by Cari Hunter
Steph tasted her coffee and got up to add more milk. “Forgotten how I like it already?” she said. A pout curled her bottom lip, but she ran a hand across the nape of Rosie’s neck before she sat next to her. “You scared me the other night. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you.” The close confines gave her voice an uncomfortable intimacy, and she shifted until they were thigh to thigh.
Rosie hadn’t come here for a tête-à-tête. She leaned forward, sorting through the paperwork and re-establishing the gap between Steph’s body and her own. Ignoring Steph’s indignant snatch of breath, she focused on the transcribed pages in her hand. “Do you want to start with the interview?”
“Okay, fine, I get it,” Steph said. “Have it your own way.”
Rosie leafed through the papers, searching for a particular quote. Ava had said, “There was a lad with her, all decked out in gear.” Rosie could see Ava’s grin, her teeth stained bright blue from the M&Ms.
“Are you speaking to the runaways dossing around the canal?” she asked. “This couple, Bill and Nance, they’re using those mills as a hunting ground and taking kids with them to act as lures.”
“We tried,” Steph said, “but we’ve only managed to catch a handful. Two, maybe three at best. They’ve either disappeared of their own volition or they’ve been cleared out.”
Rosie clasped her mug to ease the ache from her fingers. She’d gone from too hot to freezing cold in a matter of minutes. “My money would be on the latter,” she said. “These people are probably responsible for Kyle Parker’s death, directly or indirectly, and they didn’t bat an eyelid at attempting to murder us. God, they came so fucking close to killing Jem.” She paused, unable to continue, and swallowed a mouthful of tea that burned a line straight to her stomach. The pain helped to sharpen her focus. “Smiffy said you got a dark SUV on CCTV. Could the girls have been taken from the mill in the same car?”
“It’s possible. I’ve got a couple of lads from B-shift sifting through footage from local cameras, but it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack without a reg plate to pinpoint.” Steph toyed with the laptop, awakening its log-on screen but not entering any details. “We did get something on CCTV, though.”
Rosie looked at her, intrigued but on guard. “What?”
Steph’s eyes glinted in the low light. She was obviously pleased to have stirred Rosie’s interest. “Footage of Kyle Parker on the night he died,” she said.
“Christ. Where from?”
“A petrol station on the main road, approximately two miles from Ellery Lane. Time stamp puts it about ninety minutes before his body was found.”
“Is he on his own?”
“Nope.” Steph swirled her index finger on the laptop’s mouse, bringing the screen to life again. “I don’t have the authority to share this with you, Roz. It’s for Major Crime eyes only.”
Rosie frowned. “Then why mention it?”
Steph’s smile reminded her of a predator toying with its prey. “Because I’ve missed seeing that spark in you. The one that makes you sit up and pay attention.”
“Pay you attention,” Rosie said, the light beginning to dawn.
Steph shrugged. “Dinner at mine, and you can watch the tape to your heart’s content.”
Rosie was so gobsmacked she actually laughed. “No,” she said. “Thanks, but no.”
The laptop slammed closed as Steph hit the back of its screen. “What? Why not? Have you got a hot date with Jemima?”
“No, I haven’t. I just don’t want one with you.”
Steph turned so sharply that she sent a thick waft of scent into Rosie’s face. Rosie had loved that particular fragrance once, but now it just made her queasy.
“I don’t get it,” Steph said. “I don’t get what you see in her. How has she managed to turn you into her fucking lapdog?”
Rosie picked up her coat and slid her bad arm into its sleeve, her actions calm and deliberate and a direct contrast to Steph’s foot-stamping tantrum. “I’m going home,” she said. She stood too abruptly and had to grab the sofa to steady herself. “Was this the reason you brought me here? To bribe me into having dinner with you?”
“Would you have agreed to see me if I’d just asked nicely?” Steph snapped. She came to stand directly in front of Rosie. Although they were matched in height, the spite radiating off her made her seem taller.
Rosie let her coat fall, one shoulder in, the other out. She didn’t have the energy for any of this. “What do you think?” she said.
“I think you and Jem deserve each other.”
