by Cari Hunter
“Has the PM been scheduled?”
“Yes, tomorrow at eight. We also have an interview with”—Sanne consulted her list—“Natalie Acre, Culver’s ex. His landlord might come in, too, if he can find the time. Culver was behind in his rent, but the chap’s already provided an alibi.”
“Worth talking to anyway,” Eleanor said. “Did the press bite?”
“They nibbled. The Sheffield Post ran a small sidebar tonight that included the number for the incident line, and the free paper might mention it, unless another dog falls through the ice at Endcliffe Park, in which case we’ve got no chance.”
“Best we could hope for, given the vic.”
“Imagine what our solve rate would be if they were all clean-living, middle-to-upper-class types leaving behind a grieving yet photogenic family.” Nelson’s tone was so dry that Sanne feared for the welfare of the potted plant on her desk.
“Well, you sound as if you’re on the right lines.” Eleanor supported the small of her back as she stood. “I doubt I can spare anyone to assist, but I’ll let you know if that changes.”
Sanne waited until Eleanor had almost reached her office. “Did I forget anything?” she whispered to Nelson.
“Nope, you were very thorough.” He smiled softly at her as she eased her grip on her mouse mat. “Come on. I’ll make you a brew.”
*
“I don’t want…to die.” The young woman was wheezing at the midpoint of each sentence. “I’ve…got kids. Don’t let…me die.”
Meg straightened the nebuliser the woman was grappling with and caught her hand. “You’re not going to die, Chloe. Any minute now, all those drugs I’ve given you are going to kick in and you’ll feel fabulous.” She reconsidered. “Well, maybe not fabulous, but definitely less crappy.”
Adjusting the flow of the IV, she watched the numbers on the monitor climb down from critical to borderline stable, and allowed herself to relax. Despite her assurances, she knew Chloe had been peri-arrest on her arrival in Resus. Although Meg was adept at hiding her panic face from patients, she preferred not to have her control of it tested so thoroughly.
“Good girl,” she said. “You’re doing really well.”
Chloe’s teeth began to chatter, but she was calming, her breathing becoming less laboured.
Meg tucked a blanket under her chin and squeezed her hand. “Better?”
Chloe nodded.
“You going to stay away from your mate’s codeine from now on?” Meg asked. A more vigorous nod made her smile. “Excellent.”
She watched Chloe’s eyes close as the medication took hold, and for a second she felt as exhausted as Chloe looked. She swayed, grabbing the bed’s railing, as Liz came into the bay with a fresh bag of fluid in her hand.
“You all right?” Liz asked.
“I’m fine,” she said with little conviction.
“Anything I can do?”
Meg stared at the monitor, where Chloe’s baseline obs were all within normal range. “Can you cover for me for five minutes? I really need to make a phone call.”
“Of course I can. Make mine a white coffee, one sugar, when you come back.”
“Deal.”
Poking her head out of Resus, Meg checked the corridor. At the far end, a paramedic was marching a bloodstained drunk toward the waiting room, but the coast was otherwise clear. Meg made it to the ambulance bay without anyone noticing her, and slinked into the shadows behind the store of oxygen cylinders, where a littering of cigarette butts showed a blatant disregard for health and safety in any form. Lacking time to second-guess herself, she selected Sanne’s number from her mobile’s directory.
The phone only rang once before Sanne answered.
“Hey,” Meg said.
“Hey yourself.”
Meg could hear the smile in Sanne’s voice and wondered whether she was feeling the same rush of relief and happiness and regret. She leaned against the cold bricks and tried not to cry.
“You still there?” Sanne asked, sounding worried now.
“Yep, still here. Sorry I didn’t call earlier. Everything’s gone to shit at the Royal, as usual.”
“I suspected as much. I’ve spent the afternoon at Malory, knee-deep in a decomp.”
“Oh, how lovely.”
“It was joyous.” Sanne sighed, and her voice dropped, signalling the end of the small talk. “Meg, what the hell is going on? What’s Luke up to?”
