Dead To Me (2 page)

2

‘RACHEL BAILEY.’

She said it like a threat, thought Janet, studying the woman who slammed her bag down on the desk facing hers and looked about as if disgruntled at what she found.

‘DC,’ Rachel Bailey added, and message delivered, gave a nod. Sat down.

‘Janet Scott,’ Janet said.

‘Yeah, she said she wanted to put me with you.’

Oh, joy. Janet kept her expression open, pleasant, as she wondered what on earth Gill was playing at. They were already carrying Kevin, a knob who did knobby things, as a favour to Gill’s mate on one of the other syndicates. And now she pitches up with a kid who has far too much attitude, a half-sneer on her face, and should have gone into modelling or lap-dancing, got the looks for it, and dumps her on Janet.

Janet went back to her screen, checking through her
emails
, clearing her actions completed, getting up to speed on work in progress.

‘So – you been here long?’ Rachel Bailey asked.

Janet was reminded of playground interrogations –
what’s your name, where d’you live
? All front and nerves shredding underneath.

‘Thirteen years, twenty-five on the job.’

Rachel froze, looked at her. ‘Straight up?’

Why would I lie? ‘Yeah.’

‘Never gone for promotion?’ Rachel said.

‘Yeah.’ Shaking her head slightly,
tragic or what
? Janet wasn’t bothered. She knew she was good at her job. She’d done a shedload of courses and got all the accreditations to prove it. She’d not the slightest interest in climbing the greasy pole. For what? Ulcers and politics and even more pressure? Promotion was a route away from the coalface, from the hands-on, face-to-face, stink-in-your-nose reality of catching killers. Gill Murray never got to so much as interview a suspect or a witness any more. She went to the scene and the post-mortem and she coordinated each investigation, managing her team, thinking about loopholes and implications, complications. Assessing evidence as they delivered it to her: was it robust enough for the CPS? Would it stand up in Crown Court? At appeal, in Europe? None of that pushed any buttons for Janet. She wanted to be eyeball-to-eyeball with the people who had done it, the people who had seen what was done. Making them sing.

‘Not long till retirement,’ Rachel observed, pegging Janet for Mrs Average, time-server. The girl clicked her mouse, began to peer at her monitor. ‘Kids?’ Rachel asked.

‘Two,’ Janet said, a little echo of sadness inside. Happy for the newcomer to pigeonhole her: working mum, not fully committed either way, never gone for promotion, not had the drive, the vision, the brains. Mediocre. Just hanging on for her pension. Shoot me now.

The girl gave her a pitying look, then, losing interest, swivelled in her chair, scoping the room again. No one else in yet. Quarter to eight. The kid sighed, pulled her hair – glossy brown and waved (an effect that would take Janet’s eldest, Elise, all morning to achieve) – up into a ponytail, let it drop.

‘What about you?’ Janet kept it civil.

‘God no. Not the maternal type.’

She sounded almost like a teenager, that practised disdain, but she must be in her late twenties, Janet guessed. ‘Where were you before?’ Teeth not quite gritted.

‘Sex Crimes, with Sutton,’ Rachel said.

‘John Sutton?’

Rachel nodded, glanced at her watch. ‘I need a fag. Is there …’ She whirled a finger in the air, asking for directions.

Janet toyed with the idea of sending her the wrong way, but only because the girl had got her back up. She’d never be that petty. ‘Along the corridor, down the stairs, side door on the ground floor.’

Rachel snatched her bag and swung herself to her feet.

Janet watched her go. Took a breath, lowered her shoulders and returned to her inbox.

The office was open-plan, not a large space, desks crammed together in pairs, each with its computer terminal and phone. There was a bigger meeting room off it, which they used for briefings. Gill had a room to herself, roughly two and a half paces from Janet’s desk. She was generally visible through the glass partition, unless she closed her blinds. It was a bad sign when the blinds went down. The team would wait, people trying to work more quietly, waiting to see who was in for a bollocking.

Gill was in before the others and Rachel was still off having her nicotine fix so Janet went straight into Gill’s office.

The DCI had barely got her coat off when Janet jumped in: ‘Why me?’

Gill froze, tilted her head to one side. ‘It’s an interesting philosophical question, kid, but you’re going to have to give me a bit more …’

‘Rachel Bailey.’

