Breathe

by Cari Hunter

  The second girl—ghostly pale and Goth to the nth degree, with self-harm scars running the length of both forearms—held out a tube of Smarties and tipped a few into Rosie’s palm. “We’ll tell him later,” she whispered.

  Rosie colour-ordered her Smarties on her knee and started with a purple one. “Break it gently,” she said. “It’ll be like finding out about Father Christmas all over again.”

  The Goth girl giggled. “He still spends half of Christmas Eve hanging out of the window with a pair of binoculars he won on a tombola.” Her brow suddenly furrowed as she noticed Rosie’s uniform for the first time. “Shit. Are you going to arrest us for the weed?”

  Rosie pondered that while she sucked her sweets. “No. But I might have to wag my finger sternly and tell you to behave in future.”

  Woody spilled cider down his chin, the four-litre bottle too heavy for him to keep raised. He was smaller than Kyle, and a familial resemblance to the Goth suggested they were siblings. “You’re nice,” he said. “I like you.”

  “I like you too, so let’s do a bit of a deal.” Rosie took out her notepad. “I’m looking for a young lass called Tahlia, and I was speaking to a mate of yours down by the canal who said you’d seen her in here.”

  Woody’s mouth twisted, drawing his lips to one side and making his nose twitch like an inquisitive rabbit. Rosie assumed he was puzzling out how she knew his name or why she was looking for Tahlia, or perhaps he still hadn’t moved beyond the unicorn conundrum.

  “Tahlia,” she prompted him, stopping just short of clicking her fingers. “Fourteen years old, mixed race, long curly hair, had a fling with Kyle Parker? You tell me where I can find her, and I’ll forget all about the weed.”

  The penny dropped in slow, clearly signposted intervals. Rosie had finished her Smarties and arranged another batch by the time he answered.

  “Demi-Lee’s bird!” he said. “I fancied her for a bit, but Kyle said he’d knock me head off if I tried owt.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “’Bout two weeks ago. Her and Demi-Lee had a barney and split up, and she had nowhere to stay. She crashed in here for a couple of nights, then she took all her stuff and never came back.”

  “Did she say where she was going? Might she have gone home?”

  “Naw, her dad’s dead strict, and he’d have killed her for being a lez. She said she’d got a really nice place, but she wouldn’t say where, so she was probably bullshitting.”

  “Do you know where her parents live?”

  “North Curzon. Tarrick Street, I think, but I don’t know what number.”

  The girls were nodding along as he spoke, making no attempt to contradict him or elaborate on the details, and they shook their heads when Rosie asked if they had anything to add.

  Satisfied they were telling the truth, she pushed to her feet and folded her arms. “Right, come on.”

  They gawped at her.

  “You promised you wasn’t going to arrest us,” the blonde said.

  “I’m not, but I can’t leave you in here trespassing willy-nilly, drinking underage, and smoking dope. Do you have homes to go to?”

  She got a couple of shrugs and a “yeah.”

  “Are your parents or guardians there?”

  “Our mam’s at work,” Woody said. He pointed at the blonde. “Her big sister will be in.”

  “And how do we feel about her big sister?”

  “She’s all right,” the blonde said. “She’ll make us pizza and won’t tell on us.”

  That was good enough for Rosie. In a perfect world, she’d have delivered the children safely into the arms of their frantic yet forgiving parents, but the world was far from perfect, and a big sister who gave a damn and supplied pizza was better than nothing. She collected the cider bottle and stamped out the barbecue. “Mind how you go on the stairs,” she said. “If you get down them in one piece and don’t try to scarper at the bottom, I’ll buy you all a McFlurry.”

  * * *

  The woman put an arm around her boyfriend and laid her head on his shoulder. “At least the old sod went peacefully,” she said, and Jem almost spat her chewing gum into the bucket of bloody vomit at her feet.

  The protracted and grisly demise of Stanley Brown had been anything but peaceful. A chronic alcoholic with a gastric ulcer, he had decorated every room of his flat with bright red sprays of gore before collapsing in the corner behind his telly. Rigor mortis had frozen his face in an agonised grimace, and his outstretched limbs were contorted, as if he’d spent his last seconds warding off a wild animal.

