Your Life or Mine

by Vicki Bradley

  Not tonight.

  Loxton got up and walked to the bathroom. She’d have a quick shower and then crawl into bed. Tomorrow was going to be hectic and she should at least try to sleep. She turned the shower on and undressed. Her muscles ached. Once she got into the shower, she raised the water pressure up a notch to ease her knotted shoulders and neck.

  As the tension released, she heard a noise over the running water and she froze. Someone was in her flat. Her heart pounded in her chest. She left the water running and stepped quietly out of the shower, grabbing a towel and wrapping it tight around herself. She searched for her mobile through the steam but remembered she’d left it in the living room. She heard footsteps moving to the kitchen.

  She tried to calm her breathing as she crept out of the bathroom and down the corridor into the living room. Her mobile was where she’d left it on the coffee table and she grabbed it, moving over to the front door where she kept an umbrella stand and a metal baseball bat.

  Her hand stretched for the bat as she dialled 999.

  ‘Alana, are you all right in there?’ Kowalski called from near the bathroom.

  Relief coursed through her body and she cancelled the call before it connected. ‘Dominik?’ She could smell takeaway pizza wafting from the kitchen.

  He strode into the living room, confused. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine. What the hell are you doing in my flat?’ She still felt uneasy and irritated, stood there with her hair dripping and the towel wrapped around her, one hand clutching her mobile and the other holding a baseball bat.

  ‘I text you, I’ve brought pizza,’ Kowalski said. ‘I knocked but you didn’t answer and then I realized the door was slightly ajar.’

  ‘The door was open?’ She frowned, turning to stare at it.

  ‘Only off the latch, but it made me worried, so I came in. You must not have shut it properly.’

  She shook her head. That wasn’t like her. She never made mistakes like that; she was always double checking. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘How the hell else did I get in here?’ he asked. ‘I can’t walk through doors. Look, I’ll get the pizza ready and you… go get ready.’ His face flushed slightly.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ she said, flustered. She checked the door was closed properly and dropped the baseball bat back in the umbrella stand. He raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything, just shook his head and smiled in relief.

  ‘You had me worried,’ he said, and went into the kitchen. She returned to the bathroom to turn off the shower and dress and to try to steady her shaking hands.

  When she got to the kitchen, Kowalski had arranged two greasy boxes on the table. ‘I couldn’t settle this evening and I guessed you couldn’t either, so I thought pizza would be nice. Pepperoni, chicken barbecue, or share?’

  ‘Share.’ She pulled out plates and a knife. ‘Thanks for stopping by, but maybe next time call ahead.’ The words came out sharper than she intended.

  ‘It’s a good job I did come over; that door could have been open all night. I just figured you could do with a little company. I know I could. Emma going missing must be hard for you.’

  She cut the pizzas into slices and dished them out for them both. ‘It’s hard for everyone,’ she said. ‘Most people in Southwark know her. When you’ve been in as long as we have, everyone knows everyone.’

  Kowalski nodded and started to devour a slice. ‘God, I needed this.’ He waved the pizza slice at her.

  They sat in silence for a while, eating until they were full. He wiped his mouth with some kitchen roll and then ripped a fresh sheet off to wipe her chin. ‘Just a splodge,’ he said.

  She smiled despite herself and got up to pour them a glass of red; she’d need something to help her sleep.

  ‘I hate this,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear thinking about what Pearce has done to Emma.’

  ‘I keep hoping there’s been some mistake, that she’ll turn up,’ Loxton said, not believing it herself.

  ‘God, I hope so,’ Dominik said. ‘I think Pearce has done something, though.’

  ‘It might not be Pearce,’ Loxton said. She couldn’t help thinking of the coincidental timing of Barratt’s near-successful escape attempt from Broadmoor.

  ‘Who else?’ Kowalski said.

  She felt herself going cold. ‘She’s a police officer. We end up with plenty of people who have grudges. Dangerous grudges.’

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘This is going to sound crazy, but Emma worked on Edward Barratt when she was in the murder squad. He threatened to get his revenge on the female detectives who locked him up. Last week he tried to escape from Broadmoor, but they caught him within the hour.’

