by GS Rhodes
“I was off for six months, I wasn’t meant to do anything police-related or police adjacent. I was supposed to be de-stressing.”
“Well, you’ve stressed me out, so maybe we should trade places,” Zoe growled, starting the engine and speeding off into the night.
They’d not spent a huge amount of time at Colin’s house, but the nights drew in pretty quickly in the winter and it was already dark. But it was only as they were driving, that Kidd realised they weren’t going back to the station.
“Wrong turning, Zoe,” Kidd said. She didn’t respond, her eyes fixed on the road, her knuckles white where they gripped the steering wheel. “Zoe?”
“I’m taking you to the hospital, you complete idiot,” she grumbled.
“What? Why?” Kidd growled. “We need to get back to the station.”
“We need to get you checked over by a doctor.”
“Zoe, I’m not—”
“Weaver left me in charge of you,” she interrupted. “And if I don’t take you to the hospital and something happens, like you pass out or don’t show up for work tomorrow, it’s my head in the smasher.”
“Zoe, it doesn’t hurt, I don’t need to—”
“You’re going and that’s the end of it,” Zoe snapped. “I don’t want to hear another word. Just try not to bleed on the car because if you do, you’re paying to have it professionally cleaned.”
Kidd opened his mouth to respond but knew it would be no use. Zoe was very much in the driver’s seat in every sense of the word. He had to do as he was told this time.
Kingston Hospital wasn’t the usual madhouse that it could be of an evening. It had taken them a little while to get there because of traffic, and by the time they got seen to, the workday was practically over, much to Kidd’s frustration. No more progress was likely to be made today.
A black male nurse took Kidd through to be checked over, making sure his nose wasn’t broken, that he wasn’t concussed. He cleaned Kidd up, getting any dried blood off his face, assessing any damage. Ben needed to put ice on it, which Zoe assured him they would do, and he needed to rest, something Kidd assured the nurse he didn’t have time for, and they left.
As they made it back to the station, it already looked a heck of a lot quieter than it had when they’d gone to Colin’s, and he anticipated the rest of the team would have been told to pack up and leave by Weaver by now. Kidd cursed the wasted time. Every second counted in a case like this, and he’d wasted precious seconds because of what happened with Warrington.
“What the bloody hell have you done to yourself?” Diane squawked from behind the front desk. “You’re back for half a day and you’re already in the wars.”
“Don’t know what I’m going to do with him, Diane,” Zoe said as she buzzed herself through the door. “Might have to lock him up myself, might be the only way to stop him bruising that pretty little face of his.”
“You need to take better care of yourself!” she called after them. “I’ve just refilled the first aid kit, there should be antiseptic wipes in there!”
“Thanks, Diane!” Kidd called back, putting his hands in his pockets, only to find his blood-soaked tie in there. “Gross,” he muttered. The whole thing wet through with blood, probably ruined. It was only a cheap tie anyhow, and no point mourning the loss of a piece of fabric. He shoved it back into his trouser pocket where his hand brushed against something solid that stabbed at his fingers.
He pulled out the small, white card that John had given him at the pub the night before.
God, was that really only last night? he thought as he fingered the delicate piece of card. It had crumpled a little at the corners, a little bit of his blood staining it, but all the information was still there, John McAdams, his phone number, email address…
“What’s that?” Zoe asked as they walked.
“Nothing,” Kidd said, crushing the card in his fist and continuing at her side.
He was about to head back to the Incident Room when Zoe grabbed him by the arm and dragged him into the canteen. Canteen was a little bit generous. It was a room with a couple of kettles and a couple of microwaves in it, definitely not a canteen and more of a staff room. There were some sofas dotted about and a couple of tables and chairs where people could eat if they weren’t eating at their desk, which was pretty rare.
