by Claire Askew
‘Shit,’ Birch hissed, and grabbed her radio once again.
‘This is CA38, Birch. I’ve got an officer in difficulty on the western flank, we need that marine unit, sir!’
Nothing. McLeod must have been busy. PC Malton’s legs kicked, his head still pushed under, his swimming colleagues closing in on the wet fight.
‘Does anyone copy?’ Birch cried. ‘I repeat, I have an officer in difficulty—’
Finally, another swimmer reached PC Malton. Amy’s torch wavered, but Birch watched as the newly arrived officer reared back in the water and kicked the perp square in the face. PC Malton surfaced: Birch could hear his grateful first gasp even over the din of the raid.
‘DI Birch,’ the radio said. ‘This is Marine Unit One. I copy, but we’re—’
Birch wasn’t listening. She ran past Amy, down onto the loose shale and into the water. She instantly regretted her plain-clothes choice of thick trackpants, which became lead weights around her legs. The V formation she’d ordered had broken up in the water: PC Malton and the perp who’d held him down were now being pulled to shore, while two other uniforms manhandled the wooden crate, its keeper still trying to stay attached to it. Birch waded in to her waist. The water felt thick and stank of boat fuel. She held out both her arms and PC Malton clawed up at them, falling against her so she staggered. His breath sounded like cloth being torn.
‘Okay, Jaden,’ Birch said. ‘You’re okay. Can you put your feet down for me? Can you stand?’
A few feet away, Malton’s perp was resisting arrest, flailing in five feet of water.
‘Fucksake,’ Birch muttered. Then, to the officers in the fray, ‘Someone get some cuffs on that scumbag, will you, please?’
PC Malton hooked his arms over her shoulders, and steadied himself against her frame. Once he’d found his footing, she realised he was around five feet eleven, the same height as her, but also very young – he could have been twenty-one.
‘Okay, Constable,’ she said, meeting his eye. ‘I suppose that’s one way to do things.’
Malton clearly couldn’t speak: his chest heaved. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw three of her team finally drag the first perp upright and wrestle his hands behind his back. The second, it seemed, had decided to come quietly: he’d surrendered the crate, which was now being carried ashore.
Birch began to wade backward, keeping a hand on Malton’s arm. ‘Mind how you go, son,’ she said, ‘we’ve got all the time in the world.’
It wasn’t true, of course: Birch glanced behind her at the ragged line of officers still on the shore. ‘Kato,’ she yelled, turning her head away from Malton so as not to deafen him. ‘Any more sightings in the water?’
There was a pause.
‘Negative, marm,’ Amy called back. ‘The eastern flank seems to’ve hoovered them up.’
‘Okay. Hold your positions though, eyes open.’
Birch felt first one foot, then the other, splash out of the water.
‘Dry land,’ she said into Malton’s ear. ‘You made it.’ She let go of the young officer and he folded onto the ground, coughing hard.
‘This is CA38, Birch.’ She crouched down next to Malton, one hand on his shoulder as he vomited water. ‘Requesting a medic to our position, repeat, requesting a medic. Western flank, north of Hesperus Broadway, over.’
‘All right, Birch.’ McLeod was back, and sounding irritable. ‘Medic’s on her way. Now do me a favour, would you?’
‘Sir?’
‘Arrest whatever you’ve got there and then get your team over here. It would seem we’ve just nicked Solomon Carradice.’
More than anything, I remember my sister.
I suppose that’s the way when you’re the youngest kid. My sister was nearly five when I was born. She’s probably seven or eight in my earliest memories. We got on okay sometimes, but mostly I remember us fighting. Mostly I remember her doing things I wasn’t allowed to do yet, because I was small. I remember her getting things I wasn’t allowed to have, and hating her for it.