Rosie nodded, not insulted in the slightest. “I really hope so.”
Steph arched an eyebrow, clearly wrong-footed. “Don’t come crawling to me when it all goes to shit, Roz.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Rosie busied herself sorting out her coat. Her bad arm was stiff and clumsy, making the zip a challenge. “Let my sarge know when you’ve sorted out the permissions on the CCTV.”
“When did you grow a fucking backbone?” Steph asked, incredulous.
“Thursday,” Rosie said. She didn’t react as Steph stepped toward her, but Steph merely returned to the sofa and logged on to the laptop. She moved a video file into the centre of the screen and then walked to the door.
“I’m not going to apologise,” she said.
That was the least of Rosie’s concerns. “I’m not going to ask you to.”
“Lock up when you’re done,” Steph said, and shut the door behind her.
For a couple of minutes, Rosie stayed where she was, unsure what had just happened and almost certain that watching the video footage would bring Steph back into the room, flushed with triumph and ready to collect her dues.
“Fuck it,” Rosie whispered, as yet another minute passed and the corridor beyond the door remained deserted. She resumed her seat and opened the video file, then pushed the table farther away to put some distance between herself and whatever the CCTV might have captured.
For the first forty seconds, she watched a static shot of the shop’s front counter as a disembodied hand arranged special-offer protein bars and restocked a turning display of vaping liquids. At forty-seven seconds, a middle-aged man approached. Balding, with a taut beer belly and a smart-casual dress sense, he was average height and average in general, the sort of bloke no one would bat an eyelid at in the street. He’d pulled up the collar of his jacket against the rain, and his wedding ring caught the light as he placed three bars of chocolate on the counter and pointed to whatever he wanted the cashier to fetch for him. As a packet of cigarettes and a litre bottle of vodka were placed beside the chocolate, the man slipped his debit card into the reader and turned to address someone behind him.
Even though Rosie had prepared herself for seeing Kyle on the tape, his appearance was still unsettling. He slouched by the counter, twirling the vape display and pointedly ignoring anything the man said to him. His Superdry T-shirt and skinny jeans accentuated his slight build, the designer outfit at odds with his greasy hair and grimy face, as if someone had increased his clothing budget but hadn’t attended to his personal hygiene. He swiped the chocolate and the cigarettes, chewing one of the bars open-mouthed and shrugging off the hand the man laid on his shoulder. Seconds later, he flicked the wrapper to the floor and stalked out of shot. Evidently flustered, the man grabbed the vodka, with one eye on Kyle and the other on the card reader. He didn’t wait for his receipt. The paper fluttered to the counter, and Rosie jumped as a blast of static marked the end of the recording.
Too intrigued to worry about Steph barging in, she made another brew and rewatched the file several times. She jotted notes in bullet-point form, shaping theories and raising questions she had no one to discuss with. She closed the laptop when her eyes started to blur and the twinges in her arm grew into something with sharp needles for teeth. She felt dirty, as if the footage and all it implied had tainted her. They would find the man; the CCTV would provide excellent screen captures, and a publ
ic appeal featuring his image was bound to be successful. He probably had a family, perhaps a son of Kyle’s age who would have to go to school and explain to his mates exactly why his dad had been arrested. Within ninety minutes of eating that chocolate, Kyle had been dead: drugged and drunk, with his brain in bits. Rosie could still feel the flex of his ribs beneath the heel of her hand and see the utter hopelessness in Jem’s eyes.
She took her mug to the sink, running the water until it steamed and then scrubbing her hands before she started on the pots. The water left her fingers red and swollen, and it didn’t make her feel any cleaner.
Chapter Eighteen
“Whoa!” Janelle blew a pink bubble of admiration and popped it on her nose. “That’s proper manky.”
Sam poked a cautious finger at one of Rosie’s sutures. “Did a shark bite you?”
“No, love.” Rosie began to re-bandage her arm. “I cut it on a broken window.”
When he held out the Curly Wurly he’d promised as payment for a look at the wound, she snapped it into three and shared it between them. The beanbag crinkled as she inched lower, and she yawned, getting comfortable. She’d lost count of the recent nights of broken sleep, or no sleep, or sleep plagued by nightmares.
