Aftermath (2 page)

The leading firefighter, Gary Cullen, walked over to join them. It was Dennis he spoke to, of course; he always did. They were mates.

‘What do you think?’

‘Joyriders.’ Dennis nodded towards the car. ‘We checked the number-plate. Stolen from a nice middle-class residential street in Heaton Moor, Manchester, earlier this evening.’

‘Why here, then?’

‘Dunno. Could be a connection, a grudge or something. Someone giving a little demonstration of his feelings. Drugs, even. But that’s for the lads upstairs to work out. They’re the ones paid to have brains. We’re done for now. Everything safe?’

‘Under control. What if there’s a body in the boot?’

Dennis laughed. ‘It’ll be well done by now, won’t it? Hang on a minute, that’s our radio, isn’t it?’

Janet walked over to the car. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said over her shoulder.

‘Control to 354. Come in please, 354. Over.’

Janet picked up the radio. ‘354 to Control. Over.’

‘Domestic dispute reported taking place at number thirty-five, The Hill. Repeat. Three-five. The Hill. Can you respond? Over.’

Christ, thought Janet, a bloody domestic. No copper in her right mind liked domestics, especially at this time in the morning. ‘Will do,’ she sighed, looking at her watch. ‘ETA three minutes.’

She called over to Dennis, who held up his hand and spoke a few more words to Gary Cullen before responding. They were both laughing when Dennis returned to the car.

‘Tell him that joke, did you?’ Janet asked, settling behind the wheel.

‘Which one’s that?’ Dennis asked, all innocence.

Janet started the car and sped to the main road. ‘You know, the one about the blonde giving her first blow job.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Only I heard you telling it to that new PC back at the station, the lad who hasn’t started shaving yet. You ought to give the poor lad a chance to make his own mind up about women, Den, instead of poisoning him right off the bat.’

The centrifugal force almost threw them off the road as Janet took the roundabout at the top of The Hill too fast. Dennis grasped the dashboard and hung on for dear life. ‘Jesus Christ. Women drivers. It’s only a joke. Have you got no sense of humour?’

Janet smiled to herself as she slowed and kerb-crawled down The Hill looking for number thirty-five.

‘Anyway, I’m getting sick of this,’ Dennis said.

‘Sick of what? My driving?’

‘That, too. Mostly, though, it’s your constant bitching. It’s got so a bloke can’t say what’s on his mind these days.’

‘Not if he’s got a mind like a sewer. That’s pollution. Anyway, it’s changing times, Den. And we have to change with them or we’ll end up like the dinosaurs. By the way, about that mole.’

‘What mole?’

‘You know, the one on your cheek. Next to your nose. The one with all the hairs growing out of it.’

Dennis put his hand up to his cheek. ‘What about it?’

‘I’d get it seen to quick, if I were you. It looks cancerous to me. Ah, number thirty-five. Here we are.’

She pulled over to the right side of the road and came to a halt a few yards past the house. It was a small detached residence built of redbrick and sandstone, between a plot of allotments and a row of shops. It wasn’t much bigger than a cottage, with a slate roof, low-walled garden and a modern garage attached at the right. At the moment, all was quiet.

‘There’s a light on in the hall,’ Janet said. ‘Shall we have a dekko?’

Still fingering his mole, Dennis sighed and muttered something she took to be assent. Janet got out of the car first and walked up the path, aware of him dragging his feet behind her. The garden was overgrown and she had to push twigs and shrubbery aside as she walked. A little adrenalin had leaked into her system, put her on super alert, as it always did with domestics. The reason most cops hated them was that you never knew what was going to happen. As likely as not you’d pull the husband off the wife and then the wife would take his side and start bashing you with a rolling pin.

Janet paused by the door. All quiet, apart from Dennis’s stertorous breathing behind her. It was too early yet for people to be going to work, and most of the late-night revellers had passed out by now. Somewhere in the distance the first birds began to chatter. Sparrows, most likely, Janet thought. Mice with wings.

Seeing no doorbell, Janet knocked on the door.

No response came from inside.

She knocked harder. The hammering seemed to echo up and down the street. Still no response.

Next, Janet went down on her knees and looked through the letterbox. She could just make out a figure sprawled on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. A woman’s figure. That was probably cause enough for forced entry.

