by TL Dyer
‘Yeah. You know. Guy you had the hots for yesterday. Cranky.’
I bite through bread and beef and cheesy salad and look out of the window in the same way he does, like this conversation doesn’t matter. ‘What about him?’
‘Got hauled in last night. Anonymous caller.’
‘Yeah? Sweet.’
‘You don’t sound all that surprised.’
I turn to see he’s gauging me in the same way he would a suspect. ‘What they bring him in on?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Right. Well, good. That’s another dickhead off the street for two minutes.’
My partner drags his gaze away and sighs through his nose, shuffling his backside in the seat like something’s jammed up it. I go back to my Sub and ignore whatever’s got him narked, because it’s not Cranky’s incarceration, that’s for sure; he couldn’t give a toss about that. I don’t think it’s me either, so it’ll be something at home. His dog, his mother, who the hell knows with him? Perhaps he’s caught himself a raving STI, which would explain the thunderous mood and the fidgeting.
We finish our lunch in silence, and back on the road the only distraction is the intermittent crackle of the radio. I’m almost relieved when a shout comes in and we blue-light it to the City Royal Hospital where one of their staff members has been attacked by a patient. When we get there, the suspect has calmed enough to receive the treatment he came in for – a gash to the head after misjudging the edge of the pavement – but only under the watchful glare of a security guard stood bedside. The room he’s in is awash with the reek of however many units he managed to down in the time since he got up this morning.
‘This necessary?’ our man asks, all the s’s rolling together and the ‘r’ disappearing, as Smithy cuffs him by the wrist to the bed rail then nods to the security guard. The seven-foot bouncer of a guard cracks a relieved smile and taps Smithy a thanks on the shoulder before he leaves.
‘Afraid so, Mr Campbell,’ I say. ‘We can’t have you attacking anyone else.’
‘Tacking!’ he spits with an ugly grin, half his teeth missing, the other half rotten. ‘I didn’t tack no one.’
He hisses through his lips as if this is all a big wind-up. But just the effort of this has his head nodding first to one side, then the other, his eyes struggling to keep up. He squeezes them shut and digs at the lids with his fingers.
Smithy catches my eye. He looks thrilled. He also looks tired, like he hasn’t slept for weeks. Once we’re done with this, I’ll make a point of speaking to him.
‘Back in a sec,’ I say, and duck outside while Campbell is getting his head stitched. We won’t get anything out of him for a while, so it’s all we can do to have him patched up and drop him at the custody suite until he’s slept off the booze.
A male nurse directs me to a room down the corridor where the victim is herself now receiving treatment from a colleague. The young woman’s head tilts back while the doctor seals a cut above her eyebrow with strips of tape. I stand by the door, wait until he’s done with his delicate task, and when he steps away the first thing I see are the line of blood drips down the front of the nurse’s blue cotton uniform. Her own this time, as opposed to someone else’s.
Thin, pale, ringless fingers clasp together on her lap, and I sense she’s trying to keep them from shaking. She’s barely out of college perhaps, and this is the first time she’s ever been hit in her life. She smiles at the doctor, but it’s a forced reassurance that she’s alright.
‘It’s okay,’ she says with a nervous giggle when she sees me. ‘I won’t be pressing charges or anything.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Lucy, yes you will.’ The doctor peels his gloves from his hands as he catches my eye. ‘Yes, she will, Officer.’
‘He didn’t really mean it. He’s just...’
‘Wasted, yes. And tomorrow he will be again, and he comes in and does the same thing.’
Lucy’s superior won’t be any less empathetic than his young protégé, but he’s more hardened to it. Seeing his staff abused in this way will be one of those things that pokes at his darker side in ways nothing else comes close. Same as when it happens to us and ours.
The doctor drops the gloves into a waste bin and punches the hand sanitizer on the wall, rubbing his hands together and offering me a clamped-lipped smile as he passes out of the room.
‘He’s right, you know,’ I say, taking the tablet from my pocket. ‘I’m Officer Steve Fuller, by the way. And I’m hoping you’ll let me take your statement so I can get that idiot out there into a cell where he can suffer through the hangover that’s coming his way.’
