by Casey, Jane
He was big, Chris, but he was quick too. ‘Is that what the boss said?’
‘She told me not to sleep with anyone on the rota. You can pass that on to Andy if you like.’
‘I will,’ Chris promised. He was grinning to himself, but not about me. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised. She’d know all about that.’
‘Really?’
‘She was over the side with two or three blokes when she was still a sergeant. One at a time, like. She was a repeat offender, not promiscuous. That’s why her marriage broke up. Her husband was job too – a DI in North London. You’d think he’d have known what to expect.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe he did. It was after the third one that he lost patience and dumped her.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Common knowledge.’ He considered it. ‘Then again, we’re talking about ten or fifteen years ago. I suppose there aren’t that many people left who’d remember it.’
‘You poor old dinosaur.’
‘The last of my kind,’ Chris said happily. He had his window down, one meaty elbow resting on the sill. In a low, rumbling voice, he started crooning to himself. He did it all the time, and it was always Elvis.
‘Brixton has its shitty bits but it’s not quite the ghetto,’ I pointed out.
‘It is as far as I’m concerned.’ He went back to singing, deceptively relaxed as he drove, but ever watchful, ready for anything.
I sat in the passenger seat and concentrated on the radio chatter as I stared out at the dark streets. I told myself I was excited, but the knot in my stomach was the truth. I was scared, all the time, of getting it wrong.
And, as the inspector had just reminded me, getting it wrong was the one thing I couldn’t afford to do.
2
It was a quiet shift, to begin with. We drifted around, radios chattering with call signs that were not ours. Every call we might have taken was snapped up by another, closer unit. We were out of place, looking the wrong way, surrounded by drivers who were obeying the rules of the road, up to nothing but good. The closest we got to wrongdoing was a lingering smell of cannabis on a street corner, and although Chris stomped up and down sniffing like a British bulldog he couldn’t trace it back to a source. The night was hot and still, with not a breath of wind to take the edge off the humidity.
‘Feels like a thunderstorm,’ Chris said as we parked in a side street to wait for something to happen.
‘Not forecast.’
‘What do they know? They just make it up.’
‘I think it’s a bit more complicated than that,’ I said, grinning. ‘But you’re right. It does feel stormy.’
‘Gives you a headache.’ Chris frowned. ‘And where are all the burglars who should be taking advantage of open windows? Where are all the tossers who’ve been drinking all day and fancy a fight?’
‘Anyone would think you wanted someone to commit a crime.’
‘Anyone would be right. That’s the thing about this job.’ He leaned forward, hugging the steering wheel, watching the traffic on the main road. ‘Everyone thinks a knife-wielding maniac will get you, but the maniacs are few and far between. The boredom, on the other hand – that’s a killer.’
It was close to midnight when the control room asked for Lima Delta Two Six to respond.
‘Lima Delta Two Six receiving, over,’ I said.
‘Two Six, thank you. Could I head you towards Filford Street, Brixton? Reports of a disturbance, male and female voices shouting. Doing some checks on the road now for you. Show you towards?’
‘Two Six, do we have the exact address?’
‘The caller said the noise was coming from nearby. She couldn’t be more specific. She said it could have been from one of the houses or from the yards.’
I frowned. ‘Two Six, confirm the yards? Did she mean the garden?’
‘I’ve no further information on that, I’m afraid, and she’s no longer on the line’
‘Two Six all received. Show us towards.’
‘No bother.’ Chris was already turning the car. ‘I know Filford Street. It’s a residential street on the edge of our ground, near enough to Loughborough Junction, but it’s got an industrial bit in the middle by the train line. There’s a builder’s merchant and some offices and a dodgy little garage in the arches under the railway. She must mean there.’
‘Is there any street in this area you don’t know?’
‘After fifteen years? Doubt it.’ He grinned.
I imagined driving around South London for another fourteen years and ten months and wilted, just a little. I didn’t know what I wanted to do yet, but I knew I wanted to do more than respond to 999 calls in an area I thought of as my own.
‘Lima Delta Two Six.’
I answered, ‘Two Six receiving.’
‘Looking at the CAD, it came in as a possible domestic. The caller said she heard a man and a woman shouting at one another.’
I looked at Chris, who snorted. ‘Just our luck.’
There was nothing good about a domestic violence incident, especially one where the address wasn’t known and the control room couldn’t check if the police had responded to a previous incident. Even when the victim had called us, they could change their mind at the sight of a gang of black-clad officers laying hands on their partner. It was hard enough to subdue a large, violent, possibly drunk or drugged-up bloke without his missus thumping you. There were times when the victim was the one who ended up being taken in for assault on a police officer. There were times when sympathy for the victim ran very low indeed, though I hadn’t yet run out of patience with them.
Then there were the times when the victim promised us through chipped teeth, tears in their rapidly closing eyes, that they hadn’t been injured by their partners. They had fallen down the stairs. They had burned their own hands, preparing dinner or ironing. They had walked into doors. They had tripped and bruised themselves. They bruised easily, they said. One woman told me, very seriously, that she had pulled out the clump of hair that lay on the kitchen floor herself, because it wouldn’t sit neatly when she had her hair in a ponytail. They sat through the thirty or so questions on the form we were required to fill in, shaking their heads at every one. They were scared. They were afraid of making things worse for themselves, or their children.
