Chapter Eighteen

 
 
 

“Whoa!” Janelle blew a pink bubble of admiration and popped it on her nose. “That’s proper manky.”

Sam poked a cautious finger at one of Rosie’s sutures. “Did a shark bite you?”

“No, love.” Rosie began to re-bandage her arm. “I cut it on a broken window.”

When he held out the Curly Wurly he’d promised as payment for a look at the wound, she snapped it into three and shared it between them. The beanbag crinkled as she inched lower, and she yawned, getting comfortable. She’d lost count of the recent nights of broken sleep, or no sleep, or sleep plagued by nightmares.

“Rosie was in a fire, you twerp,” Janelle said around a mouthful of caramel and melting chocolate. “Mam’s kept all the cuttings from the papers.”

Sam sniffed and then wiped his nose on his school shirt, already distracted by something on his tablet. “I wish it’d been a shark.”

Janelle bum-shuffled across the carpet until she was sitting between Rosie’s legs. Resting her head on Rosie’s chest, she patted Rosie’s bad hand.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

Rosie kissed her dark curls. “No, not really.”

“Only, you look dead sad.”

“I do?” Rosie had called at her mam’s for breakfast before her shift, unsure whether she wanted company but resolved to get on with things. Her determined bonhomie had fooled her mam, but Janelle had always been the one to see through Rosie’s bullshit. As a child, she’d spotted medicine concealed in yoghurt, refused to believe that the tune on the ice cream van meant it had run out of ice cream, and lain in wait for “Father Christmas” with a torch and an ancient Instamatic. The photo of Rosie drunkenly sorting presents into stockings was still pinned above Janelle’s bed.

“Yeah, your eyes aren’t smiling,” Janelle said. “And you didn’t eat your sausages, so I know something’s up.”

“Nothing gets past you, Sherlock, does it?” Rosie sighed. “Okay, okay. You know Jem, the paramedic who was in the fire with me?”

“Yup. Mam said you stayed with her in the hospital.”

“I did.” Rosie hesitated, unsure how to phrase this. “Well, we were getting to be really good friends, but then she decided she didn’t want to be friends any more.”

Janelle turned onto her front, propping her chin on both hands and studying Rosie with a mildly unnerving intensity. “When you say ‘good friends,’ do you mean girlfriends?” she asked.

Rosie nodded, refusing to look away. “Yes, I mean girlfriends.”

“Ooh, have you got a girlfriend, Rosie?” Sam yelled from across the room.

“Oi! Shut it!” Janelle yelled back. “We’re having an intervention.”

“An inter—where the blazes do you learn these things?” Rosie asked.

“Telly, mostly,” Janelle said. “Is Jem off work today?”

“I think so, but I’m not.”

Janelle made a point of checking her watch. “You’ve got plenty of time to drop by her house on the way in.”

Her nonchalance made Rosie laugh. “You make it sound so easy.”

Janelle punched Rosie’s thigh, a sign of affection that had endured since toddlerhood. “Text me and let me know how you get on,” she said, and proceeded to roll Rosie off the beanbag.

Rosie’s mam waylaid her before she could open the front door, pressing a tinfoil parcel into her hands and kissing her cheek.

“Have that for your lunch,” she said. The subtle arch of her eyebrow told Rosie she hadn’t been fooled after all. “Make up for the breakfast you hardly touched.”

“Thanks, Mam.”

Rosie didn’t say anything else. She couldn’t. She gave her mam a hug and hurried through the rain toward her car. Convinced the last thing Jem needed was a predawn wake-up call, she defied Janelle’s edict and drove straight to work, where she walked into a mess room abuzz with anticipation. Kash grabbed her by the shoulders as soon as he saw her, spinning her around and marching her to her locker.

“Come on, come on, we’re going in five minutes,” he said.

She started to change into her uniform, heedless of the crowd. “Going where?”

“Major Crimes got an ID on a bloke spotted with Kyle Parker not long before the kid turned up dead. He was caught on CCTV. A clip was shown on the news this morning, but they put it up on the Facebook page overnight and hit the jackpot within a couple of hours.”

“Crikey,” she said. She hadn’t told him about the footage Steph had shown her, but she assumed this was the same bloke. The tape obviously hadn’t remained a Major Crimes exclusive for very long. “What’s our part in it all?”

Kash held his nose with one hand and set her boots by her feet with the other. “Tactical Aid are making the arrest. Steph wants us there for crowd control and fingertip once the dust has settled.”

“Where are we heading?”

“Cedar Road, Heaton Chapel. Looking on Street View, it’s proper leafy suburbia, all tree-lined pavements and double-parked cars. By the time we get there, the school run will be in full swing, hence the crowd control.”

She paused halfway through fastening her laces. “Is Steph sure he’ll be in?”

“An unmarked car parked by the address says yes. If he leaves for work in the meantime, Tactical Aid will grab him on the fly.”

“Excellent,” she said, thrilled with the break in the case and at having a task to keep her busy.

Kash fell in step with her as they walked to the door. “It certainly has potential. Speaking of which, did you get in touch with Jem?”

“No, not yet.” She raised a hand, forestalling any rebuke. “Don’t frown, it doesn’t become you. I’m going to phone her later. She won’t be in work today, and I don’t want to wake her, that’s all.”

