Breathe

by Cari Hunter

“Are we both going?” Kash asked.

  “No. Your sarge said he couldn’t spare you.” Steph held up a hand, pre-empting any dissent. “You’re to run solo for the shift.”

  The colour rose in his face, but he said nothing. He balanced a muffin on top of Rosie’s coffee and passed them to her before striding back toward the station for a fresh set of keys.

  “It’s your lead,” Steph said to Rosie. “I thought you’d be happy to follow up on it.”

  “I’m ecstatic.” Rosie clicked the fob. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  Steph caught her arm. “We could meet for lunch if you like. Your sarge doesn’t need to know. I can log it as a debrief.”

  Rosie didn’t shake her off, but it was an effort not to. “Are you suggesting we bend the rules to suit ourselves, Detective?”

  Steph’s tinkling laugh bore no humour in it. “Touché.”

  Rosie folded the printout and slipped it into her stab vest. “I’ll phone you later.”

  She was trembling when she got into the car, an insidious jittery sensation that made her drop her key and then over-rev the engine. She gripped the wheel, letting spots of rain blur the windscreen until Steph disappeared from view. Kash messaged her within minutes. You okay?

  Yes, she replied. Sorry.

  Not your fault. I’ll see you later. Be careful out there.

  She took heart from the traditional sign-off, replying in kind and then allowing herself a moment to sip her coffee and share half her muffin with the fat pigeon waiting hopefully at the side of the car. She opened the window fully, bringing in clean, rain-scented air that cleared the steam and made her think of Jem. It always seemed to be raining whenever they met up. She wasn’t sure she’d even recognise her in the sunshine. She flicked another chunk of cake at the pigeon.

  “Good thing it’s always pissing down here, eh?” she said, and set off toward the exit.

  Twenty-four Tarrick Street, North Curzon, sat at the far end of a neat terraced row. Its garden was well tended, with a raised bed recently dug over ready for planting, and a basket of winter pansies adding a welcome splash of colour to the doorstep. A Toyota Yaris occupied most of the small driveway, and the flickering of a television in the front room confirmed someone was home. Rosie used the knocker to rap on the door and readied her ID as a figure appeared in the hallway. The door opened on the security chain. The street might have been spick and span, but South Curzon was less than a hundred yards away.

  “Mrs. Mansoor?” Rosie said.

  “Yes, I’m Melissa Mansoor. Can I help you?” On recognising Rosie’s uniform, the woman opened the door wider. She was in her early forties and dressed in a traditional salwar kameez, with her blond hair tucked beneath a colour-coordinated hijab. She dried her hands on a tea towel, but soap suds still clung to her forearms.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” Rosie said. “I’m PC Jones, and I’m based at Clayton. We’re investigating the Kyle Parker case. I’m not sure if you’ve seen it on the news?”

  Melissa nodded, her eyes flitting to the street, where curtains were beginning to twitch. “We saw it. Would you like to come in?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Rosie followed her into a rear living room that was evidently used for guests. Small dishes of sweets and mints were laid out on a polished black glass coffee table, and the two long sofas were in pristine condition, as if bought for show, not actual sitting. She balanced on the edge of one, trying not to leave an indentation, and took out her notepad and pen.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Melissa asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  Melissa remained standing, forcing Rosie to look up at her. “So, this boy’s death. What does it have to do with my family?”

  “I’m looking for Tahlia,” Rosie said, keeping things simple. The last time she’d inadvertently interviewed a witness, Steph hadn’t taken kindly to it. “According to Kyle’s friends, she dated him for a short while, but then she and her father had an altercation about a relationship with a girl. Is that right?”

  Melissa had wrung the tea towel into a tight line, her knuckles blanching around the cloth. She glanced at the mantelpiece, where a matched set of family photographs took up most of its length. Without waiting for permission, Rosie stood and went over to pick up a photo of a young girl in a smart school uniform. She was holding a One Hundred Percent Attendance certificate and grinning ear to ear.

  “Is this Tahlia?” Rosie asked.

  Melissa nodded, her eyes brimming with tears. “She’s just a baby,” she whispered. “And we can’t find her anywhere.”

