by Cari Hunter
“Must’ve slipped his mind. He brought me a Yorkie instead.”
She laughs. “Got his priorities straight, then. We didn’t find any keys, other than the ones for the rental cottage. I can only assume they were thrown out in the crash.”
I focus on the paper and decide not to challenge that assumption. Wallace must have given me his own set of keys for Rebecca’s flat. The addresses mean nothing to me. Apparently, I live in Chorlton and my alias lived in Gorton, and both areas have Manchester postcodes.
“At least you have somewhere to aim for now,” Pryce says.
I open the wallet. “And seventy quid.”
“Don’t spend it all at once.” She stands to leave, and I slip off the bed to walk her to the door. She opens the door a crack but doesn’t go through. “I’ll keep you updated.”
“Thank you.” The polite exchange is our standard method of parting, yet it feels different this time, cut through with something I can’t put my finger on. I shake the hand she offers. Her grip is strong and solid, and I have to bite my tongue to stop myself shutting the door again and telling her all my secrets.
I don’t wave her off or watch her walk down the corridor. I go back to sitting on my bed, waiting for something else to happen.
Chapter Seven
My brother never arrives. Ceinwen comes in to deliver his apologies; it would seem another family emergency has trumped this lesser family emergency, and he will phone me at a later, unspecified time. Undeterred, I gather my meagre belongings and persuade her to arrange a taxi. She hugs me at the ward entrance, and I exchange the chocolates I’ve bought at the newsagents for Wallace’s battered plastic bag.
“Good luck,” she says. She feathers her fingers through my fringe and nods her approval. “You’ll be fine, Alis. Go on, now. You don’t want some old dear stealing your taxi.”
I kiss her cheek, too choked up to do anything but clutch my bag and walk away. This small ward has been my sole place of safety. I know its layout, its routines, and its staff, and everything that lies beyond its entrance seems dense with threat and unpredictability—with the possible exception of Muhammad, that is, who beams at me as I approach his taxi, and then ushers me into its back seat.
“Train station,” he says. “You in a rush, no?”
“No, no rush.” I don’t have a timetable, and I’m too busy fighting off the minor panic attack induced by fastening my seat belt to worry about missing the next train.
He peers into his rearview mirror as he pulls from the bay. “You all fixed now?” he asks. His eyes stray to the ridge of sutures splitting my hair.
“Yes,” I gasp between heaving breaths, obviously far from fixed. My fingers start to tingle and then contort like claws, and I shut my mouth, sucking air in through my nose until my chest is burning, but I’m no longer panting as if sprinting for a photo finish.
Tempting though it is to cower on the seat and ask Muhammad to just drive around in circles for the rest of the day, I find that the more I do independently, the more confident I become. I tip Muhammad and manage to spend thirty-odd quid on a ticket to Manchester Piccadilly without stumbling over which banknote is which. The 9:22 is running late. I buy a Manchester A-Z in WHSmith and stand alone on the platform like a knock-off Paddington Bear for whom no one packed a lunch or supplied a proper suitcase.
Prominent wounds and an accompanying whiff of institutional shampoo guarantee me a seat on my own. I settle by the window and look out at deserted, wind-lashed beaches and seaside towns battened down and dormant for the winter. As the train rattles through Colwyn Bay, I picture Pryce at her desk, diligently at work on another case now that she’s handed mine off to MMP. I see her laughing and cheerful, because she’s probably less taciturn with her colleagues. Besides which, she has a really pretty smile.
We leave the sea views and then Wales behind and head back into England. A change at Crewe hurtles us into the northern towns. We cross Stockport’s huge redbrick viaduct, and I crane my neck to spot the stupid blue pyramid that marks Junction 1 on the M60. The outskirts of Manchester slow the train to a crawl, and that skin-prickling sensation I described to Pryce afflicts me again as we enter beaten-down neighbourhoods with their tightly pressed terraced streets. I catch glimpses of the A6—the bottleneck road connecting Stockport to Manchester—and I remember weaving around the taxis and buses, blues on and sirens blaring, and cursing at the pedestrians who’d wander out regardless. Ardwick, where I rented our car, sits five minutes away, off a parallel feeder road, while Gorton is farther to the east. I plot my route to Rebecca’s address using the A-Z and then tuck it out of sight again, unwilling to look like a guest in my hometown. Jo and I would catch the bus to work together. We’d sit on the top deck to reduce the impact of the potholes, and get stoned on the second-hand smoke from the schoolkids’ joints.