Lucy lowers her head to touch her fingers to the stitches. As I step further into the room, it’s clear that the area around the wound and her left temple is a deep red, and it’s not difficult to imagine how this played out. Her patience, care, and persistence; his drunk, maybe drugged-up rage. Her youthful skin; his calloused fist.
She says nothing, and I know it’s because she’s trying to stop the tears from falling. She’s trying not to appear weak in a job that hasn’t the time or tolerance for weakness.
I give her a minute, pulling a chair from across the room and setting it down a few feet away, so that from where she’s perched on the edge of the bed, she’ll have to look down to talk to me.
‘He brought himself in,’ she begins, glancing to the clock. ‘Sometime after two. I hadn’t long come back on after lunch break. There was a lot of blood on his face but I could tell it only needed a few stitches. Except I think the blood scared him, and that’s why he lashed out.’
‘Lucy?’
Almond eyes peer up from beneath dark lashes with a level of concern that tells me this will be one of those things that keeps her up at night – at least until she’s more experienced on the job and this sort of thing becomes less of a shock.
‘We’ll hear enough excuses from him,’ I say. ‘What happened to you?’
The back of her hand taps at the corner of her left eye, blotting a tear over the fresh bruise that will be a proper shiner by tonight. ‘Um...’ Her voice shakes, her resolve collapsing, and when she talks next, she can only whisper. ‘I was just trying to help.’
I drop my gaze to the tablet in my lap. Not to spare her embarrassment at her tears, but because my head is suddenly light. The words on the screen jump and shift, and I can’t remember typing them. I grip the thin stylus between my fingers, and squeeze tight enough that I might hear the crack of plastic, something, anything to help me focus. When I speak, my voice sounds as if it’s coming from across the room and not from me. ‘What happened then?’
She talks and I listen. Her hands play with the edge of her tunic, the one stained with her own blood. And once she’s made a start, she rushes through it without stopping, without crying, without pausing for breath, because she wants this over with. Same way I want this over with. I want to be out of this room, with its stink of disinfectant that burns my nose, and its glaring sterility that makes my head hurt and eyes tired, the stinking, filthy injustice of it all that’s enough to make me throw up.
She talks. I listen. I make a note of everything. But later, once we’ve booked Campbell into custody, I think I must have been operating on autopilot. Because I can’t remember doing any of it.
*
With half an hour to go before we return to the station to wrap up, Smithy and I sit in the car outside the bookmaker’s on the High Street. I’m sipping from a coffee that burns my tongue but reignites my brain, putting my fogginess at the hospital down to another disturbed night’s sleep, and trying not to dwell on it. I still haven’t asked my passenger what’s up, but after we left the Custody Suite, he popped two Anadins, threw me the keys, and requested I take over the wheel until we’re done. His face is draining of colour and I’m guessing that’s all it is, a migraine, or a hangover. He passed on the coffee, and though he’s trying to look like he’s on it, dark glare fixed out the window and darting one end of the stre
et to the other, I can tell it’s only superficial. Behind the eyes, his head’s god knows where; already at home in bed, I assume. What he really wants to do is let those heavy lids drop, but he doesn’t dare.
I’m draining the rest of the coffee a few minutes later when two girls catch my attention. One’s a brunette in blue jeans and a grey oversized hoody, in the front pocket of which she tucks her hands, and the other is a slim blonde who’s all arms and animation as she talks. I know them, their faces are familiar, but not so familiar that I recall where from. I watch them pass down into Skinner Street, and it’s only when they’re heading away, the blonde’s hair fanning out behind her as she walks, that it comes to me. The last time I saw them they were wearing black and clutching at drinks in the rugby club with a bunch of Anna’s other friends.
I step out of the car to bin the coffee cup, when I hear a male voice holler and see the girls pause and turn. Two lads come down the road towards them, one with a swagger I don’t rate that much. I rate it even less when the blonde tugs at her friend’s arm to keep moving.
‘Alright, ladies?’ I hear, as I stroll back to the unit. ‘Where you going, then? We’ll come.’
I don’t catch the reply, only Swagger’s response, and only because he’s one of those gobby types. ‘Ah, don’t be like that, darling.’
