For Richer, For Poorer

by Kerry Wilkinson

  As Jessica sent everyone back to work, Izzy hung around, scraping into the bottom of the biscuit packet for a few lone crumbs. ‘How was London?’

  ‘Southern. Archie moaned the entire time.’

  Izzy nodded without looking up, still delving. ‘I heard you made a guest appearance in the early hours of the morning.’

  ‘Joy Bag nearly killed me with a frying pan.’

  ‘How come you were up so early?’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Yet you’re in a work suit, even though you didn’t have to be in today – almost as if you were wearing the same one you had on yesterday.’

  Izzy finally peered up, eyebrow raised imperceptibly. Jessica couldn’t meet her gaze because it was so clear she knew what had happened. Her other colleagues wouldn’t have seen the clues if Jessica had walked in with the word ‘stop-out’ inked onto her forehead. The signs were all there: slightly crumpled suit, wet hair because she’d showered at the station, unnecessary early morning visit . . . the fact she’d spent the whole of the previous day with Archie. And, of course, what had happened to Adam.

  The rest of them might be oblivious but not Iz.

  ‘I was just up and about early,’ Jessica replied, refusing to give anything up that she didn’t have to.

  Izzy nodded, not wanting to push things. ‘Are you staying around for long?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was going through the overnights and thought there was something that might interest you.’

  ‘I’m not here. This is a hologram.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  Izzy started to stand but Jessica sighed. ‘Go on then, what is it?’

  ‘Everyone’s favourite bankrupt – Martin Teague.’

  ‘What’s he done now?’

  Izzy held out a printout: ‘The usual. If you’re going home, DI Franks can sort it.’

  ‘Sod that – he’s such an idiot he’ll go talk to Teague and walk away having bought a half-finished rollercoaster.’

  ‘Want some company?’

  ‘I thought you were busy?’

  ‘I’m not talking about me . . .’

  Jessica drove the pool car in silence through the streets of Manchester towards the area where Hulme bordered Moss Side, not far from the city centre. DC Rowlands was similarly quiet in the passenger seat. At any point over the previous few years, he would have been making cracks about her driving while she would have been having digs about everything from his hair to his latest break-up. She could still remember the moment when she thought he’d been shot: a few seconds of utter panic in which she didn’t know how to react, where everything they had seen and done together seared through her mind. It had changed everything about their relationship – and then he, Garry Ashford and Jessica had sat in a café and he’d said the two sentences that she couldn’t forget.

  ‘What do you think they’re going to do?’ he had asked.

  Jessica hadn’t known what he meant. From her point of view, she had identified the person who’d killed a student and dumped him in a bin. She had dismissed Rowlands with barely a concern – ‘About what?’ Even when he’d spelled it out – ‘About you’ – she had thought nothing of it. Somehow, she had missed the bigger picture and then her car had blown up with Adam inside.

  Her car.

  ‘What do you think they’re going to do . . . About you?’

  Why hadn’t Jessica listened to Rowlands when it was so obvious he had a point? After figuring out who had killed that student, she’d known there was something deeper going on – and yet she hadn’t thought it could come back to her. Was it arrogance? Stupidity? Naivety?

  Since then, she had little to say to Rowlands because she couldn’t look him in the eye. Similarly, what could he say to her? They were strangers dressed up as people who had once been the best of mates.

  After spending five minutes trying to come up with something, all Jessica could offer was: ‘How are the shifts going?’

  Perhaps surprised that she’d spoken, Dave took a moment to reply: ‘Not too bad. The nights were awkward at first but you get used to it.’

  More silence.

  A minute or two later, it was Dave who tried to break it: ‘Archie’s on one today – worse than usual. He was sitting at his desk grumbling about various things and then saying how he hated working weekends, even though he’d swapped days so he could go to the United match tomorrow. He snapped at one of the girls just because she asked if he took sugar.’

  ‘It’s probably his time of the month.’