“We’ve got work to do,” Kidd grumbled as Zoe sat him down on one of the chairs. “I don’t have time to—”
“You still have dried blood on your face, Kidd,” Zoe interrupted as she headed to the cupboard and pulled out the first aid kit Diane had told them about. She turned back to look at him. “And a cut on your nose. You’re not walking back into that Incident Room and making DC Powell piss himself because you look like you’ve been a victim of a violent attack.”
Kidd stifled a laugh and sat back in the chair. There was no arguing with Zoe Sanchez, that much was for sure. She brought over the antiseptic wipe and dumped something heavy and covered in ice in front of him.
“What on earth is that?”
Zoe shrugged. “Frozen Mac and Cheese.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Zoe snorted. “Good thing. It went out of date six months ago,” she said. “When you’ve got yourself cleaned up, you should put it on your nose. For the swelling.”
Kidd raised an eyebrow at her.
Zoe shrugged. “The nurse said ice, this is the best I can do unless you just want to stick your whole face in the freezer.“
Kidd took out his phone, using the front-facing camera to clean up. He really did look a sight even after what the nurse had managed to do for him. At least his nose wasn’t broken. He cleaned the rest of the blood off his face and stared at himself. He didn’t look quite as exhausted as he felt, so there was that at least.
“You look fine, Ben,” Zoe grumbled. “Put the cold thing on your face now please.”
“It feels fine, Doctor Sanchez.”
“Just do it.” She groaned. “I’ve had enough of fighting with you today, just put the ready meal on your face, the bruising is already coming through. It will just help.”
Kidd grumbled and leant forward on the table, pressing the ready meal on his nose. He winced at the contact. Zoe scoffed.
“Doesn’t hurt, my arse,” she said, which made Kidd smile. “So, what the hell happened?” she asked. “I tell you not to do something daft, you chase Joe Warrington down the street, next thing I know you’re crumpled on the ground with a nose bleed.”
Kidd groaned and shook his head. “I grabbed his arm to arrest him, started saying the old spiel, then Joe swung back and cracked me in the nose with his elbow.”
“Christ.”
“I know,” Kidd grumbled. “Should have grabbed both hands.”
“Probably.”
“Couldn’t catch him,” Kidd said. “He might look like a stick but he can motor when he needs to, lucky for him. I wasn’t fit enough to keep up. All that running still hasn’t done me much good.”
“If you’re about to go off on one about not being as young as you used to be, I swear I’ll elbow you in the nose, and I’ll actually finish the job and break it,” Zoe said, looking Kidd dead in the eyes. She was kidding, trying to lighten the mood. “You’re out of practice. It happens to the best of us.”
“But he got away,” Kidd said, taking the ready meal off his face. Zoe signalled for him to return it to his nose immediately, which he begrudgingly did. Another wince. “Who knows what he could be doing right now.”
“Probably hiding somewhere because you’ve scared the shit out of him,” Zoe said, taking a breath. “It’s fine, Kidd, misses happen.”
“Yes, they do, but what if Joe is the guy we’re looking for?”
“Then we’ll find him.”
Kidd growled. “It’s not that simple,” he said. “We don’t have a whole lot to go on, and if Joe is the guy we’re looking for then he could be planning his next attack.” He sighed and took the ready meal off his face, looking Zoe in the eyes
. “The sooner we get that list from Belmarsh the better, that might give us someone else to go on.”
“You say we’ve not got a lot to go on, Ben, but we have leads,” Zoe said. “Don’t look at me like that. We’ve managed to do a heck of a lot considering you’ve been on the case for one day. We’re looking for the CCTV of the creepy old park ranger, we’ve got information from the people who found the body in the first place, and we have a potential suspect in Joe Warrington. It’s been productive, Kidd, you’ve got to stop killing yourself about this.”
When Zoe put it like that, it certainly sounded like more. There were leads, just nothing concrete. Then again, it had only been one day. He was just worried. The longer they left it, the less information they had, the more likely they were to find another body. And Kidd didn’t want that on his conscience, not again.
“We need to keep an eye on Colin,” Kidd said. “I don’t like those reporters camping outside his house. I don’t want him to do anything stupid.”