  The woman made an elaborate sign of the cross, only in reverse and enhanced by a knock-kneed curtsy, and then gave her boyfriend a chirpy thumbs-up when he came back into the room carrying a six-pack and a large plastic bag. Busy with her paperwork, Jem hadn’t noticed him leave, but he’d evidently been raiding Stanley’s kitchen.

  “Stan would want us to have these,” he said. He handed the woman a pilfered can of super-strength lager and toasted the body with his own. “Cheers, pal. You were the very best of us.” Dabbing his dry eyes with a ragged handkerchief, he turned to Jem. “You need owt else from us, love?”

  “No, thank you. You’ve been very helpful. I’ll just wait for the police to arrive.” She raised an eyebrow at the plastic bag. He was struggling to lift it, and glass clinked every time he moved. Pre-empting any enquiry on her part, he gave her a brisk nod and sidled toward the front door.

  “Come on, Yvonne. I’m sure the paramedic is very busy.”

  Although far from sober, Yvonne got the message and tottered across to join him on the threshold. “We’ll be in the Red Lion if anyone needs us,” she said.

  “Grieving,” he added, and stumbled in his haste to get out of the door.

  Jem waited until the lift silenced the irregular clack of Yvonne’s high heels. Then she went into the kitchen, where the smell of sweet copper and decomposition wasn’t quite so eye-watering. The soles of her boots stuck to the lino as she walked to the cleanest countertop, and flies were gorging themselves on the unwashed dishes that filled the sink. She scratched her arm and then her head, setting off a chain reaction of furious itching that only abated when her mobile buzzed with a message from Rosie. Safe and sound and on my way to MaccieD’s. Fancy a Flurry?

  Love one, Jem typed. But I’m stuck babysitting a body until your lot arrive. She was about to send the text when someone knocked on the door.

  “Hello? Police!” a man shouted.

  “In the kitchen,” she called back. “Watch where you’re putting your feet.”

  The officer swore every couple of steps, making it easy for her to gauge his approach. With his presence guaranteeing she’d be able to leave the scene, she erased all but the first two words of her message and added, Meet me in the B&Q car park in fifteen.

  She rendezvoused with Rosie at the far end of the B&Q car park, well beyond the steady stream of baby boomers laden with gardening supplies and buckets of grout. For the sake of convenience and staying dry, she took a leaf from every police series she’d ever watched and lined her driver’s window up with Rosie’s. Rosie—who apparently also watched too much telly—made a show of checking for witnesses before she passed Jem the ice cream, still wrapped in its brown paper bag. For extra effect, she’d donned her sunglasses despite the pouring rain.

  “Very incognito,” Jem said. “I’m sure no one’s spotted us, sitting here in our subtly marked cars.” She hit her blues for the benefit of a woman who’d stopped to stare, and the woman flounced off, steering her trolley-load of magnolia Dulux into a bollard.

  “Nothing to see here,” Rosie announced loudly. “We’re allowed to take a break, no matter what the Daily Mail might say.” She waggled a finger toward Jem’s paper bag. “You struck me as an extra sauce kind of lass. So to speak.”

  Jem said nothing, but she felt her ears go hot. Ducking her head to hide the telltale flush, she delved into her bag, popping the lid off her Flurry and t
hen gaping at it. The tub was full to overflowing and covered in liberal dollops of raspberry, with half a ton of chocolate embedded in the ice cream. She sat up straight again, her pink ears forgotten. “How the hell did you wangle this? I’ve never been able to wangle this, even when I’m in uniform.”

  “I batted my eyelashes at the cute lad behind the till,” Rosie said, and displayed another bag from the passenger side. “He gave me a free apple pie and a burger with extra gherkins.”

  “You have a real gift.” Jem settled back in the seat and entered her rest request on the RRV’s data terminal. She’d told Ryan she was happy to take her break off-base, which gave her twenty minutes to catch up on all Rosie’s gossip. “So, what do you know? What were you doing in the old mill?”

  Rosie caught a drip of ice cream with her finger and wiped it off on a napkin already dirt-smudged and crumpled. She’d obviously given herself a cat lick, but she’d missed a grey streak on her cheek and the cobwebs stuck to her hair.

  “Trying to find Kyle’s mates,” she said. “I found a few by the canal who knew him in passing, but I failed to track down Tahlia, who may have been his girlfriend for a short spell before she joined us on the Dark Side by dating Demi-Lee.”