“Rosie was in a fire, you twerp,” Janelle said around a mouthful of caramel and melting chocolate. “Mam’s kept all the cuttings from the papers.”
Sam sniffed and then wiped his nose on his school shirt, already distracted by something on his tablet. “I wish it’d been a shark.”
Janelle bum-shuffled across the carpet until she was sitting between Rosie’s legs. Resting her head on Rosie’s chest, she patted Rosie’s bad hand.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
Rosie kissed her dark curls. “No, not really.”
“Only, you look dead sad.”
“I do?” Rosie had called at her mam’s for breakfast before her shift, unsure whether she wanted company but resolved to get on with things. Her determined bonhomie had fooled her mam, but Janelle had always been the one to see through Rosie’s bullshit. As a child, she’d spotted medicine concealed in yoghurt, refused to believe that the tune on the ice cream van meant it had run out of ice cream, and lain in wait for “Father Christmas” with a torch and an ancient Instamatic. The photo of Rosie drunkenly sorting presents into stockings was still pinned above Janelle’s bed.
“Yeah, your eyes aren’t smiling,” Janelle said. “And you didn’t eat your sausages, so I know something’s up.”
“Nothing gets past you, Sherlock, does it?” Rosie sighed. “Okay, okay. You know Jem, the paramedic who was in the fire with me?”
“Yup. Mam said you stayed with her in the hospital.”
“I did.” Rosie hesitated, unsure how to phrase this. “Well, we were getting to be really good friends, but then she decided she didn’t want to be friends any more.”
Janelle turned onto her front, propping her chin on both hands and studying Rosie with a mildly unnerving intensity. “When you say ‘good friends,’ do you mean girlfriends?” she asked.
Rosie nodded, refusing to look away. “Yes, I mean girlfriends.”
“Ooh, have you got a girlfriend, Rosie?” Sam yelled from across the room.
“Oi! Shut it!” Janelle yelled back. “We’re having an intervention.”
“An inter—where the blazes do you learn these things?” Rosie asked.
“Telly, mostly,” Janelle said. “Is Jem off work today?”
“I think so, but I’m not.”
Janelle made a point of checking her watch. “You’ve got plenty of time to drop by her house on the way in.”
Her nonchalance made Rosie laugh. “You make it sound so easy.”
Janelle punched Rosie’s thigh, a sign of affection that had endured since toddlerhood. “Text me and let me know how you get on,” she said, and proceeded to roll Rosie off the beanbag.
Rosie’s mam waylaid her before she could open the front door, pressing a tinfoil parcel into her hands and kissing her cheek.
“Have that for your lunch,” she said. The subtle arch of her eyebrow told Rosie she hadn’t been fooled after all. “Make up for the breakfast you hardly touched.”
“Thanks, Mam.”
Rosie didn’t say anything else. She couldn’t. She gave her mam a hug and hurried through the rain toward her car. Convinced the last thing Jem needed was a predawn wake-up call, she defied Janelle’s edict and drove straight to work, where she walked into a mess room abuzz with anticipation. Kash grabbed her by the shoulders as soon as he saw her, spinning her around and marching her to her locker.
“Come on, come on, we’re going in five minutes,” he said.
She started to change into her uniform, heedless of the crowd. “Going where?”
“Major Crimes got an ID on a bloke spotted with Kyle Parker not long before the kid turned up dead. He was caught on CCTV. A clip was shown on the news this morning, but they put it up on the Facebook page overnight and hit the jackpot within a couple of hours.”
“Crikey,” she said. She hadn’t told him about the footage Steph had shown her, but she assumed this was the same bloke. The tape obviously hadn’t remained a Major Crimes exclusive for very long. “What’s our part in it all?”
Kash held his nose with one hand and set her boots by her feet with the other. “Tactical Aid are making the arrest. Steph wants us there for crowd control and fingertip once the dust has settled.”
“Where are we heading?”
“Cedar Road, Heaton Chapel. Looking on Street View, it’s proper leafy suburbia, all tree-lined pavements and double-parked cars. By the time we get there, the school run will be in full swing, hence the crowd control.”