  Dave didn’t laugh and Jessica didn’t feel much better either. It felt like the end of an era. Her life had changed when she’d been promoted to detective sergeant and Jack Cole had moved up to detective inspector. Since then, Cole had quit, DI Jason Reynolds had been forced out, DC Carrie Jones had died – and now the one person who’d gone through all of that with her might as well not be there either.

  Trying to put it all to the back of her mind, Jessica pulled up outside Martin Teague’s house and double-checked the address against what she had written down.

  Archie had said that Teague now lived in the council house his wife had grown up in but this was such a far cry from a mansion with a rollercoaster that even Jessica felt a twinge of sorrow for what had happened to him, no matter how much of it was down to his own stupidity. The tight, winding road had identical houses on either side, each with a dark tiled lower half, a cream upper floor and a matching tiled roof. Everything was dull but that had nothing to do with the weather. Even from where she was standing by her car, Jessica could see two skips, three cars each with a wheel missing, a row of rusting motorbikes on someone’s driveway and a vandalised green telephone exchange box sitting next to a lamppost. On the bend, there was a row of garages with its paint peeling, cars parked outside, more scrap. If an area could be judged by the number plates on the vehicles parked nearby then there wasn’t a car made in the past seven years.

  If he hadn’t wasted all of his lottery winnings, then Martin Teague could have bought the entire street and everyone’s car and still had change from his nine point eight million.

  Dave offered the plainest of shrugs and they headed along the crumbling path to the faux-cherry wood double-glazed door of Teague’s house. Inside, a Chemical Brothers song blared to such a degree that Jessica could feel the door trembling as she reached for the bell.

  After the third ring, the music went quiet and the door finally swung inwards. A thick-set man took one look at Jessica and Dave, turned around and called ‘See ya, Mart’, and then hurried past them without another word. Behind him was a man who was instantly familiar.

  Throughout the press coverage of his rise and fall, there had been many photos taken of Martin Teague as he went from a relatively normal-looking man to a bloated, red-faced, fat-cheeked slob. Not only had he blown his cash with a whirlwind wedding on a hired island, he’d spent it on stuffing his face and drinking to excess. By the time his bankruptcy hearing was in court, he had no clothes that fitted, his suit jacket unbuttoned, thighs battling against the material of his trousers, shirt buttons close to bursting.

  Teague stood in the doorway wearing a pair of cotton trousers and a dressing gown but he had lost a lot of weight; there was an elasticity to the skin around his cheeks. The hair he’d had in court had now been shaved off and he was missing one of his front teeth.

  He knew instantly who they were: ‘What do you lot want?’

  Jessica stepped forward so he couldn’t close the door on them – well, not without smacking her first. ‘We were wondering if you fancied going halves on a scratchcard? I’ll put a pound in, you put a pound in, you do the scratching and we split everything down the middle if we win.’

  ‘What?’

  Jessica edged ahead again until she had one foot inside Teague’s hallway, making him take a step back. ‘I was thinking that if you won a few more quid, it’d stop you being such a nuisance to the rest of the community.’

 
; Without giving him an option, Jessica skipped forward, leaving just enough room for Rowlands to edge in behind her and squeeze the door closed. Teague seemed so surprised at her audacity that he didn’t point out the fact he hadn’t invited her in.

  He scratched his head, thick wrinkles appearing as he did so. ‘Oh aye, someone been on the blower moaning again, have they? Who was it this time – that bitch next door?’

  ‘Where’s the kettle?’

  ‘What?’

  Jessica pointed a thumb over her shoulder. ‘I’m milk no sugar and so’s he. The quicker we get this over and done with, the quicker I can get home.’

  ‘I don’t know why you keep coming around sticking your beaks in.’

  Jessica took her ID out and held it up to make things official, even though she was already inside and he didn’t seem fussed who she was. ‘Because you’ve already been bound over for breaching the peace and according to the call we had last night, it looks like you might owe the court fifty quid. At the station I’m known as Charitable Jess – well, among other things – and I thought it’d be your lucky day. Instead of coming over and making you turn your pockets out, I thought I’d pop around, have a quick brew and see if there’s any way I can help. Now where’s your fragrant other half?’

