33

Lizzie left her car in the yard. She wasn’t really supposed to do that, but on nights, no one was likely to check. She walked to the shopping centre and bought a pregnancy test. Back in the nick, in the ladies’ toilets, she unwrapped the packaging. Sitting on the loo with her pants down, she read the instructions. It was more awkward than she’d imagined, holding the stick under the stream of her wee. She should have waited until she got home. But there was this impatience to be let off the hook. It would be good news and she could stop worrying. And if it wasn’t good news, well then, she could deal with it. The sooner the better.

She’d imagined it would take ages, but no, bang, there they were: two lines. Undramatic but clear.

She stared at the lines as though that would make them go away. Perhaps they didn’t mean what she thought they did. Or perhaps she had done the test incorrectly. She read the instructions again, checked and double-checked, looked at the stick and the two lines.

She stared for a while at the toilet door.

Someone used the cubicle beside her. She heard the tinkle of wee. Whoever it was washed her hands and left.

Lizzie hadn’t even realized she was still sitting there with her pants down. She bagged up the kit in the paper bag the chemist had given her. She threw it in the waste bin, washed her hands. She told herself to be practical.

She couldn’t tell anyone, certainly couldn’t tell Ash – she’d be immediately signed off front-line duties. She went upstairs, ate the cheddar and Branston pickle sandwich her mother had made for her.

The night duty began.

First off, Lizzie administered a caution for a common assault as a favour to another officer who wanted to go off duty. Only an hour in, they got their first call-out. An old boy – shirtsleeves, black trousers, brown checked slippers – lying on his back in his sitting room, stiff as a board. His arms were bent at the elbow and raised above his head, and the look on his face seemed to suggest the arrival of death had completely astonished him. The two uniformed officers stood back from the corpse as if denying it had anything to do with them. On the sideboard was an analogue transistor radio. Dishes dried on a rack on the sink’s stainless-steel drainer. On the arm of the sofa an open Len Deighton.

Ash said, ‘Doesn’t look like that bad a way to go.’

Lizzie turned to the uniformed officers. ‘Those windows?’

The younger officer, whose dark hair was gelled up into a ridge above his head, looked shamefaced. ‘Sorry, yes, we opened them. The smell, you know.’

So it continued. They moved from call to call. At midnight there was a rapid chain of burglaries. They listened over the radio as the suspect – as manic as a gerbil on a wheel – was detained after a chase across the roofs of a terrace. Relatively speaking, it was an easy job: it was too late to take statements and the suspect had been admitted to hospital, off his face on crack cocaine.

They entered the dead part of the night. The street outside the station was deserted and transmissions on the radio became infrequent. Lizzie thought of that plastic stick with its two lines in the bin in the ladies’ toilet. No one needed to know, not even Kieran.

One of the station mice, emboldened by the stillness of the office, came out onto the carpet and crouched in plain sight, twitching its nose. Ash shook his head in wonderment. ‘Look at the bloody nerve on him.’

They wrote up the Overnight Occurrence Book, put their takeaways in the microwave and crossed their fingers hard that there’d be no more calls.

At 0530 hours, the CID mobile rang again. It was the duty inspector informing them of an allegation of rape in a nightclub.

Ash rubbed his face wearily. ‘The timing couldn’t be worse.’

They drove to the scene: a busy nightclub open into the early hours. Three empty marked cars were parked up. Lizzie and Ash – the same age as the young people who filled the streets around the club, staggering about, smoking and talking – walked through the crowds and made themselves known at the door. They were ushered through.

The girl had reported that she’d been assaulted in the toilets. Security – blokes with arms like hams and wearing lanyards and earpieces – were waiting for Ash and Lizzie in a cramped exterior space beneath a metal staircase. They looked embarrassed and out of their depth. The girl was in the security room, up the staircase, sitting on a shabby sofa that was crammed in against the back wall. She looked about sixteen, wore leather shorts and blue cotton braces over a T-shirt that bore big red embroidered lips. On her legs were laddered tights, on her feet unlaced purple Doc Martens. She was drunk and crying. She begged to be allowed to smoke, and Lizzie knelt in front of her and explained she couldn’t smoke, not just yet.

Lizzie switched off her mobile – she didn’t want to be interrupted by a personal call right now – and guided the girl through the Early Evidence Kit. Here it was: sex reduced to bodily fluids and chemicals. A swab around the mouth and teeth. The girl sitting on the dirty loo and weeing. Lizzie carefully putting the toilet paper, the urine sample into bags. All the way through the girl cried and Lizzie tried to reassure her. No, being drunk didn’t mean she wouldn’t be believed. Was there anyone she’d like to call? She bagged up the girl’s pants and tights, her leather shorts, her T-shirt with the embroidered kiss. A female uniformed constable put her head round the door and held out the standard-issue white T-shirt and cotton bottoms wrapped in cellophane, the flat black pumps that always made Lizzie think of jumping over a wooden box in the school sports hall. The girl said she’d taken some E and wept some more. The specialist sexual offences officer arrived about an hour later, a tall guy in jeans and checked shirt with a shaved head. Professional and friendly, he took the girl off for the full medical examination and statement, hugging the evidence bags to him.

It was already past their rostered duty by the time they got back to the nick. They worked silently and with concentration. Lizzie glanced at her watch. If she was lucky, she could still miss the morning traffic and be in bed not long after eight.