Read an extract from The Cutting Stone by Sarah Hilary

Step into Sarah Hilary’s second DS Joseph Ashe thriller, as a body found beneath a Peak District landmark draws Joe Ashe and DI Laurie Bower into a deeply personal murder investigation.

Laurie hated the place the second she set foot inside. The Dream Palace, come on. Last year it’d been a derelict lamp factory, ankle-deep in broken bottles and bricks. She’d preferred that. No pretensions, no promises. The Dream Palace lied through its dimly lit teeth. Flaring with neon, stinking of overpriced cocktails and body spray, throbbing to music that hadn’t a clue which year it was, 1997 or 2016. A mirrorball threw a slew of light around, into all the dark corners. How many times had she been here? The Dream Palace was a new venue, but it was just like every other bar in this part of Salford beloved by her little sister.

‘You dancing?’ An underdressed, overconfident man of her age, shaking his hips. ‘Or drinking?’

‘Neither.’ She moved past him, scanning the room for Isabel. ‘But thanks for the thought.’

‘Love the butch look.’

‘Do you?’ Jeans and a biker jacket, her work clothes. She’d come straight from the station, answering her mum’s distress call. ‘You should try it some time.’

He pouted down at his vest top and cycling shorts before turning away, another victim of the Dream Palace’s broken promises.

Laurie’s day had started with a dawn raid on a quayside warehouse which went south by 8 a.m., leaving her desk clogged with a week’s worth of pointless paperwork. She’d needed an early night with her husband Adam, dirty burgers, TV binge. Instead she was up to the eyeballs in pushy businessmen, and girls dancing to ‘Despacito’ as if Spanish were their first language. Isabel wouldn’t be dancing, not if she’d been here since the doors opened. She’d be wedged in a corner with—

Tequila, mascara, holes in her fishnets, daggered heels propped on the crotch of a man who’d dressed in the dark by the look of him: Manchester City shirt, jogging pants, suit jacket. Her sister’s face was scrawled with drink, eyes half-shut, mouth lost to a fading slash of lipstick. Silver piercings flared as the mirrorball hit her orbit, before reverting to dull grey stitches in her nose and ears. Spotting Laurie, her whole body became a scowl, shoulders curling, mouth and nostrils thinning.

‘Hey, Izzy.’ Laurie slid into the seat, nodding at the human footstool. ‘How’re we all doing?’

The guy muttered a greeting, pushing his stare at Isabel as if he expected an introduction. Any resemblance between her and Izzy had long since been sacrificed to Messrs Smirnoff and Spice; her sister’s drug of choice was all set to be banned this year, after a decade as a legal high. In the meantime, here they were in 2016 where a single weekend could sweep up sixty Spice-related incidents. Laurie loved her job and hated it at the same time, all the reasons it was getting harder to do, the terrible life-altering consequences of failure. Isabel was a constant reminder and rebuke, her own personal prod in the ribs.

‘Fed,’ Izzy said.

‘Not since lunch. I’m getting burgers on the way home if you want a piece of that action.’

Izzy shifted her feet in the guy’s lap, put her head back and shouted, ‘My sister, the fucking fed.’

The shout proved too much for footstool guy, who rolled himself upright and off, disappearing among the dancers. Izzy reached for the dregs of her drink, ran her tongue around the salted lip of the glass. ‘Burgers give you bowel cancer.’

‘Spice makes you paranoid and kills your kidneys.’

‘Sister makes me paranoid and kills my buzz.’

Laurie threw out a smile. ‘Must be catching, in that case. Mum’s crawling the walls. Halfway to the roof when she called.’

‘Well, if you will keep picking up.’

‘Well, if you won’t.’

Izzy stared into her empty glass before holding it out, light glaring from her silver snake ring, ruby-eyed. ‘Your round.’

‘Sure, if you can tell me when you last saw Godfrey Hulme.’

Izzy’s addiction counsellor. Laurie took the empty glass, the promise of a free drink bringing her sister’s eyes into focus before Izzy hissed, ‘That freak wants me dead. Unless that’s the point of this, you can piss off.’

‘You’ve stopped seeing him, is that what you’re saying?’