‘Let’s go in,’ she said.

Dennis tried the handle. Locked. Then, gesturing for Janet to stand out of the way, he charged the door with his shoulder.

Poor technique, she thought. She’d have reared back and used her foot. But Dennis was a second row rugby forward, she reminded herself, and his shoulders had been pushed up against so many arseholes in their time that they had to be strong.

The door crashed open on first contact and Dennis cannonballed into the hallway, grabbing hold of the bottom of the banister to stop himself from tripping over the still figure that lay there.

Janet was right behind him, but she had the advantage of walking in at a more dignified pace. She closed the door as best she could, knelt beside the woman on the floor and felt for a pulse. Weak, but steady. One side of her face was bathed in blood.

‘My God,’ Janet muttered. ‘Den? You okay?’

‘Fine. You take care of her. I’ll have a look around.’ Dennis headed upstairs.

For once, Janet didn’t mind being told what to do. Nor did she mind that Dennis automatically assumed it was a woman’s work to tend the injured while the man went in search of heroic glory. Well, she
minded
, but she felt a real concern for the victim here, so she didn’t want to make an issue of it.

Bastard
, she thought. Whoever did this. ‘It’s okay, love,’ she said, even though she suspected the woman couldn’t hear her. ‘We’ll get you an ambulance. Just hold on.’

Most of the blood seemed to be coming from one deep cut just above her left ear, Janet noticed, though there was also a little smeared around the nose and lips. Punches, by the looks of it. There were also broken glass and daffodils scattered all around her, along with a damp patch on the carpet. Janet took her personal radio from her belt-hook and called for an ambulance. She was lucky it worked on The Hill; personal UHF radios had much less range than the VHF models fitted in cars, and were notoriously subject to black spots of patchy reception.

Dennis came downstairs shaking his head. ‘Bastard’s not hiding up there,’ he said. He handed Janet a blanket, pillow and towel, nodding to the woman. ‘For her.’

Janet eased the pillow under the woman’s head, covered her gently with the blanket and applied the towel to the seeping wound on her temple. Well, I never, she thought, full of surprises, our Den. ‘Think he’s done a runner?’ she asked.

‘Dunno. I’ll have a look in the back. You stay with her till the ambulance arrives.’

Before Janet could say anything, Dennis headed off towards the back of the house. He hadn’t been gone more than a minute or so when she heard him call out, ‘Janet, come here and have a look at this. Hurry up. It could be important.’

Curious, Janet looked at the injured woman. The bleeding had stopped and there was nothing else she could do. Even so, she was reluctant to leave the poor woman alone.

‘Come on,’ Dennis called again. ‘Hurry up.’

Janet took one last look at the prone figure and walked towards the back of the house. The kitchen was in darkness.

‘Down here.’

She couldn’t see Dennis, but she knew that his voice came from downstairs. Through an open door to her right, three steps led down to a landing lit by a bare bulb. There was another door, most likely to the garage, she thought, and around the corner were the steps down to the cellar.

Dennis was standing there, near the bottom, in front of a third door. On it was pinned a poster of a naked woman. She lay back on a brass bed with her legs wide open, fingers tugging at the edges of her vagina, smiling down over her large breasts at the viewer, inviting, beckoning him inside. Dennis stood before it, grinning.

‘Bastard,’ Janet hissed.

‘Where’s your sense of humour?’

‘It’s
not
funny.’

‘What do you think it means?’

‘I don’t know.’ Janet could see light under the door, faint and flickering, as if from a faulty bulb. She also noticed a peculiar odour. ‘What’s that smell?’ she asked.

‘How should I know? Rising damp? Drains?’

But it smelled like decay to Janet. Decay and sandalwood incense. She gave a little shudder.

‘Shall we go in?’ She was whispering without knowing why.

‘I think we’d better.’

Janet walked ahead of him, almost on tiptoe, down the final few steps. The adrenalin was really pumping in her veins now. Slowly, she reached out and tried the door. Locked. She moved aside, and Dennis used his foot this time. The lock splintered, and the door swung open. Dennis stood aside, bowed from the waist in a parody of gentlemanly courtesy, and said, ‘Ladies first.’