  ‘Then it can’t be him.’ Kowalski frowned at her, confused. ‘He was inside when she went missing.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m just tired,’ she said, realizing that she was exhausted. ‘And I don’t know, I’ve always been paranoid about Barratt, never quite feeling like I’m finished with him. That one day he’ll make real on his threat.’

  ‘Trust me,’ Kowalski said. ‘We’ve all got cases like that. Don’t worry, we’ll find Emma. I promise.’ He gave her arm a quick squeeze. He got up and put his coat on. ‘I’d best get going.’

  She wanted to ask him to stay; the idea of being alone scared her, but it was a bad idea. Her emotions were getting the better of her – and the wine.

  ‘Thanks for the pizza,’ she said.

  ‘Any time,’ he said. ‘I know you forget to eat when these big cases start.’ Then his face fell as he remembered that it was Emma he was talking about.

  Once he left, she put the latch on and made sure she double locked the door. She couldn’t afford to make silly mistakes; Emma needed her to stay focused.

  As she turned back to her small flat, it seemed darker with Kowalski gone, silence and shadows playing tricks on her mind. She went back to the sofa and poured herself another glass of red. She knew she wouldn’t sleep tonight, nor any night until Emma was found.

  Chapter 8

  Wednesday 26 January, 01:10

  Emma felt groggy, as if she were still drunk, and her head throbbed. She blinked rapidly but she couldn’t see anything. There was no light. It was the type of dark that you never got in London. Had she gone blind? She let out a sob into the darkness.

  Her arms were stiff and sore, stretched behind her back at an odd angle. She tried to move them, but her wrists were tied with what felt like plastic cables. She opened and closed her fingers and felt the pins and needles burn through them. She tried to twist them so she could reach the cable, but whoever had secured her knew what they were doing. She realized her ankles were the same, bound together tight.

  It was hopeless.

  She wasn’t getting out of here until someone released her. She blinked again in the gloom, expecting her eyes to have adjusted, but there was still just blackness. She’d never known anything like it. She tried to steady her breathing, to quell the panic inside her, so that she could concentrate. She could hear something – quiet, but there all the same. Drip, drip, drip. Rhythmic. Where the hell was she?

  The stench of the place was overpowering. Like gutters on a hot summer day or bins in a heatwave. She wrinkled her nose in disgust. She could smell something oily mixed with rubbish, too. Was she near a refuse site? A scrapyard?

  She thought of her mother, how scared she’d be that Emma hadn’t turned up for her daily visits. That was if her mother had been having good days. If not, then she wouldn’t even remember Emma existed.

  Work must have realized she was missing by now. She had no idea how much time had passed, but it felt as if she’d been tied up here for days. Her throat was parched and she was starving.

  She tried to recall again what had happened on Saturday night, after she’d left the bar, but it was patchy at best. Too much booze. Why did she always have to drink so much? She remembered getting off the tube, how she had thought there had been a man following
her – or did she just walk past him? She shook her head, trying to clear the fogginess, and the sharp pain dug into her brain again.

  Then she remembered the crack to the back of her head, the hands around her throat. Trying to say Luke’s name, to get him to stop. Her heart froze as she thought of him. She was in serious trouble. She’d seen something in him. A vicious streak she recognized from certain suspects at work.

  She put her head back against the cold stone. She hadn’t told anyone about Luke’s nasty side. She’d been too embarrassed that she’d fallen for his apparent charm and good looks. So when he’d hit her, she’d ended it and not spoken to him again, and she hadn’t reported him. She was a police officer and she feared that her judgement would be questioned. She was supposed to be able to sort out the criminals from the victims. And she hadn’t wanted pitying looks from colleagues.

  Right now, however, she needed to get a grip, or she was going to die here. Her hands and ankles might not be free, she might not be able to see anything, but she could move. She didn’t seem to be tied to anything. She could at least try to see if there was a way out. She shuffled forward, her progress painfully slow, but she pushed the thought aside. That type of thinking wouldn’t save her. At least she was doing something and it gave her hope.