  Rosie took the photo back to the sofa, propping it on the coffee table where Melissa couldn’t avoid it. She’d assumed this would be a five-minute “Tahlia’s not here and good riddance to her” type of house call, but Melissa’s statement had set alarm bells ringing.

  “What do you mean, you can’t find her?” she asked. “Have you been looking for her?”

  Melissa pulled a tissue from an ornate metal box. “Day and night. My husband is a taxi driver, and he’s been searching for her between fares. He was so angry with her over that girl, but he didn’t mean for this. He would never—” She began to sob, hiding her face in her hands.

  “How long has she been missing?”

  “Today is the seventeenth day.” A terrible hollowness to Melissa’s voice gave Rosie an idea of the toll those days had taken. “We know she stayed with Demi-Lee for a while. We spoke to Demi-Lee’s mum, and we thought she’d come home of her own accord, but she never did.”

  “Why haven’t you reported her missing, Mrs. Mansoor? She’s only fourteen.”

  The question prompted a fresh bout of tears. “I know! I know that!” Melissa grabbed the photo and held it to her chest. “Faisal said he would find her, that you would blame him if we told you, and our other children would be taken away as well. We kept hoping she would walk through the front door and we could pretend this had never happened.”

  Rosie bullet-pointed the answer, careful now with her record of the visit. If Tahlia’s disappearance ended as badly as Kyle’s, she didn’t want to be the weak link in the evidence chain.

  “What did you tell her school?” she asked. Any prolonged, unexplained absence would have been investigated, had some kind of reason not been given.

  “That she was visiting family in Pakistan.” Melissa looked sickened, as if she was only now envisioning the pit she and her husband had dug for themselves. In addition to the potentially permanent loss of their daughter, the family would be assessed by social workers and safeguarding teams, who would decide whether Tahlia’s siblings were also at risk. “What will happen now?” she asked. “Will you help us look for her?”

  “Yes.” Rosie was certain of that at least. “She’ll be formally reported as a missing child, and the teams working the case will continue to search for her. You and your husband will probably be interviewed by the lead detective, and you have to be prepared for the involvement of Social Services.”

  “Just find Tahlia,” Melissa said. “Whatever else happens, happens. Please, just find our daughter.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Flashes of blue and red reflected off the waterlogged road, where two fire engines, a couple of police traffic units, and a standard patrol unit were lighting up the junction like Blackpool Illuminations and acting as a lure for a crowd of bloodthirsty but ultimately disappointed onlookers.

  Zipping up her high-vis jacket, Jem picked a route across to the closest traffic officer. Cubes of safety glass crunched beneath her boots as she surveyed the scene, judging the damage to the vehicles and the likely speed of impact. The two cars sat at angles to each other, one tiny and crumpled beyond repair, the other built like a tank and slightly dented at the front.

  “Four in the Range Rover,” the traffic officer said as Jem raised a gloved hand in greeting. “Dad reckons they’re all fine, though, and the driver of the Picasso legged it.”

  “I’m so glad we haven’
t risked life and limb to rush here,” Jem said, deadpan. A newly forming habit had her checking the scene for Rosie, just in case, but she couldn’t see her amongst the rabble. “Do we know who dropped the nines for it?”

  “That stupid sod over there.” The officer pointed to a slouching lad wearing a tatty Man United cap and a knockoff Adidas tracksuit. He was snapping selfies, using the cars as a backdrop. “He swears there was a fire at first, but—and I quote—‘the rain done put it out.’”

  The job had been passed to Jem as Multi-vehicle collision, one car on fire, four people trapped, which explained the large number of resources deployed. She blinked droplets from her eyelashes, ruing her decision to cut the hood off her coat because it flapped and looked stupid and because drunk patients liked grabbing hold of it.

  “Suppose it didn’t occur to him that those trapped victims might simply have wanted to stay dry,” she said.

  “Suppose not.” The officer opened a packet of toffees and offered Jem one. “I’d arrest him for wasting everyone’s time if I could be arsed filling in the paperwork.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll make sure no one’s suddenly developed whipcash. Is my car all right where it is?”