The bluntness of the questions made Meg close her eyes in gratitude. She didn’t have to explain or fudge the truth. She could answer, and Sanne would understand implicitly.
“He’s looking for money from the house, and he hurt Mum,” she whispered. “He’s an arsehole, a fucking arsehole, and if I knew where he was I’d go round there and tear him apart.” She banged her head back on the bricks, a sting of pain tempering some of her anger and setting her ears ringing.
She dimly heard Sanne ask what time she finished work and gave her a rough guess that would probably be wrong.
“I’ll meet you in the ambulance bay,” Sanne said. “Promise me you won’t do anything daft before then.”
“Can I do something daft afterward?” Meg asked, but her rush of fury had dissipated, leaving her with only a headache to show for it.
Sanne ignored the bait. “Ambulance bay, about one-ish,” she said. “Don’t worry if you’re late. I’ll wait till you’re done.”
*
Sanne checked her watch for the fourth time in twenty minutes. In front of her car, an ambulance pulled away from the bay, its blues coming on as it immediately copped for another job. It was 1:30 a.m. on a Friday morning, but there were three ambulances parked beneath the canopy, their crews still busy in A&E, and every vehicle she had seen leave had gone out with its blues on, heading for another emergency. No one seemed to sleep anymore. There was no longer a lull in the witching hours when the city rested and those on the front line got a chance to regroup and take a break. Someone somewhere was always drunk, or getting smacked, or going online to find out whether that muscular ache in their chest could be something more sinister.
Sanne shook her head in the darkness. Her own chest had given her some twinges when she had arrived at the hospital. She wondered whether it was trepidation at seeing Meg or a reaction to being back beneath the ambulance canopy for the first time since last summer. Most likely, she supposed, it was a combination of the two.
When the A&E entrance swung open, she gave it only half a glance, sure that another crew would wander out, plastic cups of cadged brews cradled in their hands like precious trophies. Instead it was Meg, who paused to scan the crowd of vehicles, recognised Sanne’s, and hurried across to it. The passenger door opened seconds later, bringing in a blast of cold air and then Meg, before Sanne had a chance to fret or panic or realise that her pulse rate had shot back through the roof.
“Bloody hell, it’s nippy out there,” Meg said. “So say my nips.”
Sanne laughed at the familiar joke, forgetting her nerves and pre-planned greetings, as Meg had no doubt intended. She started the engine and nosed past the ambulances. “Don’t know about you,” she said, “but I could murder a kebab.”
*
Abdul’s on Croft Street wasn’t much to look at from the outside, but its reputation as one of Sheffield’s best takeaways was well deserved. It also had a small cafe area for those who weren’t minded to stagger home through the sleet eating from a paper wrap. The local pubs had emptied hours earlier, so there was a table free for Meg and Sanne to pile high with lamb and chicken shish kebabs, chips, and glasses of mango lassi. They swapped halves of the kebabs without negotiation, and tucked in for a few silent, satisfied minutes.
“How’s your mum?” Sanne asked, once her stomach no longer felt as if it were digesting itself.
Meg dabbed her lips with a napkin, which made a change from wiping her face on her sleeve. “She’s okay. I spoke to Ros a few hours ago, and she said she was in bed and settled. Luke doesn’t h
ave a fucking clue how much that place costs or how far gone Mum is now. When he couldn’t get her to tell him where the money was, he tried to yank her rings right off her fingers, the bastard.”
“Jesus. Did you call the police?”
“No, I just called you. What good would reporting it do? My mum was the only witness, and she’s not capable of making a complaint. I don’t know where he is, so it’s not as if you could get someone to go round and smack some sense into him.”
Sanne almost choked on a chip. “I don’t think we’re allowed to do that anymore. I’m pretty sure the brass frown on it. And I can’t PNC him—sorry, that’s the police national computer—not without making it official. I’d get my arse handed to me.” She hesitated, not wanting to reveal she was already walking a fine line at work, because Meg would want to know why. “I can put out some feelers, though. See if any of the patrol officers have heard he’s back in the area, and then nip around for a chat if we track him down. Do you think he’s been in prison again?”