Station Approach at Piccadilly is a heaving melee of besuited business types avoiding the no-fixed-abodes scavving on the floor for fag ends, and the students eating bacon butties. The occasional lost tourist adds an extra obstacle to the slalom, their wheeled trolleys clattering over the paving flags and getting in everyone’s way. I lurk at the periphery, holding my bag close to my chest while I gather my bearings. From this vantage point, I can see the main bus stops: number 192 from the front stand, and 200-205 from the middle and rear. Any of the 200s would take me to Rebecca’s, and I still have her pass in my wallet. A free ride beats wasting another tenner on a taxi, so I wander slowly down to the stop. Even with my bruises and the chunk missing from my hair, it’s easy to blend in with a crowd entirely taken up with its own business, and I join a loose queue, willing the driver of the 201 to get off his phone and open the door.
Sticky heat envelops me when we’re finally allowed to board, the windows streaming with the condensation generated by commuters herded in and trapped together for the hour-long slog into the city. I show the driver my pass, and he waves me on, unaware that I’m no longer the woman grinning at him from its photo. Huddled on one of the elevated seats, I tick off the journey’s landmarks, my eyes peeled for the Tesco superstore and Mabs, the decades-old, recession-resistant lighting shop. I ping the bell at Tesco and help a teenaged mum extricate a double buggy and a chickenpox-covered child.
“Ta, chuck,” she says, and I smile at her accent and the general hubbub that surrounds me as I step off into Gorton.
Standing aside to let the girl steer her brood past, I count two streets up from Mabs, realising as I do so that I needn’t have bothered: the bright yellow awning of Louella’s Caribbean Cafe is like a beacon amid the second-hand furniture shops and cheap takeaways, and it sits right on the corner of the street I need. Chivvied by the automated peep of a pedestrian crossing, I hurry over the main road. Gorton’s back streets are not a good place to hang around looking indecisive, and my keys are in my hand before I reach Louella’s. I take a right and then the second left onto Turing Avenue, striding along as if I’m not using the painted numbers on the wheelie bins to gauge my progress. Elevated above the street, the three-storey terraced houses might once have been sought after, but the area has gone to shit around them, and most are divided into bedsits or used as hostels. Number sixteen looks much like the others, but subtle distinguishing features—the pattern of missing flagstones on its narrow path, and the flower pots optimistically arranged by the entrance, lush with weeds—click something in my memory and confirm I’m in the right place.
The front door swings open when I push it, and I have a vivid recollection of a running battle with the landlord to get the lock fixed. Soft jazz drifts from the ground floor flat, bringing with it the scent of dope and home baking. I once accepted a piece of carrot cake from Bernie and spent the rest of the afternoon lying on my bed giving names to all the mould patches on the ceiling.
Climbing the two flights of stairs knocks the wind out of me. It’s already been a long day, and I feel like a nowty toddler, achy and hungry and overdue a nap. Too weary to be apprehensive, I unlo
ck Flat C and drop my bag, splaying my palm against the wall of the narrow hallway until my head stops spinning. When I slap the light switch, a low-energy bulb gradually brightens the magnolia wallpaper and picks out the tatty but cheerful runner that covers most of the bargain basement laminate flooring.
The layout is simple: bedroom and living room to the right, bathroom and kitchen to the left. I use the loo and then wash hours of travelling from my face, luxuriating in soap that smells of honey and vanilla, and a towel that doesn’t grate the top layer from my skin. It’s weird to be home but not home, because everything here is in keeping with Rebecca’s budget rather than that of a detective constable, so the toiletries are supermarket own brand, and when my rumbling stomach directs me to the kitchen, the first cupboard I open is full of Aldi baked beans and soups. I came here to find my case files and my laptop, but I can’t think beyond emptying a tin of beef and chunky veg broth into a saucepan and stuffing my face with a handful of stale imitation Ritz. Half a packet of crackers later, I leave the soup to simmer and go to explore the remaining rooms.