They were no help to us at all.
In my two months on the streets I’d been to plenty of domestics and I’d learned the rules. The female officers were there to deal with the victim, to coax them into telling us enough to make it worth our while to prosecute the suspect. The male officers provided the muscle. It bothered me enormously that everyone assumed I was capable of talking the victim around, just because we shared the experience of being female. It felt like a lot of responsibility. Conscientiously, I’d read the statistics. Two women died every week in the UK at the hands of a partner or ex-partner. One incident of domestic violence was reported to the police every minute. One in four women experienced domestic violence during their lives. On average, women endured thirty-five incidents of domestic abuse before contacting the police.
And then I showed up the thirty-sixth time and stumbled through my arguments for why the victim should trust us. As if we could make it all go away. As if we could save them.
It had been two months, and so far I remembered all of their faces. So far, none of them had turned up on the daily briefing as the borough’s latest homicide.
I looked, though. Every time.
‘Two Six, that’s received.’ I said. ‘Short ETA.’
‘Stick the lights on,’ Chris said. ‘No sirens. We don’t want to give them too much warning, do we?’
I watched the road, feeling my heart rate rise as we headed, quite fast, towards Filford Street. It was nine minutes since the call had come in to the control room. Not a long time. There was every chance the incident, whatever it was, could still be taking place. Trying to be subtle about it in case Chris made fun of me, I checked that my CS gas canister was on my belt,
and my baton was in its holster. I was fine at combat training. I just didn’t know if I was any good at combat. I hadn’t had the chance to try. The new girl was never going to be allowed first crack at arresting a rowdy drunk. I needed to do it, though, for the sake of my confidence, and for my reputation. The rota needed officers who were good in a scrap, who could back you up if you got into trouble. I had to prove myself.
Filford Street was narrow and shabby, with terraced Victorian houses on one side and the industrial units Chris had described on the other. It was also deserted. Chris drove along it with the windows down.
‘Can’t hear anything.’
‘Me neither.’ I was leaning forward, scanning the street for any movement. Nothing.
We passed under the railway line, the patrol car’s engine sounding twice as loud as the noise bounced off the brickwork, and Chris swung the car into a tight turn before heading back the way we’d come.
I pointed. ‘There. Outside that house, halfway down on the left. I bet that’s the informant.’
A thin middle-aged woman was standing on the pavement, her arms folded. She raised one hand once she noticed we were looking at her. Chris pulled in to the nearest empty space, which was not all that close to her. Instead of walking towards us, she stayed where she was and glowered, her lips a thin line.
‘She looks like fun.’
‘Your window is down,’ I said, barely moving my lips.
‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot. She didn’t hear me.’ Chris sighed. ‘Let’s find out what she has to say. If she’s chatty, leave her to me. You have a look around.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, surprised. He usually kept me on a short lead. Maybe two months of hard work had convinced him I could be trusted.
Or maybe Chris wasn’t all that interested in prowling around locked premises in the dark, on a wild goose chase.
As we walked towards the woman, I realised she wasn’t as old as I’d thought – thirty, maybe – but she was painfully thin and her shoulders were hunched.
‘You took your time. They’ve packed it in.’ She woman sounded hoarse, like a magpie. She had a proper South London accent, the vowels as thin as skimmed milk.
‘Who’s packed in what, love?’
‘The pair who was shouting. Why I rung you.’
Chris had told me never to assume that what came over the radio was accurate. It was garbled in transmission, more often than not. Ask, check, check again.
‘First things first. What’s your name?’
‘Sadie Grey.’
‘And where do you live, Miss Grey?’
‘Sadie,’ she said automatically. ‘Number forty-three.’
It was the house behind her. The front door was open so I could see a narrow, dark hallway with peeling wallpaper. It looked damp. A vast one-eyed tabby sat on the front window ledge. As I watched it yawned hugely and slid off the ledge into the tattered shrubs that filled the front garden.
‘All right, Sadie,’ Chris said. ‘Who was shouting?’
‘Well, a woman. And there was a man too, only he weren’t doing so much shouting but I heard him talking to her. Then it went quiet. Then she started up again and I called you, didn’t I?’
‘Where were they, this pair?’
‘I dunno.’
‘In a house?’
‘Maybe. Or in the yards. I thought it was maybe over that way. Hard to tell, with the trains and that.’ She glanced across at the industrial units, then turned her back on them.
‘Been over to check?’
‘No, I ain’t. That’s your job.’ Her eyes glittered as she felt in the pocket of her cardigan, coming up with a pack of cigarettes and her lighter. ‘Why don’t you go and look?’
‘Because I’m talking to you. Now then. Ever heard anything like it before?’
‘Never.’
‘Did it sound like any of your neighbours?’
‘Nah.’
‘Did any of your neighbours hear it?’