  Just as she was starting to make some headway, something froze her to the spot. She could hear footsteps in the darkness, growing louder. Someone was coming.

  Chapter 9

  Wednesday 26 January, 12:15

  Loxton hung up the CID phone and sighed in frustration. She still couldn’t get hold of Sarah and it worried her. She’d been trying all morning and had left several messages with Sarah’s team to pass on the message that Emma was missing, but all they’d said was that she was out of the office and wouldn’t be able to call back right away.

  Loxton suspected Sarah was in the middle of an undercover operation, oblivious of Emma’s disappearance. At least Sarah would have a team backing her up, making sure she was safe. Nothing could happen to her while she was on the operation.

  She sent another email to Sarah’s work address and sighed. She thought about Barratt again, always her mind looping back to him. She decided not to bother Winter with it yet. Kowalski had been right; Barratt was in solitary confinement in Broadmoor – this couldn’t be anything to do with him. Still, she felt unsettled. His final words to her echoed in her ears: ‘This isn’t over. It’ll never be over. I’ll make you all pay.’ She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to focus.

  Pearce was the obvious suspect. She prayed Emma hadn’t become one of the two women killed every week in the UK by a partner or ex-partner.

  Kowalski dropped himself into the seat next to her and took a sip of the takeaway latte she’d brought in. ‘Forensics have just told me that they think we didn’t find anything in Pearce’s car because he got it professionally cleaned. Some of the chemicals they lifted have come back as sophisticated cleaning products that hospitals use to sterilize operating theatres.’

  ‘Surely they would have found something if he’d used his car.’ She couldn’t quite bring herself to say, ‘to move the body’.

  ‘Not according to them. The car was forensically cleaned. The company he took it to knew exactly what they were doing.’

  ‘What car company was it?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, it’s less a car company than an outfit under the arches in Peckham. Tony’s Auto Repair Garage. Barely paid any tax last year, they seem to be running at a loss, yet Tony bought himself a four-bed detached house a couple of years back and has no problem keeping up with the sizeable mortgage payments. The ANPR shows Pearce’s BMW in the area at 2am and it disappears for a good couple of hours.’

  ‘Isn’t that quite a jump to think that he went in there?’ Loxton said.

  ‘Not really. He used his debit cards to withdraw a thousand quid from a cash machine three minutes’ walk away from Tony’s at five to two in the morning on Sunday. Three years back the garage was involved with forensically cleaning a car that was suspected of a drive-by shooting. With a bit of persuasion they did the right thing and told us what they knew, off the record. It was a breakthrough for the case.’

  ‘You can’t beat local knowledge,’ Loxton said. ‘Let’s go and pay them a visit.’ She was glad they were getting somewhere, but she didn’t like where they were headed. If Pearce had taken his car to this garage, what evidence was he forensically trying to hide?

  * * *

  Tony’s Auto Repair Garage was as Loxton expected. Nestled under the archway, a faded sign above read: ‘Car cleaning and repair jobs at great prices’.

  A car mechanic was tinkering with an old Ford Focus. When he spotted them, he stood up, the wrench still in his hand. He glanced at Loxton and Kowalski, a frown furrowing his brow. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘We’re looking for the manager?’ Loxton asked.

  ‘He’s not here.’ He tapped the wrench in his open palm.

  ‘Perhaps you could help?’ She showed him her warrant card and watched as he straightened up, his frown deepening.

  ‘Probably not,’ he grumbled. ‘I’m pretty busy here.’

  ‘Can you tell us what work was done to a BMW, index LY19 AXM, on Saturday night.’

  ‘I didn’t do any work on a Beemer.’ His eyes narrowed.

  ‘Can you show us your diary?’

  He brightened visibly. ‘Sure. I can do that.’ He walked them through to an office which resembled a cupboard. Inside was a table, a chair and an old computer. He opened up a faded red leather-bound ledger and flicked through the pages. ‘It’s not here.’

  She leaned over and turned the book around so she could read the handwriting. There was barely anything in the diary, including the old Ford Focus he’d been working on outside. ‘Any CCTV?’

  He smiled at her. ‘Nope. Too expensive.’