She paused halfway through fastening her laces. “Is Steph sure he’ll be in?”
“An unmarked car parked by the address says yes. If he leaves for work in the meantime, Tactical Aid will grab him on the fly.”
“Excellent,” she said, thrilled with the break in the case and at having a task to keep her busy.
Kash fell in step with her as they walked to the door. “It certainly has potential. Speaking of which, did you get in touch with Jem?”
“No, not yet.” She raised a hand, forestalling any rebuke. “Don’t frown, it doesn’t become you. I’m going to phone her later. She won’t be in work today, and I don’t want to wake her, that’s all.”
“Fair enough,” he said. They had worked together for almost three years, and he had sound instincts when it came to subjects best left alone. “Come on, Smiffy promised to save us a seat.”
The trip across Manchester to Stockport was a white-knuckle ride, dodging buses, half-asleep commuters, and suicidal cyclists. Rosie tracked the van’s progress on her phone, following a stuttering red arrow through Longsight and Levenshulme as shops began to open and locals with jobs in the city crammed into bus shelters to avoid the unpredictable downpours. The driver extinguished the lights and sirens as he left the main road and began to weave through residential streets, the outlying scruffy redbrick terraces giving way to semi-detacheds with well-tended gardens and fancier cars.
“Next right,” Rosie told Kash, and seconds later, the van slowed to make the turn. The Tactical Aid Unit were already waiting, their presence at the arrest probably overkill but intended to send a message to the perps who hadn’t yet been found, to Bill and Nancy and Fagin, but primarily to the person who had set fire to a house, trapping four people inside it.
“You okay?” Kash asked in an undertone, as the van pulled into a parking spot at the far end of Cedar and their sarge began his briefing.
“Yeah,” she said. She’d fastened her stab vest too tight, and the shirt below was damp and clinging to her. “I’m fine.”
“Smiffy, Topper, and Jonas, block off from number nine,” their sarge was saying at the front of the van. “I don’t want anyone getting past you until this bloke’s out. Rosie, Kash, and Lem, block from one. That’s the school end, so you might have
your hands full.”
“Bollocks,” Kash said, and Rosie widened the view on her phone to show the academy two streets away.
“Cheer up, mate. Where’s your sense of adventure?” she said, very much in the mood to brawl with a bunch of gobby schoolkids.
He flipped her the bird and then grabbed his seat as the van doors slammed behind Smiffy and his crew, and the driver made a hasty U-turn to drop off the remaining officers without driving past the perp’s house. When the van stopped again, Rosie jumped out first, gauging the progress of the TAU and bagging a prime spot from where she could watch the action and head off any potential troublemakers. Their presence was instantly noted by a group of uniformed teens toting rucksacks and cans of energy drinks. The lads crowded forward en masse, prompting Rosie to unbuckle her baton.
“That’s as far as you go,” she said.
The tallest of them—acne-riddled and stinking of weed—placed a deliberate boot over her imaginary line. “Free country, innit?” he said.
“It will be in approximately…” she checked her watch. There was no set timetable for the arrest, but it made her look official. “…ten minutes. Until then, you don’t come past this point.”
He took another step, egged on by three sniggering mates, two of whom had their mobiles out.
“You’re being recorded,” she said.
“Yeah, I know.” He grinned and gave a little wave to the phones.
She tapped the camera on her vest. “This one’s admissible in court, pal.”
He shrugged, but the gesture lacked his earlier bravado. “Be a load of shite anyway. Five-O arresting some poor fuck who’s done nowt wrong, as usual.” He shoved the smallest lad, causing him to stumble, and then glared at Rosie. “What? You gonna do me for assault?”
“Not today,” she said, her tone leaving him in no doubt as to what she saw in his future.
“Yeah, whatever. Fuck off,” he said, and led his posse back the way they’d come.
Kash watched them wander out of earshot. “I’m so glad my three are still nonverbal or at the ‘daddy, need go wee-wee’ stage,” he said, opening a packet of gum and offering one to Rosie.