Cath Staincliffe - Bleed Like Me

‘How?’ She looked astonished, as though Gill had suggested something improper.

‘You can tell us about the family, about Owen and Pamela. It may help us know where to look.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. She put her cup down, her hand shaking, spilling some tea over the edge. ‘Can we go?’ she said, her mouth twisting and twitching. ‘Please can we go now?’

Gill smiled and got to her feet, shared a swift glance with Julia, knowing how bloody heartbreaking the next half-hour would be.

With a dignity that was painful and humbling to witness, Margaret Milne solemnly identified her forty-year-old daughter Pamela, her eleven-year-old granddaughter Penny, and her twenty-nine-year-old son Michael. She stood in the viewing room facing the window, tears coursing silently down her face. Then she turned to Julia and asked when she would be allowed to touch them.

‘We have to wait for the coroner to release the bodies,’ Julia said quietly. ‘It may take some time. The defence have the right to request an independent post-mortem, you see.’

The woman nodded her understanding but held her arms out, fingers opening and closing around empty air. Gill knew that powerful urge, had seen it before, the desire to clasp the person, to hold them close. She had witnessed it at murder scenes where a relative or sometimes even the culprit clung to the victim, raining kisses on them, rocking them, willing them back to life. At road traffic accidents where parents cradled shattered children or drivers held hands with their lifeless passenger. And when she had accompanied the bereaved to funeral parlours and seen them stroke their loved one’s hair or cheek. A tactile way of understanding that the person was dead and gone. That the essence of them wasn’t there any more. Their heat and vitality and spirit had departed.

‘Do you need a moment?’ Gill asked, eager to get Margaret back to the station, to move things forward, aware of time passing from the metronome ticking in her pulse. For somewhere out there were Cottam and his children, at grave risk of death.

Margaret Milne turned to face her, slowly wiped her cheeks with her fingers and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said numbly.

Gill dipped her head and turned and led them out of the mortuary into the bright of the day.

‘But won’t it be weird for you?’ Rachel said, cramming half a sausage roll into her mouth and swallowing before she continued, ‘me being a sergeant and you still a DC?’ Snatching a break at the station before their respective interviews. A snack at their desks. She hadn’t had breakfast earlier, couldn’t face it, so had spent all morning with her stomach feeling as if her throat had been cut. An image of Michael Milne flashed into her mind. The napkin of blood across his chest. And the sickening powerlessness as Nick stooped over her in the dream, slid the knife under her throat.

‘Why should I?’ Janet said, ‘Gill’s my boss, our boss, several rungs up, and I can handle that.’

‘Yes, but-’

‘What?’ said Janet.

‘She’s your age.’

‘Ancient, you mean?’

Rachel rolled her eyes. ‘And she’s years of experience. But me-’

‘Elbowing us oldies out, queue jumping,’ Janet tutted, ‘all mouth and attitude, still wet behind the ears.’

Rachel grinned. ‘Something like that.’ She ate the rest of her snack.

Janet took a drink. ‘You’ll be a good sergeant, I’m a great DC. No problem.’

Then Rachel thought of the trial, and Mr dickhead barrister Nick Savage, and everything went cold and hard again.

‘What?’ Janet said.

Rachel sighed, about to speak, but Kevin came through then, his arms full of exhibits from the crime scene. Everything to be logged and kept safe. ‘Skiving again?’ Kevin said as he drew close. Rachel considered sticking out her foot, tripping him arse over elbow, serve the snidey little tosser right, but that might damage the exhibits and it’d be her in trouble, never mind the risk to the case.

‘Pencil first, Kevin,’ she said, ‘then you can rub out all your mistakes.’

‘Comedian,’ he sneered.

Once he was out of earshot, Rachel glanced up at Janet, who was still patently waiting for an explanation. Rachel pressed her fingertips on to the crumbs of pastry on the paper bag. ‘It’s just… when we go to trial, Nick – he could take me down with him, Janet. I’d lose my job. My warrant card.’ The prospect of that, like a bloody great pit, waiting to swallow her. She had always known it would come to this, something like this, no matter how far she’d come, run, from her shitty life and her scrappy family, no matter how much she studied and trained, no matter the hours or the commitment or the fact that this was all she had ever, ever wanted; sooner or later she knew she’d be found out, failed, chucked out. End up on a bench in the precinct with a can of cheap cider, spouting crap like her miserable excuse for a father. Or missing presumed couldn’t-give-a-fuck like her mother, who swanned off when three kids and a feckless feller got too much for her.

‘It’s an offence, perjury,’ Rachel said. ‘I could get sent down.’ Join her sad-sack little brother who was behind bars for armed robbery. Some irony there, given she’d not exchanged a word with him since he was caught. Janet didn’t know about that, about Dom or her mum and dad, but she knew about the perjury.

Janet said, ‘Look, I grant you, he’s a nasty piece of work, and I told you-’

‘You told me,’ Rachel echoed bitterly.

‘But he is charged with attempted murder, with trying to kill you, and if he even mentions that it’ll backfire because it’ll show Nick was colouring outside the lines. Using you to get confidential information that he’d then manipulate to try and get his slimy client off.’

One professional to another, that’s how Rachel had seen it. What’s said in the bedroom stays in the bedroom. She’d told him of her elation at nicking notorious crime lord Carl Norris and the jibe she’d made as she put Norris in the custody suite: ‘Who’s laughing now, pretty boy?’ But Nick broke the rules. Months later, the relationship in tatters, Rachel had been summoned to give evidence as arresting officer at Norris’s trial. And was horrified to discover Nick acting as Norris’s barrister. Cross-examining her, Nick sought to undermine the basis for the arrest and flung the phrase back at her in court. Which she then denied. Lying under oath. A stick to beat her with. And Norris walked.

But when Rachel found out, just by chance, that Nick had been shagging one of the jurors during that trial, she’d some leverage of her own. By then, though, Nick had turned over a new leaf, she’d given him a second chance (maybe third – she wasn’t counting). All seemed hunky-dory until she was nearly mown down.

‘The evidence against him is overwhelming.’ Janet’s blue eyes beaming intelligence, reassurance, at her.

The tape recording. Rachel’s stomach turned over at the thought of it again. Nick Savage in a car with big-shot career criminal Carl Norris. Nick oh so carefully explaining how Rachel might be a ‘problem’ seeing as she’d found out Nick was screwing a juror during the trial where Nick was defending Carl Norris. And clever-dick Norris oh so carefully taping the whole conversation. For the police.

‘Chop chop!’ Gill swept in, clapped her hands together.

‘Any more on the ANPR?’ Janet asked.

‘Not as yet.’

‘His phone?’ said Rachel.

‘Not using it. Not switched on, our telecoms reckon. Update at the briefing.’

Sod Nick Savage. Maybe Janet was right and he wouldn’t derail her career. He’d go to trial and get found guilty and spend the next ten to fifteen years banged up with a load of low-lifers, bored out of his skull or too anxious to sleep. Posh boy like Nick wouldn’t exactly be one of the lads inside, and without Carl Norris watching his back he’d be fair game.