‘She’s here?’ Gill beamed.

‘I don’t want her,’ Janet said.

‘Reason?’

‘I’ve already got one teenager at home, and her sister’s in a permanent state of revolution, I can do without it at work. Why put her with me? Put her with Mitch.’

‘What’s she done to you?’ Gill was shifting through
paperwork
on her desk now, easing into her chair. ‘She’s only been here five minutes.’

‘Five minutes too long. Who sent her?’

‘I picked her.’

‘You picked her,’ Janet said, appalled. ‘Can’t you unpick her?’

‘She’s a bit rough around the edges,’ Gill allowed.

‘Dog rough,’ said Janet. A pit bull bitch, she thought but that seemed too harsh. Rude. ‘Give her to Pete or Lee, or any of them.’

Gill took her glasses from her case, set them down and stared at Janet for a moment, then slapped her palms on her desk. ‘She stays with you. That’s how I want it.’

‘Gill,’ Janet groaned.

‘End of.’ Gill held up her hands, brooking no further discussion.

‘Six weeks,’ Janet tried. ‘If I still feel the same …’

‘We’ll see.’

‘We’ll see!’ Janet mocked, laughing. ‘We’ll see? That’s what I say to the girls: “We’ll see.” It usually means,
No, but I haven’t got the energy to argue with you now
.’

‘You’ll be good for her.’ Gill slid her glasses on and began to open files on her computer.

‘Sounds like a parasitic relationship,’ Janet said.

‘Symbiotic – she’ll bring a bit of life into the place, shake the dust off.’

‘What are you saying?’ Was Gill implying she’d grown stale?

At that point, Rachel strode back into the outer room, distracted but altering her demeanour, straightening her spine, as she caught sight of Gill through the glass.

‘Welcome,’ Gill shouted, waved a hand but didn’t get to her feet. ‘Team meeting in ten. Pack drill then.’

Rachel nodded. ‘Great.’ She sat back at her desk.

Janet waited for a second longer, but Gill, already devouring the information on the screen, pointed a finger towards the door. Dismissed.

As Janet sat down, Rachel leaned forward and whispered, ‘What’s she like? Bit of a dragon?’ signalling with an upward flick of her eyes that she meant Gill in the office behind her.

‘Gill?’ Janet moved closer, eyes narrowing, sneaky and confidential. ‘She’s fucking brilliant!’

3

GILL DROVE OVER
to Collyhurst, the furthest southern corner of their patch. The neighbourhood was spitting distance from Manchester city centre, nudging up to the Northern Quarter, where redevelopment had seen the decaying rag-trade warehouses converted into flats and most of the old porn shops transformed into bijou cafés and boutiques. Collyhurst was still a poor place, even with the splurge for the Commonwealth Games back in 2002 and the building of the new stadium nearby and the Velodrome. Whatever all the ‘new jobs’ were, it didn’t seem as though many of the long-term un employed in Collyhurst had got a look in. Pick a side road, any side road, and you’d soon spot the poverty. And Gill, like any copper with half a brain knew that poverty and crime were dancing partners. Plenty of families round here where thieving or domestic violence was passed on in the genes, imbibed with the baby formula and the rusks. Handy for prison visiting, though: if your nearest and dearest were doing time in Strangeways you could see the prison from the rise on Rochdale Road across the railway lines.

By the time Gill was a beat bobby, drugs had arrived, and the mad mobsters had moved in. Hard men from Salford and Eccles who saw an opportunity to make a shitload of money. The burglary and brawling of the earlier years were replaced by turf wars and outbreaks of astonishing violence by the gangsters, accompanied by a spate of muggings and petty thefts by junkies needing a fix. When Gill moved into MIT in the 1990s everyone had come to the party: gangs in Cheetham, Longsight, Moss Side, links to Birmingham and Liverpool. The bloodbath peaked in 1999, over two hundred and forty shots fired, forty-three injured, seven dead and not a witness on the face of the earth. Gill had worked a few of those. Even got a conviction or two, against all the odds. Then they set up the special squad to tackle the scourge. Developed inter-agency strategies. Things had changed since then. Quieter now, a combination of prevention programmes and good detection, a rigorous support service for vulnerable and intimidated witnesses, weapons amnesties. As recently as 2008 they’d taken a whole load of drug scumbags off the streets, seriously weakening the gangs. The drugs were still out there, the dealers still busy and the related crimes went on, but it didn’t feel quite the same lawless frontier country, Gunchester, of the 1990s.