She pointed. ‘Forty-five is deaf. Forty-seven is full of young kids and the baby was crying so Lucia wouldn’t have heard nothing. Forty-nine’s empty. So’s forty-three. Don’t know forty-one – they’ve just moved in. Thirty-nine is too snobby to look out the window and anyway she probably ain’t come home yet. She’s never there. And thirty-seven is a perv. If he heard screaming he’d have assumed it was someone watching a porno.’
‘Do you live on your own?’
A nod.
‘So it was just you who heard it and called it in.’
She bared her teeth in what was meant to be a smile. ‘Good citizen, me.’
‘Tell me what you heard again,’ Chris said, patient as a monk.
Not hurrying, I walked away from them, crossing the road to look at the yards. The main building was a square block with tinted windows and stained brickwork, a product of the seventies. It was dark, the doors securely locked. Behind it to the left was the builder’s merchant, complete with high metal gates and spiked fencing. I shoved the gate experimentally but it didn’t budge. I headed back towards the railway bridge. Across the road, a flame flared in the gathering darkness. Sadie’s face glowed for a second, her cheeks hollowed as she inhaled.
I had my torch in my hand as I rounded the corner of the building and approached the garage. The shutters were down, the ground in front of them black with engine oil and grease. Two courtesy cars were parked opposite the garage, parallel to the building, the garage’s logo on the front doors. This side of the building wasn’t fenced off and I kept walking, the beam of the torch sweeping the ground methodically as I went. The ground was littered with bits of rubbish – old clothes, scraps of paper, a pen cap, squashed tin cans, an ancient toaster spilling its electronic entrails, mouldy bread scattered by pigeons or scraggy urban foxes or, though I tried not to think about it, rats. These scraps were the things that were always dumped in the unadopted places in a city, the definition of worthless, no good to anyone. I wasn’t surprised to see the two large bins squatted at the back of the main block, their lids padlocked. People came here to put their rubbish in the bins and, thwarted, dumped it nearby. Someone else’s problem.
Someone else’s shoe was another matter. I stepped over it, shining the torch on it briefly as I went. Black leather, a strap across the instep, a three-inch heel. I walked on.
I stopped.
I walked back.
I squatted beside the shoe and stared at it, but it took me a moment to work out what bothered me about it. The strap ended in a buckle, and it was done up.
Which meant that someone had taken it off without undoing it. And someone had thrown it away, without its pair. I shone the torch around to see if I could spot the other one, without finding anything. I stared at the one I’d found for a couple of seconds longer, then stood up. Chris would be just thrilled if I showed him. I found a shoe. I think it’s lonely.
I walked on, trying to ignore the nagging feeling that I was missing something. Training had conditioned me to expect clues in a crime scene but this wasn’t a crime scene, as far as I knew. This was just a deserted, unlovely place that would look completely different during the day. I turned my radio down so the constant hum of control room chatter was muted, trusting that Chris would tell me if there was anything I needed to know. I came to the fence that secured the back of the builder’s merchant premises and stopped, checking along it to see that it was all secure. A low whine announced a train was approaching, long before I could hear the clickety-clack of the wheels on the track and the hum of the engine. Bright rectangular windows zipped by as the train passed over the bridge, picking up speed. As the sound died away into the distance, the silence in the yards seemed to press against my ears. I stood for a moment, listening. All of my senses were on high alert, tension prickling along my arms and the back of my neck, although I couldn’t have said why. There was nothing to hear, nothing to see. Nothing to make my mouth dry. And nothing to make me shiver as if I was cold when the air was as hot and thick a
s soup.
I gave up and moved away, my boots crunching on broken glass, and it was the purest chance that I heard anything at all. It was a low sound, wordless and brief, and I thought at first it was an animal – a cat snarling, or a fox. Even so, I stopped. I stood completely still, tuning out my own breathing.
I heard it again.
I could place the direction now, over near the bins, and I was even more certain that it was an animal as I strode towards it impatiently, eager to be gone. There was nothing behind the bins or under them, though I got down on the ground to check. The bins stank with the sweetish, rancid cabbage smell of food waste in high summer. There was a pool of something on the ground, a kind of horror soup with little bits of raw meat and more glass mixed in with it from a broken beer bottle. The neck of it had survived with an inch or two of the bottle, I saw. It glinted under one of the bins. I wiped my hands on my uniform trousers as I got to my feet, feeling dirty as well as too hot. Back to Chris, to report that I had found nothing. And at the end of my shift, a long cool shower. There were clean sheets on my bed, too. It would be bliss to lie down, to sleep. To let the day slip through my fingers like water until it was time to get back in my uniform and start all over again.
When the beam of my torch passed over the missing shoe, where it stuck out behind one of the parked cars, it took me a moment to realise what I was looking at.
It took me even longer to realise that inside the shoe was a foot.
I wasn’t aware of moving but I must have run because the next second I was crouching as near to her as I could get. She was in the narrow space between the car and the wall, lying on her side, huddled with her knees up to her chest. I could tell she was alive because I could hear her breath rasping through her throat, but I couldn’t reach far enough in to check her pulse. Her dark hair hung down over her face. Her nails were painted pale pink. She wore a red skirt and a pale yellow top that was ripped down the middle from collar to hem. One shoe on, one shoe in the middle of the yard. No handbag. No watch. No bra. Blood on her skin. Blood in her hair.