Meg shrugged. “It’s possible. He’s been out of the loop for three years, which is a good indicator. Either that or he’s pissed someone off and had to keep his head down.”
“He should be easy enough to find if he’s out on licence,” Sanne said, wondering whether her new best friend from the Malory case would be willing to do her a favour and what she might want in return. “Leave it with me. And try not to worry, okay?”
That seemed to be good enough for Meg, who bit into her kebab with renewed vigour. Sanne made a chip butty with a piece of pitta, dipped it in ketchup, and took a gleeful bite.
“I like your hair,” she said at length, using her improvised sandwich to outline Meg’s new style. It was longer than she had ever seen it, and Meg had used a plethora of clips and kirby grips to wrestle it under control. Nothing else seemed to have changed, though. Meg hadn’t taken to wearing makeup or designer clothes, and after her initial attempt with the napkin, she now seemed content to leave grease smeared around her mouth.
“Yeah?” She stole a chip from Sanne’s fingers. “It’s a pain in the arse, really, but Em seems to prefer it. Come summer, I’m having it all chopped off again.”
Sanne squirted more ketchup on her chips. “How is Em?” she asked, trying to keep things casual. The nickname felt too familiar for someone she hardly knew, but it was her own fault that they weren’t better acquainted.
“She’s fine. Tired, like the rest of us. She finished Ortho last month and moved to Medical Assessment. Our shifts clash more often than not, but it’s nice when we’re together. We get on well.” Meg paused to mop up yoghurt dressing, taking her time about it, her eyes on the plate. “I didn’t mean for it to happen, San, any of it, and I really didn’t want to lose you.” Sauce slopped across the table as she gesticulated with the pitta bread. “God, I’ve made such a fucking mess of everything.”
Sanne passed her another napkin, and Meg looked at it in confusion before noticing the splashes of sauce.
“I meant us, not the bloody table,” she said.
“We’re not a mess,” Sanne said. “And you’ve not lost me. I’m where I always was.”
Meg gave her a look, the one that said “don’t bullshit me” with a mere arch of her eyebrow. “Sanne Jensen, you are slipperier than a fish to get hold of on the phone, and you always have an excuse not to visit. After the first couple of months, I got to the point where I stopped trying so damn hard. If you were mad at me, I wanted to be mad at you too.”
The smell of fat and meat began to turn Sanne’s stomach. She pushed her plate away and brought her lassi closer. “I wasn’t mad at you. I was never mad at you. I just didn’t want to be the dog in the manger.”
“The dog in the what, now?”
“The manger. My mum always used to say it. You know, when you don’t want something yourself, but you sit in it anyway, just to stop anyone else from having it.”
“Huh.” Meg sucked on her straw and then spoke around the end of it. “So I’m the manger?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“And you were afraid of sitting in me? Am I getting this right?”
“You’re skirting the crux of it.” Sanne knew when Meg had worked it out, because her face fell.
“So you really didn’t want me?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t think I knew what I wanted,” Sanne said, hating herself for telling the truth, even though she knew Meg would have caught a lie. “I never know what I want till I’ve fucked it up.”
Behind the counter, the grill sizzled, sending up a cloud of aromatic smoke as the chef threw something on it and called out to the deliveryman in Urdu. Meg waited out the brief influx of noise, her eyes locked on Sanne’s.
“Made a bit of a bugger of things, didn’t we?” she said when the men quietened.
Sanne shook her head vehemently. “No, don’t say that. Whatever was going on with us, it was always going to end, Meg. If it’d been perfect, we would never have kept dating other people.”
Meg mulled this over, stirring her lassi. “I suppose not,” she said, but her words were laced with uncertainty.
“What did Emily say about Luke?” Sanne asked, trying to steer the conversation into less choppy water. She saw Meg wince and begin to pick at the chipped Formica on the tabletop. “Oh for fuck’s sake, have you not told her?”
“No.” When Meg looked up again, tears were brimming in her eyes. “Can we get out of here, please?”