  “The plot thickens,” Jem said.

  “Indeed it does. Tahlia had been crashing in the mill, but by all accounts she’s moved to somewhere splendid.” Rosie tapped her teeth with her spoon, deep in thought. “Which seems unlikely.”

  Jem had only been to the mill once, but the prospect of spending a night there gave her the collywobbles. “Where the hell are Tahlia’s family in all of this? Does she have any, or is she in care?”

  “They live on North Curzon. I think Steph will be paying them a visit in the not too distant. According to a very stoned lad, Tahlia’s dad kicked her out after her dalliance with Demi-Lee.”

  “Poor kid,” Jem said. Not for the first time in her career, the phrase “there but by the grace” sprang to mind. She had responded to numerous 999 calls for looked-after children, most in their early teens, running away from their care homes, taking drugs, self-harming, or getting drunk. Sometimes they got into the wrong car with the wrong man. Oftentimes they did the same thing all over again, and she came to know the children by name. She turned up the car’s heating as goose pimples rose on her arms. “What about the local shelters and hostels? Is someone checking those?”

  “As we speak.” Rosie flicked through her notebook. “Have you heard of one called Olly’s? A lad mentioned it, and I assumed I’d be able to get the address from comms, but they haven’t been able to find it.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell. I’ll ask around, though.”

  “Cheers. I’ll probably be on that tomorrow, unless Steph finds me another plum gig involving towpaths and dilapidated buildings.”

  Jem busied herself making patterns in her ice cream, concentrating on the swirl of sauce so she wouldn’t blurt out the question teetering on the tip of her tongue. Whatever was going on between Rosie and Steph, it was none of her business. If Rosie wanted to tell her, she would tell her.

  “Two years and three months,” Rosie said, her voice barely audible above the rain drumming on the cars. “That’s how long we were together. We split up last September.”

  “Oh.” Jem put her tub down. “Sorry, Rosie, I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “You didn’t pry.”

  Jem regarded her carefully, trying to catch signs of anger or regret, but Rosie was nibbling a piece of Flake she’d dipped in raspberry, and she seemed quite cheerful.

  “I wanted to, though,” Jem admitted.

  “Well, yes, I could see that.” Rosie bit her chocolate. “But in contrast to my bull-in-a-china-shop approach, you are far too polite to be nosy.”

  Jem checked the clock on the dash. She had eight minutes left on her break, which didn’t seem anywhere near long enough for this conversation. It would be cowardly to change the subject, though.

  “It must be hard to see her all the time at work,” she said. “I know people who’ve had to move stations or groups after a break-up with a colleague.”

  Rosie reached a hand out of her window, letting rain collect on her mucky palm. She watched it drip through her fingers for a few seconds before answering. “It helps that she’s Major Crimes and not a bog-standard plod, which is ironic, because that was half the problem in the first place. She wanted me to follow in her footsteps, work on her team, but I was happy doing what I’m doing. I’d like to take my National Investigators’ Examination—that’s the first step to qualifying as a detective—but I’ll do it when I’m ready, not to please whoever I’m sleeping with.”

  “Sounds fair enough.”

  “Not to Steph,” Rosie said, and for the first time Jem heard the bitterness and hurt beneath her words. “Steph is Type A to the core, and I’m…well, I’m not sure what the hell I am. It wasn’t all bad, of course. We got on fine at first, had a great social life, lots of nights out and weekends away. I don’t really know at what point it stopped being fun. I can’t remember it being a major light-bulb moment or anything; I just realised she was whittling away at me bit by bit. Every decision we made together was actually her decision, and I was constantly making compromises to keep her on side. It was exhausting, and I was miserable, so I ended it.”

  She was back to staring at her palm again. Jem took hold of her fingers and gave them a squeeze.

  “Did she just let you?” she asked. “End it, I mean.”

  “No, not really,” Rosie said quietly. “We’re not a couple, not by a long shot, but she pesters me to go on dates with her and makes sure I’m assigned to her cases, and every so often she’ll get me drunk enough that I’ll sleep with her.” She withdrew her hand from Jem’s and tucked it between her thighs, her embarrassment evident in every stilted movement.