  Teague stood staring at her. She’d spoken so quickly that he was taking a few moments to take it all in.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Tania – where is she? I could do with having a word with the pair of you.’

  ‘She’s upstairs.’

  Jessica pointed to the stairs he was standing next to. ‘Those ones? Not quite another dimension, is it – so it should be easy enough to get her down. Now pop the kettle on and we can have a cosy little chinwag.’

  Teague twisted a watch around on his wrist, the past two minutes finally catching up with him. ‘You can’t just come in here – I know my rights.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah – I’ve heard it all before. Blah-di-blah this, I-know-my-rights that. Just stick the kettle on, or we’ll get you down the station and start asking how you intend to pay that fifty quid.’

  Teague looked from Jessica to Rowlands and then turned sheepishly on his tail. She heard Rowlands mutter the word ‘charitable?’ and suppressed a smile. Talk quickly and sound confident – easy when you knew how, though it helped if you didn’t trip over an errant gym bag when you strutted into the kitchen trying to act like a big shot.

  As she righted herself, Jessica scowled at the bag, squeezing the yoga mat back down towards the bottom and re-folding a towel, then shoving it into the corner as if the incident had never happened. Teague was at least doing as he’d been told and had apparently missed her accident because of the gush of water into the kettle.

  The kitchen didn’t look as if it had been done up in twenty years: cracked tiles above a built-in cooker that was more brown than the white it had once been; grubby, stained counter tops; a draining board with ingrained white scum streaks and a mould-blotched roller blind. Even the slimiest of estate agents would struggle to sell this kitchen as anything other than something that needed ripping out in favour of starting again.

  Teague nodded towards the open doorway where Dave was standing. ‘Through there.’

  Jessica led the way into a living room that was almost as out of date as the kitchen. Brown cord sofas, worn crimson carpet, peeling wallpaper with a raised flowery pattern, falling-apart flat-packed furniture – and dog hairs: lots of them. Jessica peered both ways into the room but there was no sign of the offending mongrel, so she took a seat on the sofa. Music videos were playing on the television with the sound on mute but aside from a few celebrity magazines scattered on the floor and some photographs on the wall, there was little else of anything. Nine point eight million quid and this is what they were left with.

  Teague soon entered with two mugs of tea, giving Jessica one that had a large chip missing from it, and then shunting one towards Rowlands and spilling some on the floor to an accompaniment of swearing. He sat in a squeaking armchair and put his feet up on the coffee table that looked as if it could collapse at any moment, reaching down to the gap between the chair and the wall to retrieve a beer can. He popped it open, took a large swig, and leant backwards.

  ‘What d’yer want, then?’

  Jessica peered into the pale orange of the liquid in her mug, thinking it was a shocking effort at tea-making. If a constable had made one like that, it would have been a disciplinary offence. ‘What happened last night?’ she asked.

  Teague nodded towards the wall. ‘That bitch been complaining again?’

  ‘If you call your neighbour that one more time then we’ll take you down the station for threatening behaviour. Over the past few months we’ve had more than one complaint from more than one person – so stop moaning about other people and get talking.’

  ‘You’ve got quite a mouth on you, haven’t ya?’

  ‘So I’m told.’

  ‘There weren’t owt in it. All couples have the odd barney, don’t they? What’s the problem?’

  ‘If you’re shouting at each other at the top of your voices and it’s keeping other people awake, then there’s clearly a problem. As I said – this is a conversation we need to have with your wife as well.’

  Teague nodded tersely and then rocked forward: ‘TANIA!’

  There was a half-second pause and then a woman’s voice echoed from upstairs: ‘WHAT?’

  ‘GIT DOWN ’ERE.’

  ‘WHY?’

  ‘BECAUSE I FUCK-ING NEED YOU.’

  ‘WHAT FOR?’

  ‘BECAUSE I DO.’

  Jessica was getting a sense of what the complaints were about.