“Are you counting him out?” Zoe asked.
Kidd shook his head. “Not entirely. It doesn’t seem likely at this point, but I have to keep him as a suspect just in case he’s managing to pull the wool over our eyes just like his father used to.”
“And what about Joe?”
Kidd took a breath. “I saw the lad and I jumped,” Kidd said. “It might be him, it feels like it could be, considering the level of interest he had in Colin and the original case, but that’s not enough to convict him.”
“So, you want to arrest him?”
Kidd nodded. “We’ll arrest him tomorrow. I’ll brief the team on everything that’s happened, and if Weaver thinks it’s the right call, we’ll arrest him. Who knows what else might have come up while we were out.”
They stayed there for a moment longer, Kidd resting the ready meal on his nose until all it felt like it was doing was making his face wet. He sighed and sank into his chair.
“What?” Zoe said.
“Just exhausted,” he said. “It’s been a day. I’m not used to doing all this anymore. Six months off and I’m screwed.”
“Going out for drinks with your sister last night probably didn’t help that, huh?” Zoe said.
Kidd chuckled. “That honestly feels like a decade ago.”
Zoe stood up. “You done with that ready meal?”
“Yeah, why? You hungry?”
“Gross, throw it out,” she said. “And let’s get out of here.”
“But the case—”
“Will still be here in the morning,” Zoe interrupted. “Everybody else has gone home, I checked with Weaver while you were lusting after the nurse. He wants you here bright and early tomorrow morning so we can keep going.”
Kidd sighed. He wanted to keep going. Even if he wasn’t onto something right now, it was much better to feel like you’re doing something rather than twiddling your thumbs. But Zoe wouldn’t let him stay, that much he knew.
“Alright then,” Kidd conceded. “An early night for me it is.”
Zoe laughed. “No, I don’t think so, You owe me a drink.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Kidd failed to see quite how he owed Zoe a drink. She reasoned that she’d taken him to hospital and taken care of him while he was wounded. Kidd, on the other hand, thought that was bullshit.
“Okay, how about the fact that you disappeared off the face of the earth for six months and ignored all of my calls?” she asked. And that was enough to make Kidd shut his mouth and walk to the pub with her.
They found a quiet table in a corner, away from the dirty old men who seemed to basically live there—Kidd was sure he’d seen at least half of them there last night—and the prying eyes of any onlookers. Kidd’s face wasn’t looking great, bruises in full bloom where Joe’s elbow had connected. It hurt to breathe, which couldn’t be a good sign.
Kidd bought the first round along with a couple of plates of chips to share, hoping that might placate Zoe and at least go some way to making up for the fact he had gone totally AWOL and then proceeded to act like a dick on his first day back.
“Do you reckon it was Warrington?” Kidd asked eventually, having to raise his voice over the din.
Zoe shook her head.
“You don’t?”
“No, that wasn’t my answer,” Zoe said. “That was me shaking my head to us spending the whole day working only to spend the whole evening talking about work.” She took a sip of her pint and seemed to relax into her chair almost instantly. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Doesn’t it stay in your head though?” Kidd asked. “Something like this is so… I don’t know, it’s not exactly ordinary. I can’t get it out of my head.”
“Well, Kylie Minogue,” Zoe said with a lazy smile. “That would be why you got signed off for six months because of stress and I stayed in the job.”
“Harsh.”
“But true,” she said. “You have to learn to let go. You’ve got to leave the job behind when the door closes, otherwise, you’ll just be sending yourself into an early grave.”
Kidd shrugged. “Old habits die hard.”
“And you’ll die harder if you’re not careful,” she said. “Life is stressful enough without carrying the weight of your work around with you too.”
Kidd took a sip of his drink, knowing in his heart of hearts that she was right. It was what Liz had been telling him just yesterday, and he would need to take it on board before it ended up killing him. How many sleepless nights had he had since he joined the Met? How many more could his body take?