  “Hey,” Jem said. She waited until Rosie looked at her. “I can fabricate feline shenanigans just as well as you can, so phone me if you ever need me, okay?”

  “Steph knows I don’t have a cat,” Rosie said. Her face was pale, but she was starting to smile.

  Jem shook her spoon at Rosie, splashing ice cream down the side of the car. “I’ll use my imagination. I’m very creative when I set my mind to it. Do we have a deal?”

  “Okay, yes, we have a deal.” When they shook on it, Rosie kept a tight hold of Jem’s hand. “On a scale of one to ten, how pathetic do you think I am?”

  “Zero. Minus one. Don’t be bloody stupid,” Jem said. “Nobody’s perfect. We all fuck up, get stuff wrong, and do things we’d want to change if we had the chance.” She held Rosie’s gaze, making sure she’d got her point across, and then jumped as the RRV’s data terminal began to bleep and her radio blared in synch with it. She scrolled down to the job information and sighed. “I rest my case,” she said, turning the monitor so Rosie could read it. Male, nineteen. Head stuck in a gate.

  “For fuck’s sake.” Rosie could barely swear for laughing. “That scale I just mentioned? He’s getting an eleven.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Jem straightened Ferg’s bowtie and steered him in front of her bedroom mirror. “They’re not going to know what’s hit them,” she said, brushing a crumb from his kilt. “Damn, Ferg, you have better legs than me.”

  “Hairier legs,” he corrected her. “And ginger hair at that.”

  “Shush, it’s all part of your charm. You’ll have them queuing out of the marquee again.”

  They walked downstairs together. She was ready for work and scheduled to drop him at the train station half an hour before the start of her shift.

  “How ever are you going to manage without me?” he asked. He’d always been as much a big brother as a best friend, and there was genuine concern in his expression, despite his lightness of tone.

  She handed him his laptop case. “It’s only five days, Ferg. I just need to drag my poor aching bones to the end of this shift, and then I’m planning a long weekend of lounging about with my feet
up. I might walk the dogs if I’m feeling energetic, which, I have to admit, is unlikely.”

  “You could always ask Officer Rosie to lend a hand,” he said, and reacted with exaggerated innocence when she walloped him. “What? You speak very highly of her, and you’ve already been on a couple of dates.”

  “We have never—those weren’t dates!” Jem folded her arms, the poster child for indignation and denial, though she knew she was playing right into his hands. As predicted, he paid no heed to her protest.

  “There are few things more romantic than sharing a McFlurry at B&Q, Jemima.”

  “I can think of plenty of things.” She wrapped his scarf around his neck, pulling it tighter than was strictly necessary. “Stop being an arse and grab your suitcase, or you’ll be catching the bus to Piccadilly.”

  The station’s drop-off was half empty, and Jem risked the ire of the taxi drivers by getting out to hug Ferg.

  “There’s a chicken and mushroom pie in the fridge for your tea tonight,” he said. “And I made a lasagne as well.” He winked at her. “It’s big enough to share.”

  Unable to be cross with him when he’d gone to so much trouble, she kissed his cheek and gave him a bottle of Lucozade, a box of paracetamol, and a hip flask full of whiskey. “Hangover cures,” she said. “The choice is yours. I’ll see you Tuesday.”

  He laughed, tucking the hip flask beneath his kilt. “See you Tuesday, hen.”

  She waited until he reached the main entrance, where a growing throng of impatient commuters assimilated him. The traffic heading away from Manchester was starting to pick up, most of the cars heading to the flyover that would take them out of the city and into Trafford Park. After almost being sideswiped by a speeding VW at the Apollo roundabout, Jem drove up Hyde Road as if everything was out to get her, a tactic that had kept her collision-free for the years she’d lived within the city limits. The main strip of shops in Gorton was stirring to life, with shutters clattering open on its newsagents and cafes, while white van men made a beeline for the twenty-four-hour supermarket. She overtook a street sweeper, and, forgetting she was in her own car, waved at an ambulance, whose driver waved back regardless. She laughed and cranked the radio up a notch. She loved the city, loved its eclectic neighbourhoods and its fierce sense of pride. Like any sprawling multicultural metropolis, it had its problems, but it usually faced them cheerfully and head on, with a pint in its hand.