Gill checked the address, Fairland Avenue, and took a left into the estate.

I’ve already got one teenager, Janet had complained.
She
wasn’t far wrong; there was something bratty about Rachel Bailey. Gill knew next to nothing about her background, but she could tell it wasn’t silver spoon and skiing holidays. Local girl, she’d a wild edge to her, something simmering beneath the cover girl looks and the shrewd expression. And she was hungry for a chance. Gill could sense that. Drinking everything in at the morning’s induction yet impatient to get on with the real work, the dirty work. Like me, Gill thought, the raw ambition.

Gill parked in the last remaining place on the pavement. The short street was cluttered with vans and cars. She got out and stood, took a moment first, considering the location. Only one route into the cul-de-sac, which forked off Gargrave Street, the main thoroughfare of the estate. Twenty houses in all, a turning circle at the far end. A gaggle of neighbours had gathered there, uniforms keeping them behind the tape. Victim’s house, second on the right from the junction, number 3A. The houses opposite would have a clear view of anyone coming and going if they were peering out of their windows. It would be getting dark soon, the CSIs were making the most of the fading light, photographing and scouring the area immediately outside the house.

She put on her protective clothes and drew up her hood. Andy Pandy, ready to go and introduce herself to the CSM.

The houses were divided into flats, separate entrances, maisonettes really. ‘It’s the downstairs flat,’ the uniform on the cordon told her as he logged her in.

Gill raised her hands, almost a surrender pose, though her palms faced her ears not forward. Looked daft. Some people chose to stuff their hands in their pockets, or laced their fingers together, got a bit sweaty in the gloves like that. All tricks to safeguard against mucking everything up by smearing fingerprints or other trace evidence: spittle, dandruff, cosmetics, snot, blood, that lurked waiting for detection and recovery. Door frames, handles – all would be examined. Gill’s very first dead body on MIT, she’d leaned against a door-jamb and got a four-star bollocking from her boss. Since then she’d used the hands-up technique; she didn’t want her hands in her pockets because she needed her hands to think, to analyse, to communicate.

‘You’re like a bloody windmill,’ Janet once told her, ‘or someone on the tote, at the races.’

One Christmas the team bought her a pair of white cotton gloves, the kind a magician wore. Gill had got very pissed at the works party and waxed lyrical about how what they did
was
magic of a sort. Dark magic, maybe, solving the sordid little details of the crime, turning a tragedy into an achievement.

‘For who?’ Andy had objected, winking at Janet. ‘We’ve still got a dead body. Someone’s still lost a family member.’

‘But they know how, why. And that’s all we can do for them,’ she had said, taking another swig of vodka. ‘Give them the story, the facts, the name, the face … At least we can do that.’ She had sliced at one hand with the other for emphasis, and Janet had laughed and shaken her head. ‘Without that they are in bloody limbo for ever,’ Gill said. They all knew that. Lee and Mitch had nodded, muttering in agreement.

She had drunk way too much that night; it wasn’t long after Dave had gone walkabout, and she’d ended up curled over a bog in the Ladies, with Janet holding her hair out of the way and saying, ‘Time for bed, Houdini. Got you a cab.’

Gill walked through the tiny porch on the stepping plates that had been laid down and turned ninety degrees into the narrow hallway, noting the bathroom immediately to the right. Straight ahead, a bedroom. The door ajar. Gill took in the mattress on the floor, the carpet littered with clothes and scraps of paper, cigarette papers, DVD cases, burn marks on the carpet. Someone had once attempted to redecorate the far wall either side of the window. It was painted a muddy ginger shade, reminding Gill of parkin, the cake they ate round Bonfire Night. But they’d obviously lost heart and the edge near the ceiling still showed the cream woodchip paper underneath. Gill could smell damp in the room mixing with the rank stench of stale fag ends and, peering carefully round the door, saw an area in the corner there mottled with mildew. She didn’t go in, it had yet to be examined. The next ninety-degree turn took her past a storage cupboard on the right and into the living room at the end. The smell was different here, unpleasantly metallic.