The first of two closed doors leads to the bedroom. I stop dead on its threshold, a cracker poised between my teeth.
“Fuck.”
The room has been ransacked, every drawer emptied and tossed. The bedding and mattress lie gutted, hacked open with something serrated, and the lava lamp that entertained me for hours the day Bernie got me stoned is bleeding fluid and green gel onto the carpet.
“Shit, shit, shit!”
I drop to my knees and lay my hand on the wet patch. It’s still soaking and spreading, and I scramble backward like a crippled crab, my eyes darting to the wardrobe, the bed frame, anywhere an intruder with a knife might hide.
I cringe as I hit the doorjamb, the thud of bone on wood reverberating through the tiny flat. I haven’t been quiet since I got here, though. I’ve flushed the toilet, banged cupboards, and rooted through the cutlery for a tin opener, and no one’s pounced on me or attempted to make a run for it.
A determined mantra of “It’s probably just a burglary” gets me off the floor. I bring the remnants of the lava lamp with me, leading with the sharp end as I check the room for bogeymen and then head back into the hallway. I don’t tiptoe or creep. If someone is lying in wait for me, I want them to think I’m blundering obliviously toward my fate, not armed with broken glass and fully prepared to use it.
The destruction of the living room has obviously been interrupted by my arrival. The bookshelves on the far side of the room are upended, their contents strewn about. The near side is as yet untouched. I can’t see the perpetrator, but I only have an instant to brace myself before a man barrels out from behind the sofa and launches me into the hallway. I manage a couple of wild slashes as I slump against the wall, earning a splatter of blood that’s rewarded with a kick in my guts.
“Stupid fucking slag!” he snarls, and lands another kick.
I vomit crackers onto his laces and slip from his grasp, my efforts with the glass now limited to stabbing at his ankles. He curses again, his voice disappearing beneath the roar of my ear going to shit, and he belts me with a weighted rucksack as he shakes his leg free. I’m too far off balance to grab the bag, so I settle for making myself as small a target as possible and not provoking him further. He steps over me, his boot landing an inch from my nose, and seconds later the front door slams behind him.
I close my eyes, quite happy to stay put for a while, secure in a ball, with Ella Fitzgerald crooning faintly in my good ear and my knees drawn up to lessen the throbbing in my belly.
The smell of burning soup eventually forces me to my feet. I groan as pain twists through my abdomen, but everything’s relative, and I’ve had worse over the last week. Using the wall as a prop, I limp into the kitchen and extinguish the gas. Thick smoke is rising from the pan, and it rushes out of the window I open. Three storeys below, Gorton is carrying on as if nothing has happened. A crappy car with an overloud exhaust roars over the speed bumps, and something races along Hyde Road with its sirens blaring.
The sound of someone else’s emergency goads me into action. I’ll have to report the break-in. A normal person, one who doesn’t suspect that the violent invasion of her home may have been an inside job, would report it immediately, and I have to be seen to be acting normally. Allowing myself twenty minutes’ grace, the time it might take Ms. Normality to recover her equilibrium, I use it to process the raided rooms. My laptop is missing, and the hard copies of files I presume are related to my UC assignment are strewn across the small dining table. The man has been clever, not making it obvious that the files were his target. They’re disturbed but appear intact, their pages still neatly bound and numbered. He could easily have used his mobile to photograph the salient details, though, and most of it’s probably duplicated on the laptop, should he manage to crack my password.
I don’t have an inventory of my possessions, but a suspicious gap beneath the telly suggests he’s taken a DVD player or similar, and when I check the drawers in the bedroom I find a jar of small change almost emptied. Sitting on the shredded mattress, I take stock of the carnage and begin to question whether this was the handiwork of anyone other than a smack rat hitting an easy target. It’s as if I’m caught in a grotesque game, where one side is covering up a crime within a crime and I go along with it because their tactic happens to work to my advantage. But then perhaps I’m just being paranoid. Perhaps I timed my homecoming to unfortunate and shitty perfection.