She was always there, though. One day we went to Glasgow. No idea why . . . there must have been some important or official reason for Maw to schlep the two of us all the way on the train, and me still in the buggy. I was pretty wee. I remember we were on Gordon Street, because we’d come out of the train station. I’d laid back in my buggy and watched the glass roof of the station portico sliding by overhead, giving way to this tall red stone building across the street, towering up. You don’t get that red stone in Edinburgh. Anyway, we stopped there, on Gordon Street, and Maw let go of the buggy for a second. There’s a postbox at Central Station, so I always imagine she nipped to post a letter. Or maybe something dropped and she had to pick it up: a toy or a blanket or one of my socks. And my sister was there, of course. She used to walk alongside the buggy with one hand low down on the handle. When we got older Maw would tell people stories about how my sister always wanted to push the buggy: she wanted folk passing by to think that I was her baby, that she was taking care of me. They were designed to embarrass my sister, but I hated those stories, too. They made me realise that she must have seen me the same way as her baby dolls: something to dress up and carry around. Something make-believe.
But next thing, we were flying down Gordon Street, vaguely downhill, towards God knows what, and people were shouting. Women were shouting. I remember the dizzy feeling, watching those tall red buildings blur past overhead, seeing pigeons rattling up between them. As soon as Maw’s back was turned my sister had grabbed both handles of the buggy and run. We went zigzags. We must have crossed two big roads, and she can’t have stopped to look for the traffic because I don’t remember us slowing. I remember hearing Maw behind us belting out both our names and stop and stop her, which she must have yelled at other people as we clattered by. I probably loved it at the time. I probably laughed and squealed as little kids do when they’re zoomed about in the air by their granda or strapped into the baby swings and swung up high. Maw says we got as far as the Royal Exchange Square before someone tackled my sister to the ground. She always claimed to have no memory: of the day, of the act, of being skelpit raw right there by the Royal Exchange with half of Glasgow stopped to watch. I remember it all. My first real memory of anything.
Nella, I called her. That wasn’t her name but it was as close as I could get with my gummy kid-mouth, and it stuck. Maw called her it too. Da was gone before I can remember: long before Glasgow and the buggy and the skelping. Maybe before I ever spoke, so it might be that she was never Nella to him.
Nella the elephant packed her trunk and said goodbye to the cir-cus. That’s what Maw and I used to sing to her. When I got a bit older I’d make fart noises as Maw sang the trumpety-trump line, and Nella would swat at me or go off in a huff. We fought about everything and nothing. We shared a room. I used to throw stuff at her over the curtain that Maw had rigged up between our beds. She used to hide my toys in her half and then scream at me for going past the curtain to find them. We nicked each other’s pocket money, such as it was. We bit and scratched. But she was always there. Whatever we did, we did together.
There was one night when she admitted to remembering the buggy incident, or at least she didn’t deny it. We were both at this party and I’d got profoundly stoned and was lying on a sofa – whose sofa? Whose party? It feels like a million years ago. The grass was really good, but I’d overdone it like I always used to. Someone could have come and sawn my legs off and I’m pretty sure I’d have let them. And Nella sat down next to me. She had a coffee mug in her hand, a Star Trek mug. I remember that so clearly: it had a bad screenprint of Quark and Odo from DS9 running all the way round. I remember fixating on it as we talked. I remember saying, NellaNellaNellaNella, over and over – her name running into itself like a weird circular chant – I remember enjoying how it felt to make the sound. And then I said, ‘Why did you try to steal me from Maw that time? In Glasgow?’
They’d made punch at that party. They’d f
illed the bathtub with as much alcohol as they could find, all mixed together, and then sloshed in carton after carton of orange juice. It was disgusting, strong as rocket fuel. Nella had dipped the coffee mug in and was sipping this bathtub punch with a hard face. I expected her to say, You’re so fucking stoned or It’s fifteen years ago or You know I don’t remember that, but instead her eyes went sort of distant and she was quiet.
‘I wanted to take care of you,’ she said, after a while. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you or anything like that. I wanted a shot at taking care of you. That’s all.’
I was falling asleep by then, she’d waited so long to say it. But she said it: I remember, I heard. She reached her hand out and put it on my head, and weaved her fingers into my hair. I slipped off into sleep then, fast. Out like a light. Out like a thief in the night.
‘DI Birch.’