*
Outside, snow had started to fall, a flurry of pellet-like flakes that left a crunchy layer on the pavement. Meg used a scraped-up handful to clean the grease from her fingers and cool her cheeks. At the crossroads, she looked to Sanne for guidance before choosing at random, heading down a tree-lined street whose huge detached houses were now split into flats and hostels. A front door slammed, and a man shouted abuse in a language that might have been Polish as he careened up the road ahead of them. Meg slowed her pace to keep him at a distance and turned to Sanne.
“Do you remember when you came out, San?”
Sanne nodded, her hazel eyes sombre in the intermittent light from the streetlamps. “Yeah. I think that’s the most scared I’ve ever been.” She paused, and Meg assumed she was factoring in the night Billy Cotter had tried to murder her. Her breath escaped in staggered clouds of white as she shivered. “I was a good few years before you, wasn’t I? I begged my mum not to tell my dad, and she promised me she wouldn’t, so Michael tried to blackmail my pocket money out of me for a month and then told him anyway.”
“The little shit.” Meg brushed snow off a low wall and pulled Sanne’s coat sleeve until she sat beside her.
“Don’t have much luck with brothers, do we?” Sanne said.
“That’s putting it mildly.” Shrugging forward to keep herself warm, Meg tucked her hands into her pockets. “I can’t forget the look on my mum’s face when I finally plucked up the courage to tell her. I barely recognised her. Her lips went into this thin furious line, and I didn’t know whether she was going to cry or batter me. She did both, in the end, but I never want to see that look again, San. Not ever.”
“If you’re worrying about Emily, I think she might already know you’re gay, love,” Sanne said gently, but her knees were drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around them protectively, and Meg suspected she had worked out the real issue.
“I’ve told her a lot about me,” Meg said. “She knows I grew up on Halshaw and that I paid my way through uni by working on the market. She knows about Mum, and how little is left of my wage once Rainscroft and my mortgage and student loans have been taken out of it.” Meg felt Sanne’s cold hand slip into hers and squeezed the fingers tight. “I’m not ashamed of any of that—I never have been—but I don’t know how to tell her that my dad buggered off to London with a girl just out of secondary school, or that Luke smacked me and Mum around for years and neither of us could do a thing to stop him.”
The breath she took seemed to stic
k in her throat. She hadn’t spoken that truth aloud since that summer’s day spent sunbathing with Sanne on the back field. She couldn’t remember how old they had been—eleven, or maybe twelve?—just the scents of freshly cut grass and lemonade, and that Sanne had seen her wince as she lay down. Back then, it hadn’t been a big deal. Sanne’s dad regularly clouted her too, and after listening to Meg’s whispered confession, she had kept the secret without question. Once she reached adulthood, Meg understood that it should have been a big deal, that even if your dad left, your brother wasn’t supposed to black your eye or punch you so hard that you pissed blood. Her teachers had ignored the bruises, though, and the prospect of being taken into care had terrified her into silence. Luke, for his part, had eventually learned how not to leave a mark.
Meg stared up at the blizzard swirling beneath the streetlamp, each flake drifting to the pavement in the end, like a singed moth giving in to gravity. Right then, she knew the feeling.
“You were the only one I ever told, San,” she said. “And it’s not been an issue for so long now that I never thought I’d have to tell anyone else. It’d be like coming out all over again. Emily’s from Harrogate, for fuck’s sake!”
Sanne gave a shocked gasp, hand on heart, mouth agape. “Oh good Lord, not Harrogate! What’s a scrubber like you doing with a posh girl like that?” She nudged Meg hard enough to rock her sideways, letting her know how daft she was being.
Meg covered her face with her hands. “Sod off,” she mumbled. “I’m being serious here.”
“I know.” Sanne pulled Meg’s hands down and waited until she looked at her. “And I get it, love. It’s not like I wear a Team Halshaw T-shirt to work, is it?”
“I suppose not.” Meg licked snow from her lips, its chill a welcome balm for her dry mouth. “I’m not sure which would be worse: Em wondering what the hell she’s got herself into, or her viewing me as a pity project. She can be a bit of a bleeding heart at times.”
