Cath Staincliffe: Dead To Me

Gill took her glasses from her case, set them down and stared at Janet for a moment, then slapped her palms on her desk. ‘She stays with you. That’s how I want it.’

‘Gill,’ Janet groaned.

‘End of.’ Gill held up her hands, brooking no further discussion.

‘Six weeks,’ Janet tried. ‘If I still feel the same…’

‘We’ll see.’

‘We’ll see!’ Janet mocked, laughing. ‘We’ll see? That’s what I say to the girls: “We’ll see.” It usually means, No, but I haven’t got the energy to argue with you now .’

‘You’ll be good for her.’ Gill slid her glasses on and began to open files on her computer.

‘Sounds like a parasitic relationship,’ Janet said.

‘Symbiotic – she’ll bring a bit of life into the place, shake the dust off.’

‘What are you saying?’ Was Gill implying she’d grown stale?

At that point, Rachel strode back into the outer room, distracted but altering her demeanour, straightening her spine, as she caught sight of Gill through the glass.

‘Welcome,’ Gill shouted, waved a hand but didn’t get to her feet. ‘Team meeting in ten. Pack drill then.’

Rachel nodded. ‘Great.’ She sat back at her desk.

Janet waited for a second longer, but Gill, already devouring the information on the screen, pointed a finger towards the door. Dismissed.

As Janet sat down, Rachel leaned forward and whispered, ‘What’s she like? Bit of a dragon?’ signalling with an upward flick of her eyes that she meant Gill in the office behind her.

‘Gill?’ Janet moved closer, eyes narrowing, sneaky and confidential. ‘She’s fucking brilliant!’

GILL DROVE OVER to Collyhurst, the furthest southern corner of their patch. The neighbourhood was spitting distance from Manchester city centre, nudging up to the Northern Quarter, where redevelopment had seen the decaying rag-trade warehouses converted into flats and most of the old porn shops transformed into bijou cafés and boutiques. Collyhurst was still a poor place, even with the splurge for the Commonwealth Games back in 2002 and the building of the new stadium nearby and the Velodrome. Whatever all the ‘new jobs’ were, it didn’t seem as though many of the long-term un employed in Collyhurst had got a look in. Pick a side road, any side road, and you’d soon spot the poverty. And Gill, like any copper with half a brain knew that poverty and crime were dancing partners. Plenty of families round here where thieving or domestic violence was passed on in the genes, imbibed with the baby formula and the rusks. Handy for prison visiting, though: if your nearest and dearest were doing time in Strangeways you could see the prison from the rise on Rochdale Road across the railway lines.

By the time Gill was a beat bobby, drugs had arrived, and the mad mobsters had moved in. Hard men from Salford and Eccles who saw an opportunity to make a shitload of money. The burglary and brawling of the earlier years were replaced by turf wars and outbreaks of astonishing violence by the gangsters, accompanied by a spate of muggings and petty thefts by junkies needing a fix. When Gill moved into MIT in the 1990s everyone had come to the party: gangs in Cheetham, Longsight, Moss Side, links to Birmingham and Liverpool. The bloodbath peaked in 1999, over two hundred and forty shots fired, forty-three injured, seven dead and not a witness on the face of the earth. Gill had worked a few of those. Even got a conviction or two, against all the odds. Then they set up the special squad to tackle the scourge. Developed inter-agency strategies. Things had changed since then. Quieter now, a combination of prevention programmes and good detection, a rigorous support service for vulnerable and intimidated witnesses, weapons amnesties. As recently as 2008 they’d taken a whole load of drug scumbags off the streets, seriously weakening the gangs. The drugs were still out there, the dealers still busy and the related crimes went on, but it didn’t feel quite the same lawless frontier country, Gunchester, of the 1990s.

Gill checked the address, Fairland Avenue, and took a left into the estate.