‘I’m saying he wants me dead. Spends every second of every session listing all the ways I could do it. Rope, pills, razorblades. Seriously—’ She scooted to the edge of her seat, face set in sudden sharp lines. ‘You know they’re opening a place in Spinningfields, this rooftop restaurant everyone’s talking about?’

Some posh-nosh paradise for people keen to throw a tenner at a celeriac starter. ‘What about it?’

‘Godfrey won’t shut up about it. And not because he wants to take me there for fancy cocktails when it opens next year.’

She held Laurie’s attention by pointing two fingers between their faces, sister code. ‘It’s a high-rise. Nineteen floors, and security’s sloppy. Anyone can walk in, climb to the roof. Why’d he tell me shit like that if he doesn’t want me dead?’

Good question. Laurie would’ve wanted to ask Godfrey Hulme herself, if she could be certain Izzy hadn’t invented the story.

‘When’s the last time you saw him?’

Her sister sat back, eyes switching off. ‘You’re paying, you should know.’

‘You’re right.’ Laurie saw herself rolling bank notes, feeding them through the slats of a drain since that made as much sense as what she’d been doing this past year, paying Godfrey to help Isabel fight her addiction. ‘You can’t afford to miss another session, anyway. Genuine danger he’ll dump you.’

‘Genuine danger I’ll dump myself, head first from a high-rise.’ She pinged a nail at the empty glass. Her wrist was bony, its home-made tattoo conspicuous. Libra, their shared star sign. A lurch of memory: their heads together, laughing at a joke, her sister’s shoulder shaking against hers; Laurie blinked it away.

‘We’re trying to help you, Iz. Why won’t you let us help you?’

‘I don’t need help.’ Each syllable loaded like a bullet, fired from her snarling mouth. ‘You’re the one with a problem. I’m doing great.’

You’re killing yourself. You’re dying right in front of me and you won’t let me do a damn thing about it.

She wanted to recount any one of the Spice-related ‘incidents’ she’d had to attend in the last nine months. The boy who’d walked like a zombie into traffic that had taken his head off, or the two who’d fought over who should take the wheel before ploughing into a wall, painting the bricks with their brains. Just stories, Isabel would say. She was bored of Laurie’s stories.

‘Drink, you said.’ Pinging at the glass a second time.

Tequila, salt and lime. It stung Laurie’s lips, the scent of cigarettes lifting from her sister’s clothes. Gauloises because that was Izzy: expensive cigarettes and cheap drugs. It made no sense, Spice least of all; over ninety per cent of its addicts were men. When she’d volunteered this statistic, Izzy had laughed, ‘You always wanted a brother,’ which was no truer than anything else she said when she was high. Mum had given up trying to keep her at home. Laurie and Adam had a spare room where she could sometimes be persuaded to spend the night; she wasn’t homeless, or helpless. The public associated Spice with the streets, and prisons, but the majority of users had homes and families. There wasn’t any need for it, that was what Laurie kept returning to.

‘If you’re not buying me a drink, you can piss off.’

The mirrorball kept putting little chips of light in her sister’s eyes then taking them away again. It was like watching a family movie of the last six years on repeat. Izzy getting better, Izzy getting worse. Recovery, relapse. Hope, despair. Only it wasn’t despair, not quite, not yet. It was frustration, and it was fury at Izzy’s dealers. Guilt at Laurie’s own inability to solve this crime which was wrecking all their lives. It was missing her sister, every single day. Loss had worn such a deep groove in her mind it was hard to remember a time when she hadn’t missed Izzy, when the pair of them were inseparable. Sitting in that dimly lit corner of the Dream Palace, she had a sudden, shocking premonition of Isabel on a stranger’s floor, blue-lipped, long dead.

When it came about, less than two years later, her first thought wasn’t, Oh God, no, but Yes, of course, because it was always going to end like that; every door in her sister’s life unlocked by her addiction, windows smashed by dealers or her own angry unhappiness and Laurie, the fucking fed, failing to do a single thing to stop it.

1.

‘And another thing,’ Sammi said. ‘If you move into Merry’s place for six weeks you’ll end up staying for ever and I don’t want to be best friends with someone who lives with his gran at the age of twenty-eight.’

Joe smoothed parcel tape across the base of a packing box. One down, two dozen to go. ‘My best friend’s a ghost. I manage to cope.’