The uncertainty sets my head pounding and kicks up my tinnitus. I dry-swallow a couple of ibuprofen and limp across to the phone on my bedside table. I’m debating which number to call—999? 101? Wallace’s?—when I spot the boots upended and tossed beneath my desk. They’re work boots, my size, steel-toed and sturdy. A stamp on their inner lining marks them as “Property of Hamer & Sons,” and they’re an exact match to the pair that just gave my belly button a deep purple halo.
“Bollocks,” I mutter.
So much for my smack rat theory.
Chapter Eight
The paramedic stands in front of me, her hands on her hips. She is not amused. Neither am I, but I’m not budging from my seat in the kitchen, no matter how many times she taps her foot. Apparently, I “lack capacity” to refuse a trip to the hospital, and try as I might, I can’t convince her that this is due to my pre-existing head injury and not the result of being booted in the abdomen.
“You’re disorientated.” She points to the first item on her paperwork. “You couldn’t tell me the date.”
She’s splitting hairs—my guess was one day out—and she’s starting to piss me off. I’m about to suggest exactly where she can stick her clipboard when Wallace walks in.
“Bloody Nora.” He tips my chin, examining me for fresh damage. “You’ve not been home five minutes.”
“Yeah, hell of a welcoming committee.” I lower his hand, squeezing his pudgy fingers. “I’m okay.”
“She’s not okay,” the paramedic pipes up. “She needs regular neuro obs at the hospital.”
“She’d fail ’em,” Wallace says. Then, to me, “Didn’t you explain all of this?”
I shrug. “Several times, but she has a checklist.”
“How’s about I run you to A&E after we’re finished here?” he says, before turning to the paramedic for her approval. “Any problems in the meantime, I’ll drop the nines again.”
The paramedic huffs and deliberates and then writes a long postscript absolving her of any responsibility should my grey matter suddenly leak from my nose. I accept a copy and promise to take it with me on the trip to A&E that Wallace and I will absolutely not be making. He waits until the front door closes behind her and then he nods to the hallway.
“SOCO are on their way. Did you get a good look at him?”
I shake my head. “Taller than me. White, heavyset, wearing a navy or black jacket and black gloves. He had his hood up, so I couldn’t see his face properly. He knocked me to the floor wit
hin seconds.”
“He hurt you?”
“No.” I fold the ambulance report in two and slip it in my pocket. “No, I’m fine.”
Wallace scratches his jaw but doesn’t push the issue. “How’d he get in?”
Oh shit. In all the excitement, I’d not even considered this. Used the key I’ve not seen since the crash is the most plausible explanation. It wasn’t as if the door was hanging from its hinges when I arrived.
“I’m not sure,” I say, and as we go to have a look, I actually cross my fingers in the hope that the bloke’s been smart enough to leave a mark, no matter how subtle.
“Any idiot with a hairclip and a bit of knowhow could’ve picked this,” Wallace says. He puts a grubby pair of glasses on and peers at the Yale lock. “See these scratches?”
I lean closer and nod at the faint gouges. They’ll do nicely.
“Crafty bastard,” he continues. “I’ll have words with your landlord. The main door is knackered as well.”
“Yeah, I noticed.” I lead him back to the living room, where we survey the mess.
“Jesus. Did he take much?”
“He got my laptop and whatever I had under the telly—possibly a DVD?” I don’t mention the files. I’ve left them as they were, scattered at random in the same manner as the magazines and newspapers I’d kept on the coffee table. “The bedroom is worse than this. I think there’s a bit of cheap jewellery and some money missing, but he trashed everything he set his mucky little paws on.”
“Fucker was probably high as a kite,” Wallace says, and I murmur my accord, keen to encourage this conclusion. He doesn’t spot the incongruity of a perp being dextrous enough to lock pick while smacked off his tits. “Good thing you don’t live here anymore, eh?”
“Aye, there is that.” I lean on the wall as he walks to my bedroom and gives a low whistle. I should be suffering more of a reaction to this, to the shock of being assaulted and of having a stranger violate my privacy, but the day’s traumas have simply slotted beside the accumulated trauma of the past six, and I can’t risk separating them and focusing on any one thing. Not yet.