“Fair enough,” he said. They had worked together for almost three years, and he had sound instincts when it came to subjects best left alone. “Come on, Smiffy promised to save us a seat.”

The trip across Manchester to Stockport was a white-knuckle ride, dodging buses, half-asleep commuters, and suicidal cyclists. Rosie tracked the van’s progress on her phone, following a stuttering red arrow through Longsight and Levenshulme as shops began to open and locals with jobs in the city crammed into bus shelters to avoid the unpredictable downpours. The driver extinguished the lights and sirens as he left the main road and began to weave through residential streets, the outlying scruffy redbrick terraces giving way to semi-detacheds with well-tended gardens and fancier cars.

“Next right,” Rosie told Kash, and seconds later, the van slowed to make the turn. The Tactical Aid Unit were already waiting, their presence at the arrest probably overkill but intended to send a message to the perps who hadn’t yet been found, to Bill and Nancy and Fagin, but primarily to the person who had set fire to a house, trapping four people inside it.

“You okay?” Kash asked in an undertone, as the van pulled into a parking spot at the far end of Cedar and their sarge began his briefing.

“Yeah,” she said. She’d fastened her stab vest too tight, and the shirt below was damp and clinging to her. “I’m fine.”

“Smiffy, Topper, and Jonas, block off from number nine,” their sarge was saying at the front of the van. “I don’t want anyone getting past you until this bloke’s out. Rosie, Kash, and Lem, block from one. That’s the school end, so you might have your hands full.”

“Bollocks,” Kash said, and Rosie widened the view on her phone to show the academy two streets away.

“Cheer up, mate. Where’s your sense of adventure?” she said, very much in the mood to brawl with a bunch of gobby schoolkids.

He flipped her the bird and then grabbed his seat as the van doors slammed behind Smiffy and his crew, and the driver made a hasty U-turn to drop off the remaining officers without driving past the perp’s house. When the van stopped again, Rosie jumped out first, gauging the progress of the TAU and bagging a prime spot from where she could watch the action and head off any potential troublemakers. Their presence was instantly noted by a group of uniformed teens toting rucksacks and cans of energy drinks. The lads crowded forward en masse, prompting Rosie to unbuckle her baton.

“That’s as far as you go,” she said.

The tallest of them—acne-riddled and stinking of weed—placed a deliberate boot over her imaginary line. “Free country, innit?” he said.

“It will be in approximately…” she checked her watch. There was no set timetable for the arrest, but it made her look official. “…ten minutes. Until then, you don’t come past this point.”

He took another step, egged on by three sniggering mates, two of whom had their mobiles out.

“You’re being recorded,” she said.

“Yeah, I know.” He grinned and gave a little wave to the phones.

She tapped the camera on her vest. “This one’s admissible in court, pal.”

He shrugged, but the gesture lacked his earlier bravado. “Be a load of shite anyway. Five-O arresting some poor fuck who’s done nowt wrong, as usual.” He shoved the smallest lad, causing him to stumble, and then glared at Rosie. “What? You gonna do me for assault?”

“Not today,” she said, her tone leaving him in no doubt as to what she saw in his future.

“Yeah, whatever. Fuck off,” he said, and led his posse back the way they’d come.

Kash watched them wander out of earshot. “I’m so glad my three are still nonverbal or at the ‘daddy, need go wee-wee’ stage,” he said, opening a packet of gum and offering one to Rosie.

She chuckled but then sobered as she heard the sound of boots pounding toward them. “Aye up. Here we go.”

Three houses down, the TAU lead hammered on the front door, his team poised around him. “Police! Open up!” he yelled, and Rosie saw a succession of nearby curtains start to twitch. The neighbour at number one came out in his dressing gown, his legs bare and a copy of the Daily Telegraph clutched beneath his arm.

“What on earth is going on?” he demanded.

“Sir, please go back inside,” Kash said.

“Is that Adrian’s house? Why are you at Adrian’s house?”

“Sir, please go back inside,” Kash repeated, emphasising his request by barricading the garden gate and unfastening his CS gas.

The TAU had charged into number five, their shouts of “Clear!” muffled by a woman yelling and the cries of children.

“Shit,” Rosie said. “He’s got kids.”

“He’s got two,” the neighbour said. “Eleven and fifteen. You can’t seriously be arresting him.”

As if to prove the neighbour wrong, the TAU sarge marched down the garden path with the man Rosie had last seen buying vodka and chocolate for a fourteen-year-old boy. Apparently dressed for work, he was wearing a smart grey suit, but his head was bowed and his hands were cuffed behind him. A woman ran after him, her slippers slapping the paving stones and her nightie flying up around her thighs.

“He didn’t do it!” she shrieked. “He didn’t do anything wrong! That boy asked him for sweets, that’s all!”

Rosie snapped around to look at Kash, who seemed just as appalled. “Did she fucking know?” she said.

Kash shook his head, stunned. “Perhaps she saw it on the BBC.”

“And what, they decided to sit there and wait for the knock on the door?”

“Maybe not,” he said as a TAU officer carried a holdall through the porch and handed his sarge what appeared to be a passport.

“Bloody hell.” Rosie absently yanked a schoolkid to a standstill by the scruff of his neck. “I guess that’s just pissed all over his chances of getting bail.”