I’ve already got one teenager, Janet had complained. She wasn’t far wrong; there was something bratty about Rachel Bailey. Gill knew next to nothing about her background, but she could tell it wasn’t silver spoon and skiing holidays. Local girl, she’d a wild edge to her, something simmering beneath the cover girl looks and the shrewd expression. And she was hungry for a chance. Gill could sense that. Drinking everything in at the morning’s induction yet impatient to get on with the real work, the dirty work. Like me, Gill thought, the raw ambition.

Gill parked in the last remaining place on the pavement. The short street was cluttered with vans and cars. She got out and stood, took a moment first, considering the location. Only one route into the cul-de-sac, which forked off Gargrave Street, the main thoroughfare of the estate. Twenty houses in all, a turning circle at the far end. A gaggle of neighbours had gathered there, uniforms keeping them behind the tape. Victim’s house, second on the right from the junction, number 3A. The houses opposite would have a clear view of anyone coming and going if they were peering out of their windows. It would be getting dark soon, the CSIs were making the most of the fading light, photographing and scouring the area immediately outside the house.

She put on her protective clothes and drew up her hood. Andy Pandy, ready to go and introduce herself to the CSM.

The houses were divided into flats, separate entrances, maisonettes really. ‘It’s the downstairs flat,’ the uniform on the cordon told her as he logged her in.

Gill raised her hands, almost a surrender pose, though her palms faced her ears not forward. Looked daft. Some people chose to stuff their hands in their pockets, or laced their fingers together, got a bit sweaty in the gloves like that. All tricks to safeguard against mucking everything up by smearing fingerprints or other trace evidence: spittle, dandruff, cosmetics, snot, blood, that lurked waiting for detection and recovery. Door frames, handles – all would be examined. Gill’s very first dead body on MIT, she’d leaned against a door-jamb and got a four-star bollocking from her boss. Since then she’d used the hands-up technique; she didn’t want her hands in her pockets because she needed her hands to think, to analyse, to communicate.

‘You’re like a bloody windmill,’ Janet once told her, ‘or someone on the tote, at the races.’

One Christmas the team bought her a pair of white cotton gloves, the kind a magician wore. Gill had got very pissed at the works party and waxed lyrical about how what they did was magic of a sort. Dark magic, maybe, solving the sordid little details of the crime, turning a tragedy into an achievement.

‘For who?’ Andy had objected, winking at Janet. ‘We’ve still got a dead body. Someone’s still lost a family member.’

‘But they know how, why. And that’s all we can do for them,’ she had said, taking another swig of vodka. ‘Give them the story, the facts, the name, the face… At least we can do that.’ She had sliced at one hand with the other for emphasis, and Janet had laughed and shaken her head. ‘Without that they are in bloody limbo for ever,’ Gill said. They all knew that. Lee and Mitch had nodded, muttering in agreement.

She had drunk way too much that night; it wasn’t long after Dave had gone walkabout, and she’d ended up curled over a bog in the Ladies, with Janet holding her hair out of the way and saying, ‘Time for bed, Houdini. Got you a cab.’

Gill walked through the tiny porch on the stepping plates that had been laid down and turned ninety degrees into the narrow hallway, noting the bathroom immediately to the right. Straight ahead, a bedroom. The door ajar. Gill took in the mattress on the floor, the carpet littered with clothes and scraps of paper, cigarette papers, DVD cases, burn marks on the carpet. Someone had once attempted to redecorate the far wall either side of the window. It was painted a muddy ginger shade, reminding Gill of parkin, the cake they ate round Bonfire Night. But they’d obviously lost heart and the edge near the ceiling still showed the cream woodchip paper underneath. Gill could smell damp in the room mixing with the rank stench of stale fag ends and, peering carefully round the door, saw an area in the corner there mottled with mildew. She didn’t go in, it had yet to be examined. The next ninety-degree turn took her past a storage cupboard on the right and into the living room at the end. The smell was different here, unpleasantly metallic.