I get behind the wheel and put the car in gear, the group of them out of sight now. Beside me, Smithy clicks on his seatbelt without a word. I take it slow, hanging back, but as I bear left onto Skinner Street, the boys are disappearing round the corner. It’s them I follow, turning the car down the Bus Only lane. Up ahead, the girls ahead are stepping under the bus shelter. Swagger’s still looking like he’s mouthing off, but Blonde guides her friend over to the corner of the shelter and sits. Brunette sneers at the boys, and raises a middle finger which freezes mid-air when she sees us coming down the street. Swagger looks over his shoulder at what’s caught her eye, and I make sure he knows it’s him I’m watching. My partner has the same sense as me, because despite the headache, his eyes are on the spiky-haired youngster too. The boy smiles, kicks at the pavement, but he’s rattled. He says something to his mate and they turn back the way they came, without so much as a sideways glance at us as we pass. I pull into the bus stop.
‘What’re you doing?’ Smithy asks, awaking from his fugue state.
‘It’s alright. I know them.’
I hit the button to lower the passenger side window, and a blast of cool air floods in. Leaning over the centre console, I call past my partner. ‘Hey. Those lads bothering you?’
‘Nah,’ the blonde girl says. ‘They’re just... Being lads.’
‘Where are you headed?’
Smithy’s head turns to me but I ignore it.
‘Home.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘St Julians.’
I check the mirrors. There’s no sign of Swagger and his mate, they must have hoofed it back to the High Street pretty sharpish. But I don’t trust them.
‘We’ll drop you, if you like.’
‘Steve.’ Smithy issues a hushed reprimand.
Blonde looks at her friend and puffs out a short laugh. ‘Thought we weren’t supposed to accept rides from strangers.’
‘That’s correct.’ PC Smith gazes through the windscreen at some point up the road.
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘But I’m not a stranger. You’re friends of Anna’s, right? I recognise you from the funeral.’
The two girls look to each other, debating what the right thing to do is. Accept a ride home in a panda car or wait for the bus for the next twenty minutes and hope the arsehole Romeos don’t come loitering for a second go.
I undo my seatbelt, getting out before Smithy can get further in his protests than my name. By the time I’m opening the rear door, the girls have already decided and are stepping over the pavement, Brunette with her rucksack clutched in her arms and cheeks a molten glow, Blonde with a smile she’s not trying too hard to fight. Once they’re in, I close the door on their soft giggles. Except by now my colleague is out from his seat and pulling me by the arm around the back of the car.
‘Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing, Steve?’
‘Making sure they get home safely,’ I say, which even to my own ears sounds pathetic.
‘Where’s the danger?’ he snaps, brown eyes almost black with his headache, his tiredness, and now his anger.
‘They went up there.’ I tip my chin in the direction over his shoulder, but my partner’s not interested. His expression says he doesn’t know where to begin, or if he has the strength to bother.
‘Are you fucking serious?’ is all he can muster in the end.
I know there’s little chance of explaining and him understanding right now. Little chance of him accepting that policing doesn’t need to be about mopping up the mess, sometimes it can be about stopping that mess from happening in the first place.
‘Look, settle down, mate,’ I say instead. ‘We’ll only be two minutes. Then we’ll head back in to book off.’
Before this debate can go any further, I’m already opening the driver’s door and hoping that the words ‘book off’ are enough to win my colleague over. And while his face when he gets back in tells me it hasn’t worked, he’s not about to let rip in front of our passengers either.
To appease him, I say over my shoulder, ‘Right then, girls, if a call comes in between here and home, you’re out, I’m afraid.’
‘Aw, I hope not,’ Blonde says, as I pull away from the bus stop. ‘I always wanted to go on a ride-along.’
I glance in the rear-view mirror, but she’s looking out at the River Usk as we pass over the bridge and onto Clarence Place.
‘My uncle used to be a copper,’ she adds.
‘Yeah? What’s his name?’
‘You wouldn’t know him. He lives in Bristol. Quit years ago. He’s a yoga teacher and life coach now.’
‘Of course. A perfectly natural transition.’
