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‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah.’
Sensing that they were getting on, Ba
Morrow cleared her throat and shrugged. ‘Sorry I called you a cunt. I’s tired…’
He flinched at that. ‘You didn’t. What you said was that we wouldn’t get on if I was going to be a cunt about it, but you didn’t call me a cunt.’
This semantic difference seemed to matter to him. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘No, that’s right.’
‘We’ve been kind of put in an awkward situation here, you know? Kind of competing when we could be working together. Bad management.’
The implied slur on MacKechnie was meant to be a bonding move, or trap. Queasy with sleep deprivation and tired of having to guess what the fuck was going on with Ba
Ba
‘Hmm.’
‘Grew up with the service.’
‘Yeah.’ Morrow scratched her face, a little too hard. Just because his father was in the force didn’t mean she was less committed.
‘If you grow up in it,’ he frowned at the windscreen, ‘you know it, a bit more maybe. Know what it’s really like, what’s likely to happen at the end of a career. New recruits, they’re idealistic, yet to lose faith with it.’ He was talking about her.
‘I’m not a new recruit,’ said Morrow.
‘No, but you’re not old police family, are you? I mean, in some ways you’re lucky because you’ll have to find those things out yourself. Just… it can be a bit of a shocker when you do.’
‘TJF,’ she said sullenly.
He nodded. ‘TJF. But me, I know what to take on and when to make my moves, I know the limits of the job. You don’t have that killer instinct…’
She suddenly found herself confused. ‘Killer instinct?’
‘How to work the system to get the job done right.’
She didn’t understand but had a bad feeling about the way it was going.
‘Anyway,’ he said, as if that had cleared all that up, ‘if Omar is Bob, why does anyone think he’s got two mill kicking about? He’s twenty-one, he’s been studying since leaving school, doesn’t have a job. Why would they think he has millions of pounds?’
‘Oh, I du
He looked out at the road. ‘This junction’s a pain in the arse.’
‘Go right,’ she said quickly, keen to maintain the forward momentum in the conversation. ‘Round the side there to the left.’
Ba
Still suspicious, she opened her door, climbed out and shut it, watching him carefully over the roof of the car. He was squinting at the Battlefield Rest, a restaurant in a converted Edwardian tram depot. ‘Looks like a seaside ice cream parlour or something. Why’s it called the Battlefield Rest?’
‘You don’t know this area?’
‘No.’
‘Mary Queen of Scots fought her last battle here. Against her son’s army. She lost.’
‘What were they fighting about?’
‘Religion.’ She stopped to frown. ‘I think.’
He pointed to the little rotunda. ‘And she rested in there?’
The tram stop was built during the Great War, over three hundred years after Queen Mary was executed. Morrow looked for a note of humour on his face but found nothing. ‘No,’ she said, ‘she just sent in for a lasagne.’
Ba
The lobby was busy but the lifts were efficient, sucking in groups gathering in front of them and spiriting them off to different floors. Ba
The mother herself looked nippy, a ski
Morrow saw Ba
Ba
Morrow didn’t join in the cosy sanctimony. Ba
Ba
When Morrow looked up she was smiling. ‘She says they were asking for Bob.’
Ba
She gave him back the statement as they approached the ward doors, walking slightly behind him, a disingenuous gesture of companionship. She wanted him to trust her. When she reached forward to press the security buzzer on the door she saw that he was smiling quietly to himself. It worried her. A wash of exhaustion swept over her, shift change from night to day was always painful.
A voice on the intercom interrupted her train of thought; ‘Yes?’ A young nurse in glasses was looking out at them from an office a hundred yards down the corridor.
‘DS Ba
‘OK.’ The nurse reached back into the door and pressed a button to release the lock, walking down to meet them as they entered.
Two coppers had been ordered to stay outside Aleesha’s room and were stationed in the corridor, one sitting on a chair in the corridor, the other leaning against the wall facing the door, watching the nurse’s arse as she passed him.
Morrow and Ba
A large window looked into the room from the corridor. A tangle of wires was threaded through a hole in the wall, plugged into monitors sitting on a metal trolley in the corridor, where the nurses could watch the numbers. The DCs standing outside stood upright when they approached. Ba
Through the glass they could see Aleesha was asleep, propped upright against puffed-up pillows. Her left hand was heavily bandaged but the shape still discernibly distorted: three of her fingers were missing, only the index finger still clearly outlined, the others stubs after the first knuckle. The dressings on the stubs of her two middle fingers were discoloured with a translucent yellow fluid.