With Dennis only inches behind her, Janet stepped into the cellar.

She barely had time to register her first impressions of the small room – mirrors, dozens of lit candles surrounding a mattress on the floor, a girl on the mattress, naked and bound, something yellow around her neck, the terrible smell stronger, despite the incense, like blocked drains and rotten meat, crude charcoal drawings on the whitewashed walls – before it happened.

He came from somewhere behind them, from one of the cellar’s dark corners. Dennis turned to meet him, reaching for his baton, but he was too slow. The machete slashed first across his cheek, slicing it open from the eye to the lips. Before Dennis had time to put his hand up to staunch the blood or register the pain, the man slashed again, this time across the side of his throat. Dennis made a gurgling sound and went to his knees, eyes wide open. Warm blood gushed across Janet’s face and sprayed onto the whitewashed walls in swirling abstract patterns. The hot stink of it made her gag.

She had no time to think. You never did when it really happened. All she knew was that she couldn’t do anything for Dennis. Not yet. There was still the man with the knife to deal with. Hang on, Dennis, she pleaded silently.
Hang on
.

The man still seemed intent on hacking at Dennis, not finished yet, and that gave Janet enough time to slip out her side-handled baton. She had just managed to grip the handle so that the baton ran protectively along the outside of her arm, when he made his first lunge at her. He seemed shocked and surprised when his blade didn’t sink into flesh and bone but was instead deflected by the hard baton.

That gave Janet the opening she needed. Bugger technique and training. She swung out and caught him on the temple. His eyes rolled back and he slumped against the wall, but he didn’t go down. She moved in closer and cracked down on the wrist of his knife-hand. She heard something break. He cried out and the machete fell to the floor. Janet kicked it away into a far corner, then she took the fully extended baton with both hands, swung and caught him on the side of the head again. He tried to go after his machete, but she hit him again as hard as she could on the back of his head and then again on his cheek and once more at the base of his skull. He reared up, still on his knees, spouting obscenities at her, and she lashed out one more time, cracking his temple. He fell against the wall, where the back of his head left a long dark smear on the whitewash as he slid down, and rested there, legs extended. Pink foam bubbled at the side of his mouth, then stopped. Janet hit him once more, a two-handed blow on the top of his skull, then she took out her handcuffs and secured him to one of the pipes running along the bottom of the wall. He groaned and stirred, so she hit him again. When he fell silent, she went over to Dennis.

He was still twitching, but the spurts of blood from his wound were getting weaker. Janet struggled to remember her first aid training. She made a compress from her handkerchief and pressed it tight against the severed artery, trying to nip the ends together. Next she tried to make the 10-9 call on her personal radio – officer in urgent need of assistance. But it was no good. All she got was static. A
black spot
. Nothing to do now but sit and wait for the ambulance to arrive. She could hardly move, go outside, not with Dennis like this. She couldn’t leave him.

So Janet sat cross-legged and rested Dennis’s head on her lap, cradling him and muttering nonsense in his ear. The ambulance would come soon, she told him. He would be fine, just wait and see. But it seemed that no matter how tightly she held the compress, blood leaked through to her uniform. She could feel its warmth on her fingers, her belly and thighs. Please, Dennis, she prayed,
please
hang on.

•

Above Lucy’s house, Maggie could see the crescent sliver of a new moon and the faint silver thread it drew around the old moon’s darkness.
The old moon in the new moon’s arms
. An ill omen. Sailors believed that the sight of it, especially through glass, presaged a storm and much loss of life. Maggie shivered. She wasn’t superstitious, but there was something chilling about the sight, something that reached out and touched her from way back in time when people paid more attention to cosmic events such as the cycles of the moon.

She looked back down at the house and saw the police car arrive, heard the woman officer knock and call out, then saw her male partner charge the door.

After that, Maggie heard nothing for a while – perhaps five or ten minutes – until she fancied she heard a heartrending, keening wail from deep inside the bowels of the house. But it could have been her imagination. The sky was a lighter blue now and the dawn chorus had struck up. Maybe it was a bird? But she knew that no bird sounded so desolate or godforsaken as that cry, not even the loon on a lake or the curlew up on the moors.