She giggles at my sarcasm, but my partner doesn’t. His dead-eyed glare is about to put a chip in the windscreen.
‘So we don’t get to see you firing your pistol then, Officer?’
Beside me, Smithy covers his eyes with his hand, while in the back, Brunette thumps her friend in the arm and hisses, ‘Kate, that’s America, you wally.’
‘Not true, actually, Sam. Some carry guns.’
‘They do,’ I say, ‘but that’s Armed Response, not us.’
‘You have Tazers instead, don’t you?’
‘Well, no. Not all of us. Not yet, anyway.’
‘Don’t they trust you with one?’
I catch Kate’s eye in the mirror. ‘Something like that.’
We drop them at the end of their road at Kate’s request, so we won’t give her mother a stroke to see her daughter getting out of a cop car. They thank me and I tell them to take care, before hauling in a deep breath and facing my judge, jury and executioner. Lucky for me, the verdict’s not long in coming.
‘So now we’re a fucking taxi service?’ he mutters, as I pull away from the kerb.
I don’t rush to answer. I’m considering how to counter Smithy’s square-box thinking with some simple human kindness – that other thing we’re supposed to be here for.
‘We’re whatever we’re needed to be, mate,’ I say. And despite the shake of his head, I leave it at that.
Chapter 21
When I get home, the house is empty. The note left on the kitchen counter tells me Dan’s studying at a friend’s, while she’s having some drinks with the girls at work – Diane’s birthday – and won’t be back till late. She also mentions we’ve had an offer on the Lobster Pot for three hundred, but she’s pushing for more.
‘I should bloody well hope so,’ I mutter to myself, opening the fridge and staring in. ‘Three hundred! Jesus Christ.’ I take out a can of Fosters and push the door shut.
‘Three hundred,’ I repeat my disgust to the dog. Rumpole l
ifts his head from his bed and peers up at me like this is one problem too many. He lets it fall again, with a grunt and a soft fart that he can get away with at his age.
The edge of the can crashes against my teeth, but the lager is cold and soothing as it goes down, so that I empty half of it in a few gulps before remembering I need to eat. Taking out a Pyrex dish of marinating chicken as well as a second can, I flip the oven on, and sit at the counter to finish the first.
Re-reading Ange’s note, I pick up the pen and add, £450k min., as a postscript. Sod it. I cross that figure out and replace it with £500k. Fincas don’t come cheap. Then there’s the whole uprooting and moving to another country thing. Because that’s her ultimate goal. How many summer vacations in the sun before she wants to stay longer? Before she doesn’t want to return home at all? She says when we retire, or more specifically, when I retire. But things change, and Ange is impatient when there’s something she craves.
I crack the ring pull on the second can, and after the first long, cool sip, I pull my phone from my pocket, lay it on the counter, and scroll through the contacts until I land at Tricia. My thumb hovers a while before I tap to open the message app.
Cheers again for last night. Really enjoyed it, I type, before holding down delete and erasing it all.
Technically I didn’t enjoy it, not the dancing anyway. It was fun, I suppose, but it’s not like I want her to think I’m into all that now and start signing me up for competitions or weekend trips to Blackpool.
Cheers again for the laughs yesterday. Was much needed.
Too cheesy. And might imply an emotional deficiency that I need help with. Delete.
‘Shit.’
I rest the can on my bottom lip, tipping my head back to pour and wondering, what the hell is it I actually want to say? Do I need to say anything at all? I said thanks last night. Putting the can on the counter, I tap out, How are your toes? I press send and thrust the phone away over the counter. No big deal. Just a friendly text message, with no strings implied or neediness suggested.
The oven clicks off and I get up to remove the cling film. Overpowered by the smoky, sweaty sock stench of barbecue marinade, I slide the dish in and set the timer to twenty minutes. While I wait, I take a plate from the rack on the drainer, give it a cursory wipe with a tea towel, and do the same with the cutlery. Rooting about in the cupboard, options for quick and easy are limited to a tin of baked beans or a packet of microwave egg fried rice. I throw the rice on the counter at the same time the phone vibrates behind me and I almost drop a kidney.