  Kowalski took a step up to him. ‘Too expensive? With the prices you’re charging? I really doubt that. Look, jerk, this is an investigation into a missing cop. You’d better cooperate or you’re going to have half of Southwark police looking into your business. Off the record, what work did you do on the black BMW?’

  The man wiped his forearm across his sweating forehead. ‘Missing cop? I saw that on the news.’

  ‘We know someone here worked on the BMW,’ Loxton said. ‘The owner paid one thousand pounds cash for the work. We’ve got CCTV.’ Loxton decided not to mention that the CCTV was just of Pearce taking the cash out.

  The mechanic’s face fell.

  ‘We can arrest you.’ Loxton shrugged, hoping he believed her threat. ‘It’s up to you.’

  ‘I never talk to the police.’ The mechanic crossed his arms in front of his chest.

  ‘This time you might have to,’ Loxton said. ‘A female police officer has gone missing.’ Loxton felt herself holding her breath as she waited for him to explode.

  The mechanic seemed to consider for a moment, glancing at his knuckles and then at them. ‘Fuck him, he was a twat anyway. He came in with his BMW on Saturday night. It had a dent in the front bonnet and the windscreen was smashed, so I fixed it up for him. He said it needed a clean inside and out. There was smashed glass everywhere. Plenty of people need that sort of thing after a little accident.’

  ‘At two in the morning?’ Kowalski stared at him.

  ‘Accidents can happen anytime.’ The man shrugged.

  ‘Did you see any blood? The missing officer is my friend.’ Loxton asked, her heart thundering in her chest. She imagined Emma’s blood trickling out of her mouth as she lay motionless on a tarmac road.

  ‘He said he’d hit a cat.’ The mechanic paused for a moment, trying to work out whether what he said would come back to haunt him later. His voice softened. ‘Maybe there was a little on the bonnet.’

  ‘Let’s get forensics to check the garage out now,’ Loxton said to Kowalski.

  ‘You can’t do that. Tony will kill me,’ the mechanic said, alarmed. ‘I told you what you wanted to know
. I thought we had a deal?’

  ‘The deal was I don’t arrest you; I never said I wouldn’t search the garage,’ Loxton snapped back, and she moved away from him and turned to Kowalski. ‘I’ll have Winter get a search warrant for the garage authorized now.’

  Kowalski nodded, his face grave, realizing what the blood on Pearce’s bonnet might mean for Emma. Had he hit her with his car?

  Chapter 10

  Wednesday 26 January, 22:30

  Loxton was scrolling through the CCTV around Emma’s flat one more time, just in case they’d missed Pearce’s BMW the first time round. It wasn’t likely, but she needed to be doing something while they waited for the lab results to come back from the forensic search of Tony’s garage.

  Loxton was startled by Lena sitting down next to her, obviously too transfixed on the screen in front of her. Lena was holding a bundle of papers in her hand. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,’ Lena said apologetically.

  ‘It’s okay, I was just checking the CCTV again.’ Loxton frowned at the blurry images on her screen.

  ‘I can see that. You were lost to the world. But you’ve been working flat out for a couple of days now; you should go home. Getting exhausted isn’t going to help Emma.’ Lena smiled at Loxton with warm eyes, but Loxton could see she had something.

  ‘You didn’t come over here to tell me to go home. Come on, what have you got?’ Loxton felt the tiredness fall away as a fizz of adrenaline replaced it.

  ‘As you requested, all the unsolved hit and runs involving cars in the last two weeks in all the southern boroughs of London. Not as many as you’d think. There’s three here which I’ve put at the top that will be of special interest. Witnesses or CCTV indicate a car the same size and type as Pearce’s BMW.’

  Loxton leafed through the pages. The one she kept getting drawn back to was an Uber Eats motorcyclist who’d been hit on Saturday evening, around midnight, on the way to a delivery. The description of the driver was of a white male in his thirties with short brown hair. But the witnesses were contradictory; it had been dark, and a couple had insisted the driver had black hair and was in his twenties. They’d all agreed he’d been driving a dark-coloured BMW, though.