“You don’t want to talk about work, what do you want to talk about?” Kidd asked. “How are things with you? You still with that fella…” he trailed off, scrabbling for the name.
“Mark?” Zoe winced. “No. He broke up with me a couple of months back.”
“Oh shit, I’m sorry, Zoe, I didn’t know.”
“You would have if you’d picked up your phone,” she said with a wink. “I’m not too cut up about it now. I was then, we’d been together for over a year.”
‘Did you think he was the one?”
Zoe shook her head. “I think I knew he wasn’t right for me. It was just easier to ignore it and have somebody, than be alone.”
“Oh, you want to talk about being alone? I know an awful lot about being alone.” Kidd laughed. “But I’m sorry it didn’t work out. That sucks. And I’m sorry I vanished for so long. I think…” he trailed off, finding his bearings. “I think I needed to vanish a little bit, get away from it all.”
“I understand that.”
“I just felt like the best way to do that was to cut myself off from it entirely,” he said. “Not see anybody, not talk to anybody remotely attached to the job.”
“Now, I don’t understand that so much,” Zoe said. “I’m your friend, Ben. Friends first, colleagues second. I wouldn’t want to sit around with you and talk about work the whole time we were together, that would be boring as shit. I just wanted to know how you were, how you were getting on being off work. Friend shit, not work shit.”
“Okay,” Kidd said. “I’m sorry. It was just my way of coping.”
“And how did that work out for you?” Zoe asked.
Kidd sighed. “Terribly. I spent most of the time trying to distract myself by reading or watching TV, running or going to the gym, all things that failed. Except the running, I got into running.”
“Still can’t catch up to a young man though.”
“Wow, alright, a bit too soon, you can see the bruise on my face but the one on my ego is way bigger!” Kidd said with a smile. “And the rest of it was just… empty days I guess. I saw a lot of really nice places around the area, I took a solo trip out to Germany for a while, I saw a fair bit of Liz and the kids but…”
“But you were thinking about work the whole time?” Zoe suggested. Kidd shook his head. “Craig, then.”
And there was the kicker. So many people knew about Craig, he’d been such a huge pa
rt of Kidd’s life, he came up way more often in conversation than he would have liked. But talking about it with Zoe was different. As she’d already said, they were friends first, colleagues second. He could bring down that guard a little with her. At least, he felt like he could.
“Are you still looking for him?” Zoe asked.
Kidd shrugged. “On and off. The trip to Germany was retracing our steps a little bit from our holiday there.”
“Why?”
“To torture myself, I think?” Kidd laughed. He didn't want to tell her everything that had happened in Germany. That he didn't only retrace their steps but went to city after city looking for him, falling into all sorts of trouble that would certainly make her look at him differently. He didn't want to dwell on it if he could help it. He shook his head and looked up at her. “Or maybe just to remember the last time we were both truly happy. That’s probably what it is.”
“Oh, Ben—”
“I know, I know, it’s pathetic.”
“It’s not pathetic,” Zoe said. “If he knew you were looking for him—”
“He’d probably call me pathetic,” Kidd interrupted. He knew he would. Craig was like that. “It’s been two years.”
“Do you think he’s…? I don’t know how to ask this, Ben.”
“Do I think he’s still alive?” Kidd finished. Zoe nodded.
Kidd never knew the answer to that question. There were times when he thought that Craig was alive, like he would know somehow if he was really gone for good. It was what kept him looking, checking missing persons reports to see if anything had shown up. It was what made him go to Germany. It was what made him talk to anyone who would listen, and even to people who wouldn't. But there were other times when he thought he had to be dead. Because if he was alive, why the hell wouldn’t he come back? That was a door Kidd didn’t want to open.
“I want to believe that he’s alive,” Kidd said. “But believing he’s alive means accepting the fact that he doesn’t want me to find him. Probably.”
“So will you just keep on looking?”
Kidd shrugged. “Maybe. The trail is ice cold, frozen over, but I still hold out hope that he’ll just walk back into my life one day.”
