evening while Jax made the journey into the heart of Newcastle from the front of a patrol car – a trip that was as weird and off base as the rest of the day had been. The motorway heading north was deserted. Aside from a single police vehicle at the roadblock site, there wasn’t another car to be seen. Just the faint glow of their own headlamps in the lowering light and the constant stream of traffic heading south.
    Inside, the air was filled with the hum of the engine and constant chatter from the police radio. All of it was from the crash site, as though keeping Jax and her driver updated: crime scene investigators arrived, then another two ambulances for passengers in the minibus; a contra-flow was being set up by the RTA, sectioning off a lane on the other side of the motorway to start the process of getting the banked-up traffic moving. And the media made its presence felt – a news chopper touched down on an empty section of motorway, reporters wanted details and an officer requested a spokesperson.
    It was a big story. All of it – the gunman, the police operation, the massive traffic jam. Jax knew the news desk at her old paper would be trying to get a journalist and photographer into a chopper so they didn’t have to wait at the back end of the traffic. Other reporters would be working the phones and their police contacts. They’d know it was her by now – the who travelled as fast as the what when there was an angle, and the angle on this was Nicholas Westing’s widow involved in a police drama. His death would be rehashed yet again. Maybe it was just as well Jax’s mobile was with the cops – she didn’t want to take the inevitable calls.
    The officer driving lent Jax a mobile and as she dialled Tilda’s number, she tried to scrounge up words and a voice that said she was fine, brave, holding it together. ‘Tilda, it’s –’
    â€˜Jax, honey. Are