  “It’s fine. We’ll be clearing up for a while yet.”

  The Range Rover’s tinted glass concealed its occupants until the driver lowered his window. He gave Jem a thin smile, obviously tolerating the fuss under duress and keen to be on his way. The woman beside him continued to speak into her mobile and didn’t deign to acknowledge Jem was there. With a new headlight and a dab of superglue on the vanity plate, no one would suspect their car had been in a collision.

  “Hello, sir,” she said. “My name’s Jem, and I’m with the ambulance service. The police officer said no one in your car is injured. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.” He tapped an impatient beat on the handbrake, striking a chunky gold ring against the lever. “Did the officer say when we might be able to get going?” The civility of his tone couldn’t disguise his broad Mancunian accent, and angry streaks of red coloured the black tribal tattoo on his neck when Jem shook her head.

  “Sorry, no, he didn’t. I’m sure it won’t be long, though.” She moved closer until she could see the back seat passengers: a lad and a girl in their mid-teens. “Hey,” she said, making eye contact with the lad as the girl played on an iPhone with a bejewelled case. “Are either of you hurt?”

  “Naw,” the lad said. “I thought he’d hit a speed bump.”

  The girl sniggered and twirled the stud in her nose. “You’re such a dick,” she told the lad.

  Soaked through and also feeling narky, Jem ripped off her nitrile gloves and shoved them into her pocket. “Right, then. I’ll leave you in peace.”

  “Hey, it’s easy money,” the traffic officer said, when she told him she was clearing. “We get paid for this shit regardless.”

  It was true, and she dealt with enough bad jobs to appreciate those that turned out to be false alarms. She hung her jacket over the RRV’s passenger seat and started the engine. Rosie had sent a WhatsApp while Jem had been on scene, a stock photo of a Twix next to a cup of coffee, with the caption, Do you have time for a tutorial?

  Hold that thought, Jem replied. I’ll let you know where I am in a couple of hours.

  * * *

  Rosie tore onto the street, her blues and siren still blaring, the Clayton van less than thirty yards behind her and making just as much noise. An elderly man grabbed his poodle, cradling it to his chest as if the vehicles might snatch it away, while a postie stamped out his fag and crossed himself. Rosie counted the numbers down, screaming to a halt in front of thirty-nine, her seat belt already off and her Taser unbuckled.

  “This one!” she yelled to the officers scrambling from the van. “Wife said they were round the back.”

  Guided by the sound of raised voices, they moved en masse, no plan or formation, just five uniformed officers itching for a scrap after a shift spent dragging cars out of floodwater and supervising sandbag distribution. Rosie pushed the side gate with the hand that wasn’t holding her baton. She lived for calls like this, pelting full-tilt into the gods only knew what, with an assortment of crappy weapons at her disposal and a team of her best mates backing her up.

  The commotion became louder and more distinct as she jogged between two garages: a woman’s voice, high-pitched and hysterical, and two men shouting over each other.

  “Help!” the woman shrieked. “Someone please help us!”

  Rosie bolted around the corner expecting carnage—an ongoing fight to the death, blood spraying, bones breaking, perhaps a severed limb or two—and found a housewife whacking at her neighbour over a neatly trimmed privet hedge, as her husband waved a pair of loppers like the spoils of battle.

  “What the actual fuck?” one of the officers said, almost going arse-over-tits on a tub of slug pellets.

  “Help!” the woman screeched again, still brandishing what appeared to be a rolled-up apron. “Help!”

  “Oi!” Rosie’s bellow was loud and low enough to cut through the melee. “Police! What the hell is going on here?”

  The three potential perps froze in unison and looked across at their audience. Confronted by a wall of solid blue, they swiftly surrendered their garden implements and raised their empty hands.

  “He stabbed him,” the woman wailed, fanning herself with a hanky. “Oh, my heart can’t stand this. I might faint, or have my angina.”

  “Shall I zap the buggers anyway?” the officer asked.

  Tempting though the suggestion was, Rosie holstered her baton and breached no man’s land by stepping onto the lawn. “Who exactly stabbed whom, ma’am?”