Birch was dreaming. It was one of those dreams where she knew that it was a dream, but she was going along with it anyway. It was night. She was standing on the Portobello promenade, outside the front gate of her own house. She was looking towards the city – looking along the little terrace of houses that, in the daytime, had neat square gardens with bedding plants and friendly cats. Her terrace was a good place, a place she loved, and she’d longed to live there ever since she was a tiny child. But the dream had changed it. The houses were in darkness. Birch knew, somehow, that no one lived in any of them. She was the only one there.
‘DI Birch.’
There was a storm. The streetlamps along the prom were dimmed, like old gas-lights, and in the tarry sky above, lightning whip-cracked in giant arcs. She felt herself jostled by a hard wind. She could hear the sea – up close by the prom like it got at high tide – but it sounded violent. Beside her, the salt-crusted bars of her garden gate chattered in their fixings.
‘Birch.’
Someone was walking towards her, up the prom. He began as a tiny doll of a figure, and moved slowly, but she knew who he was. As he got closer, she could see the wind yanking his hair around, though his face was indistinct. She realised his coat was tattered, the bottoms of his trousers scuffed, and his feet were bare. He must be cold, she thought. He must be so cold. He was still young: the age he’d been when he’d walked out of her life and vanished, though thirteen years had passed. No, fourteen. Fourteen years ago today: even in the dream, she corrected herself. At last, he reached her. He stopped about four feet away and they stood there, looking at one another, as the sea hissed beyond the railings and ridiculous Hammer Horror lightning opened up the sky.
She opened her mouth to say Charlie, but there was a colossal crash, right beside her head, as though someone behind her had thrown something.
‘Helen!’
Birch flinched awake. DCI McLeod had brought his palm down hard on the desk, where about half an hour ago she’d put her head down – just for a minute, just to rest her eyes. Now he was standing over her: watching as she jolted upright in her chair, aiming for nonchalance and missing by a country mile.
‘Sir.’
It was the first time that night that she’d looked at him properly, and she realised McLeod looked strange. His usual bespoke suit had been replaced by a black turtleneck and dark grey jeans. They looked wrong on him. He’d had his massive stainless-steel watch on throughout the raid though, no doubt a subtle hint as to who the commanding officer was. He just oozed authority, somehow, like background music he hadn’t worked out how to switch off. No matter what had gone down, Birch doubted he’d have been willing to dive into the harbour.
‘Sweet dreams, DI Birch?’
Birch could feel herself turning red. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ She raised one hand to her cheek to check she hadn’t drooled, or sat up with a Post-it stuck to her face. ‘I just nipped in here, to – um. I mean, I was up at two thirty.’
McLeod made a snort sound. ‘We were all up with the lark this morning, Helen.’
Yeah, all right, she thought. Crossed off the shortlist for Cop of the Year once again, I get it.
McLeod raised an eyebrow, and for a hot, panicked second Birch thought she might have actually spoken out loud.
‘Not getting much sleep at the moment?’
There was the cruel hint of a smile on his face. Oh God. Did he know about Anjan? No, surely – there was no way he could know.
Birch lifted her chin, began to right herself. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’ She thought for a half-second and then added, ‘Congratulations, sir. You ran quite the operation.’
It worked. She saw McLeod let go of his annoyance and push out his chest, just a little.
‘Thank you, Helen,’ he said. ‘There was a fine team at work this morning. I take no credit on a personal level.’
Liar, Birch thought, but she said nothing more. She rolled out what she hoped was a genuine-looking smile.
‘Okay.’ He’d lost interest in her nap now. She was out of the doghouse. ‘Full briefing in fifteen minutes. I suggest you get some coffee in you.’
She watched him stride out of her office, balled her hands into fists, and rubbed her eyes. ‘Stick up the arse,’ she whispered, blinking away stars from her vision. ‘Fucking brilliant, Helen.’
She was in the Ladies, fixing her face at the sink, before she remembered the dream. Her dreams about Charlie were always weird, but that one had been weirder than most. That it had happened on his anniversary was natural: she’d been thinking about him a lot, these past few days. She didn’t talk about him much any more: she found that telling people I have a brother who disappeared one night with only the clothes on his back, hasn’t been seen since, and is presumed dead could be a bit of a mood killer. But she suspected that not talking about him, shelving him in the back of her mind wherever possible, only made the dreams more vivid. The fact that he’d been dressed in rags, and his feet were bare – that spooked her. She didn’t like to think what it symbolised.