‘Because your best friend’s smart and funny and— Wait, is that us?’ Sammi crouched by the box Joe was filling, studying the photo. Two boys, big grins, legs hanging from a treehouse door. ‘How old’re we here?’

‘Seven. Your mum made sandwiches, the layered ones, all different fillings.’

Joe pressed his thumb to the photo before tucking it inside a book, returning the book to the packing box.

‘You’re too sentimental for a detective.’ Sammi hated talking about his mum. Happy memories meant something else, Joe guessed, when you were dead. ‘DI Bower’s going to eat pieces out of you.’

‘Not unless her teeth are insured.’ Joe reached for another handful of books, began jigsawing them into the box. ‘She said I’ve a core of steel, remember?’

Joe wasn’t keen to bring up the circumstances under which his boss had said this; Laurie had been standing him down after a gruelling murder investigation, trying to convince the pair of them he was in one piece.

‘I’m not going with you to your gran’s place.’ Sammi lay back on his elbows, kicking a heel at the carpet. ‘You know that, right?’

As solid and real as anyone in Joe’s life, Sammi had drowned at the age of eleven. Yet here he was, a man of twenty-eight, smart and funny just as he said, but in some ways still a boy. Like now, sulking about moving to Merry’s cottage, which he’d declared a no‑go zone years ago.

‘You’ll like it there,’ Joe told him, ‘if you give it a chance. She makes the best biscuits and swears like a sailor.’

‘Swears there’s no such thing as ghosts, you mean.’

‘She’s never once said that. Just that my life would be easier if I stopped telling people I could see you, and the others.’

Nine dead children, killed in the bus crash Joe had survived seventeen years ago. Sammi was the only one he saw every day, but the others were nearby. Joe had made his peace with that a long time ago, although ‘peace’ was perhaps the wrong word for it. Stretched at his side, Sammi ran an unhappy hand through his curls. Joe was so used to him smiling or laughing, it stopped his breath for a second.

‘Look, I’m moving, sooner or later. I’ve no choice about that. The landlord’s selling and I don’t want to buy this place.’ Or any place, since renting suited him. ‘There’s nowhere else I like the look of just now. It makes sense to wait until the right place comes up, don’t you think?’

‘You could buy 28 Powderhill. I hear that’s on the market.’

Boarded‑up windows, the last tatters of police tape, a smell not even a smoke bomb could get shot of. ‘Yes, no thanks.’

‘Or the house next to Bobby’s.’ Amusement crept into Sammi’s eyes. ‘Free neighbourhood watch.’

‘Watching what, exactly?’ Bobby German was about to turn ninety and even in winter wore so few clothes he risked being arrested for indecent exposure. ‘Why’re you so keen on me living in the middle of nowhere?’

‘You already live there,’ Sammi pointed out. ‘Edenscar isn’t exactly jumping, is it?’

‘You’re right. I should move to Sheffield, or Manchester.’

‘Don’t you dare.’

They hadn’t tested that recently, whether Sammi would survive a move beyond the immediate radius of what’d been his home.

Joe was saved from answering by his phone playing Laurie’s tune. He disentangled himself from the packing boxes, taking the call to the window where the reception was less likely to drop out. ‘Boss?’

‘Where are you?’ Laurie’s voice was backwashed by the thin wail of high winds, or distant sirens. Outside at a crime scene by the sound of it.

‘Home. Where’d you want me?’

‘Rock Hall—’ Wind whipped the rest of her words away. Joe heard its flat beat against her clothes, the kind of wind that knocked walkers from their feet if they ventured too high up the Peak District National Park.

‘She’s talking about the Roaches,’ Sammi said.

‘Up at Hen Cloud?’ Joe suggested.

‘No idea.’ Laurie had found shelter of some kind, her voice clearer. ‘I’m sure a local can give you longitude and latitude. Off the A53, just after the Leek Road turning. I’ll get Milla to send you directions.’

Sammi sat up, frowning but alert. ‘You’re on sick leave, aren’t you?’

They both knew Laurie wouldn’t be calling unless this was serious; whatever was at Hen Cloud needed detectives.

Despite the frown, Sammi’s face had brightened, coming into focus; Joe wasn’t the only one who’d missed being at work these past three weeks. He reached for his car keys. ‘On my way.’