  There was a scraping on the ceiling above and then a couple of thumps before a scratch-scrape-scramble of claws on bare-wood stairs. Moments later and a small dog skidded into the living room. Jessica had no idea of the breed, but it was white, fluffy, and had that yappy look about it as if it didn’t understand the ‘shut up’ command. He/she/it took one look at Jessica and then scarpered back the way it came.

  Click-clack-click-clack on the kitchen floor and then Tania Teague emerged into the living room, dressed in heels, tight jeans and a tighter jumper. She had straightened bleached-blonde hair tied back into a loose ponytail and overdone eye make-up. The dog was hanging around close to her feet. She looked from Jessica to Martin and back again. ‘How can I help you, love?’

  She smiled slightly and it didn’t even sound as if she’d said it sarcastically.

  Jessica decided to respond in kind, taking her ID from her pocket and holding it up: ‘It’s about last night. We keep getting complaints about noise, plus there was that one from the other month about the junk left in your front garden.’

  The dog crept out from under Tania’s feet and edged towards Jessica. Tania slapped her husband on the arm: ‘That’s you, that is. I keep telling you to keep your big gob shut.’

  ‘You can fucking talk – always at the gym and chasing around after that bastarding dog.’

  Tania gasped. ‘You do realise Tinkerbell can hear you?’

  The dog seemed more interested in sniffing Jessica’s ankles than in taking offence. Teague took another large mouthful from his can and scrunched it up. Jessica hadn’t even noticed him drinking it but he’d gone through the half-litre in barely a few minutes. He dropped it on the floor and reached down for another.

  Tania crouched and picked up the can: ‘For God’s sake, how hard is it to pick up after yourself? And why are you drinking so early? It’s not even lunchtime.’

  Teague mumbled something Jessica didn’t catch, although the second word was definitely ‘off’. Tania turned to Jessica: ‘This is what I’ve got to put up with. Ever since we came back here, it’s been like this – well, it wasn’t me who spent all the money and it’s not me who’s missing it.’

  Using his hand, Teague simulated a mouth opening and closing. ‘Always flapping on. It wasn’t your money anyway – I won it. Anyway, Parky, Steve an
d Hamish are coming around tonight, so make yourself scarce. Either that or you can put some food on.’

  ‘Oh, piss off.’

  Jessica hadn’t particularly wanted to put herself in the middle of a domestic but it was looking increasingly as if she’d done just that.

  ‘Personally, I couldn’t care less about whatever’s going on between the pair of you,’ Jessica said, ‘but you’ve caused us nothing but grief over the past few weeks. If we’re not getting called out here, then we’re dealing with incidents at the houses that were taken off you and put up for auction—’

  Teague cut her off: ‘That’s why I pay my taxes – so you can have a job.’

  ‘You didn’t pay your tax – that’s why you’re living here instead of in a mansion with a rollercoaster.’

  ‘Well, what do you lot want? It’s not my fault – I can’t be expected to keep a watch on houses I don’t even own.’

  ‘Maybe not but you can keep your trap shut when it’s late at night and people want to get some kip.’

  ‘It’s not my fault that nosy b—’

  ‘Don’t say it.’

  Teague glanced between Jessica and Rowlands but held his tongue. ‘It was only a little tiff and everyone should keep their noses out.’

  ‘The more we keep getting called here, the more likely it’s going to be that one of you gets banged up for something. Usually it’s uniform, this time it’s me – so I’m telling the both of you to stop pissing everyone off.’

  Teague began to reply but Tania talked across him: ‘We’re sorry, Inspector. We don’t want any trouble.’

  ‘Good – me either. Now where’s your toilet?’

  ‘Upstairs – second door on the right.’

  Jessica headed up the stairs and made a special point of peeping into each of the rooms. The first had bare floorboards and a metal-framed unmade bed, while the second must have been their room because there was a set of carpet squares pressed together around a double bed. In the open wardrobe, Jessica could see rows of dresses and shoes, with clothes that appeared to belong to Teague – jeans, tracksuit bottoms and plain T-shirts – piled on the floor.