She patted a bristly paper towel over her face and avoided her own eyes in the mirror. She still didn’t understand how someone just disappeared – how even a senior police officer could search for over ten years and fail to find a trace. It was rare, in this day and age: there were digital footprints, bodily fluids, clues. Charlie was a smart boy but he wasn’t that clever. He ought to have left something behind. Dead or alive, she should have found him by now.
She held her hands palms down under the power dryer, watched as the blast of lukewarm air pooled and dented the skin. Against her hip, her phone buzzed, and before she’d really realised what she’d done, she found herself back inside the cubicle, putting down the lid so she could sit and read. She was thinking of Amy earlier, peering over her phone screen – thinking about McLeod asking why she hadn’t been sleeping well. No one could know about Anjan yet. She couldn’t let anything jinx this.
Just heard, the message read. Congratulations, Detective Inspector! Make sure you’ve got something to charge him with – clock’s ticking. Birch rolled her eyes at this – typical lawyer. Hope it’s not feeling like too much on Charlie’s anniversary. Go easy on yourself. A x
Birch looked at the glowing screen in her hand. She looked at it for so long that after a while it faded to black and the phone locked itself. Go easy on yourself. Anjan was being kind, but she regretted telling him about Charlie. She’d felt the anniversary of her brother’s disappearance drawing closer for weeks now, and she’d been using it as an excuse for things. She’d never have gone for that first drink with Anjan, for example, had she not felt it so keenly. She knew that this – what? Relationship? – was inappropriate. But it’s Charlie’s anniversary next week, she’d thought, saying, yes. It’s just dinner, and I’ll be stronger in a few days. I can put a stop to it then. When they’d gone for a drink afterwards, the thought had been, Sure, I don’t want to go home yet. And then everything had got hazy, and she’d found she was telling Anjan all about her little brother: the boy who walked out of his uni halls one evening – carrying only a wallet and the clothes he stood up in �
� and never came home.
‘Not a trace, even now,’ she’d said, putting her hands on the table in front of him, palms up, a beseeching gesture. ‘Fourteen years next week, and not a trace.’
After that, Anjan was kind, and kissed her. And then she was happy to go home, as long as she didn’t have to go there alone.
Birch cringed, wanting to stop the flashbacks before they went any further. She thumbed the phone back to life so she could see the time: 8.25 a.m. Anjan would be at work by now, assuming he’d made allowances for the longer commute from her place. He will have, she thought. She and her fellow officers had long ago nicknamed Anjan Chaudhry ‘the Brain’. And here she was, feeling – in a slightly uneasy, fluttery way – happy that he’d put an x on his text. Ridiculous.
Briefing in five, she wrote back. Thanks, Anjan. Sorry if I got weepy on you last night. She didn’t remember crying, but she also wouldn’t have put it past her last-night self. Unsure of how to sign off, she wrote, Keep in touch. H x She hit send, and clattered up and out of the cubicle before she could regret any wording.
Briefing in five. Christ. McLeod would be insufferable. And Anjan was right: if they couldn’t find something sharpish to charge Solomon with, he’d be sprung like a hare from a trap. This man had friends everywhere, and decades of favours just waiting to be called in. Whatever they had on him had to stick, or Operation Citrine would have been a costly embarrassment, in more ways than she cared to count.
She laid her phone down on the sink’s Formica surround. She was appraising the violet bags under her eyes – procrastinating, she knew, in her last moments of freedom before the briefing – when the phone began buzzing against the counter, making her jump. As she reached to swipe ‘answer’, she felt almost certain that the voice on the other end would be her mother, calling as she always used to on Charlie’s anniversary to speak tearfully and in circles while Birch clucked and soothed. Her mother, demanding to know what her daughter had been doing all these years – wasn’t this why she joined the police force anyway? How could it be taking this long?