  “He”—the woman flapped her hands at the neighbour—“stabbed my Malcolm. Show them, Malcolm.”

  Now looking sheepish, Malcolm lifted his shirt to reveal a taut beer belly with a smudge of green on it. “Here,” he said, indicating the smudge.

  Rosie touched the mark. It was a piece of privet leaf, which fell off onto her palm. “I think you’ll live,” she said. “What did he use? A garden cane?”

  The man toe-poked the loppers. “He was cutting our side of it. We’ve asked him not to umpteen times, but he’s sneaky. He’ll wait till we’ve gone out or the weather’s like this and we’re not watching for him.”

  “Sir?” Rosie turned to the neighbour. “Do you have anything to add to this?”

  “He threatened to break my loppers,” he mumbled. “And I only bought ’em on Saturday.”

  Rosie had heard enough. “Do any of you think it’s appropriate to drag five very busy members of the local police force into your privet dispute?”

  The men shook their bowed heads. The woman continued to waft her hanky about but had the sense not to remonstrate.

  “In which case, we’ll leave you to reach some sort of resolution that does not result in any further ructions,” Rosie said. “If we have to come back here, we’ll arrest the lot of you. Is that understood?”

  Taking their silence as acquiescence, she rejoined her colleagues.

  Smiffy, the eldest on the van, clapped an arm around her shoulders. “‘Privet dispute,’” he said. “I liked that part the best, PC Jones.”

  “I can’t help it, Smiffy. I am naturally punny.” Rosie checked her phone and extricated herself from his grip. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, gents, I have to rendezvous with a lovely young paramedic who’s got a nifty trick to teach me.”

  * * *

  “There you go, sweetheart. And you can put that bloody money away.”

  Jem knew better than to argue with Paula. She dropped a couple of quid into the cafe’s charity box and shoved the chocolate into her pockets to leave her hands free for the drinks. Reminded of her B&Q conversation with Rosie, she tapped the box, the proceeds of which were being donated to a city-centre homeless charity.

  “You ever hear of a shelter called Olly’s, Paula?”

  Paula’s vigorous wiping of
the counter became slow, contemplative circles. “No, I haven’t. Is it local?”

  “I think so, but I’ve never heard of it either.” Making a snap decision, Jem wrote “Tahlia Mansoor” on a blank section of the takeaway menu. All sorts of gossip passed through the small cafe, and Paula was perfectly placed to eavesdrop. What she didn’t know about local affairs probably wasn’t worth knowing. Jem slid the menu across the countertop. “Police are looking for this lass, and that shelter was mentioned as a possible place of safety for her. She’s fourteen, mixed race, been missing from home for a couple of weeks. Can you keep your ear to the ground for me?”

  “Of course I can, love.” Paula folded her dishcloth into a neat square. She had mild OCD when it came to cleanliness and tidiness. “Was that you, out on your own with the lad by the river the other night?”

  “Aye. Did one of the papers give my name?”

  “No, I just bloody knew it. I told Dan as much. ‘That’ll have been our Jem,’ I said, and he bet me fifty pence I was talking shite.”

  “He owes you fifty pence,” Jem said. “Make sure he pays up, as well. He’s tighter than a duck’s arse.” She collected the drinks and waited until Paula came round to get the door for her. Paula shimmied in front of the counter and then rolled up her left trouser leg to reveal a newfangled prosthesis.

  “What do you think of this? Swanky, eh?”

  “Hey, check you out!” Jem said. “That’s fab.”

  “I’m jogging again.” Paula did a little jig on the spot to demonstrate. “Not far, just around the lake, but it’s a start, right?”

  “Absolutely. It’s bloody brilliant.” Jem gave her a brew-restricted but heartfelt hug. It was less than eighteen months since a truck had mounted the pavement and hit Paula while she’d been out running. Jem had crawled beneath the chassis and clamped her fingers around Paula’s exposed femoral artery. It had taken over an hour to extricate them, and a further half-hour until the surgeons at A&E had allowed Jem to let go. As bonding experiences went, it was certainly a unique one.