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  She didn’t know then that she was being followed.

  She looked up ahead as she was walking parallel to the elevated electrified train lines heading for Manchester Piccadilly station a couple of miles away. She was going to get on one of those trains one day. She was going to get a one-way ticket and never come back to this dump. She could see the big Hilton Hotel that towered over everything else in the city centre. She could see one of the other big posh hotels in the city that was right next to the station. Posh people with loads of money stayed in places like that. She knew that because, once upon a time, her own family had been amongst them. That was before Dad lost the business but it can’t have been all his fault. She’d never accept that.

  She got to the main road and, on the other side, was a petrol station with a kind of mini-supermarket attached to it. She had some money and she thought she’d get some crisps and chocolate that she could eat in her room later so she wouldn’t have to join the rest of them at the table for tea. How can you have a proper conversation with someone who doesn’t speak your language properly and when there’s a half-caste bastard baby who grabs everybody’s attention and keeps crying all the time? She hated the way her sister, Paige, had accepted the whole situation and the way she liked to play mini-mum to that brown bastard, Tariq. What the hell was she thinking? Didn’t she want their dad to come back? How could he come back now that brown bastard was here? How could life ever get back to normal again?

  The road was a dual carriageway and she managed to get across by running and then jumping over the central reservation. She walked across the forecourt and into the shop. She chose two large bags of crisps, three chocolate bars, and a Pot Noodle just in case she got really hungry. When she took them to the counter, her arms sort of collapsed and all her stuff scattered across the small space. The man behind the counter lifted up a carrier bag and began to put her things in it. Sheridan didn’t like this at all.

  “Oi, that’s my stuff!”

  “Yes, and I’m helping you by putting it in a bag.”

  “Sorry?” she questioned. The man was another darkie just like Arif. Why don’t they all go back to where the fuck they came from?

  “Didn’t you hear what I said to you?”

  “I heard but you’re not speaking proper English so I couldn’t understand.”

  The shop assistant took a deep breath. “I said that I was helping you by putting your things away in a bag. That’s all.”

  “And, you see, I still can’t understand because you’re not speaking English!”

  Sam Jackson was standing behind Sheridan, waiting to pay for the petrol he’d just filled his car up with. This girl in front of him was being so bloody rude to the guy behind the counter and Sam hated that. He had to intervene.

  “Look, love,” said Sam. “I understood this gentlemen perfectly well. He was trying to help you and you’re being rude.”

  Sheridan was incensed. “What the fuck has it got to do with you?”

  “Don’t use language like that to me.”

  “I’ll do what I fucking well like!”

  “Oh, come back and talk to me when you’ve grown up.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  If there was one thing Sam couldn’t stand, it was teenagers like this girl talking to adults with absolutely no respect. He especially didn’t like the racist overtones in her abhorrent behaviour and despite, the fact that the guy behind the counter was gesturing for him to say no more and that it was okay, it wasn’t okay as far as Sam was concerned and he’d continue to stand up for the guy.

  “But you can start now by apologising to the gentleman.”

  “No way! Why are you standing up for him? You’re a white person. He’s just a stupid Paki who shouldn’t be here.”

  “How is somebody as young as you so full of hate?”

  “How is somebody like you not sticking up for your own race?”

  “You’re out of control. Somebody should sort you out.”

  “Really? Well, somebody should stab you.”

  “That’s your answer to everything is it?”

  “No. But it’s my answer to you.”

  Sheridan always carried a knife with her whenever she went out. It was for protection. This time, however, she was going to use it to teach this stupid bastard that he should stick up for his own race of white people. She took the knife out of the inside pocket of her jacket and lunged it at Sam whose attention had been taken by a conversation with the guy behind the counter. He didn’t even see the knife coming until it was too late and it penetrated just below his heart. He immediately went into shock. The guy behind the counter pressed the alarm button under the counter and then came running round to try and help Sam. He looked angrily at Sheridan and said “The police are coming you stupid, horrible, girl.”

  “You made me do it!” Sheridan screamed. “It was your stupid fault!”

  She ran onto the petrol station forecourt and that’s when she first saw the car as it came screeching round from the back. She stopped dead in her tracks as the car moved out in front of her and the window on the driver’s side rolled down.

  “Sheridan, get in!”

  Sheridan squinted her eyes in the late afternoon sunshine. Could it really be him? “Where the fuck did you spring from?”

  “Never mind that. Just get in!”

  Sheridan looked down at all the blood on her clothes and started to cry. “I think I’ve killed somebody.”

  “Sheridan, I know, I saw it all happen. Now we’ve got to get you out of here before the police arrive so, for God’s sake, get in! Trust me, I can get you out of this but we’ve got to leave now before it’s too late.”

  Sheridan ran round and jumped into the car on the passenger side. He then sped off down the main road towards the city centre. “There,” he said. “Immediate danger over. I was watching you as you came across the wasteland. I wanted to protect you and step in if you got into any trouble. Good job I did, eh?”

  “Did I really kill him?” she cried hysterically. “Oh, God I can’t go to prison! I can’t! I can’t!”

  He placed his hand on her knee. “It won’t come to that. Okay? Now you’ve got to trust me and everything will be alright. I promise you.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To somewhere I can take care of you until all this is over.”

  THREE

  “Can you remind me how we got here?” Rebecca Stockton asked.

  “Well, we walked, or rather ran up the stairs once the mood had struck us,” answered Joe Alexander.

  Rebecca laughed. “No, you silly bugger, I know how we got up here and into your bed but how did we, you know, get here?”

  “You came round for lunch but something else came up.”

  Rebecca laughed again. “Am I going to get anything serious out of you this afternoon?”

  “The way I’m feeling now, I’d say the answer is a definite ‘no’.”

  DI Rebecca Stockton and DC Joe Alexander had been in very different emotional places when Joe joined DSI Jeff Barton’s team just a few weeks ago. Rebecca had thought she might be getting somewhere in her pursuit of Jeff Barton as a romantic as well as a working partner but her amorous intentions were thwarted once more by Jeff’s admission that he still couldn’t see past the death of his late wife, Lillie Mae. Joe was getting over being dumped by his ex-girlfriend whilst he was in hospital fighting for his life after an incident involving guns whilst on duty. Joe had taken the rejection hard. He’d never been that lucky in love and his adult life was sparsely populated by girlfriends.

  Then, one night at the pub last week, something had happened. It was a kiss. A drunken kiss, but a kiss that was no less intended than if they’d been sober. They’d both felt that shiver when you suddenly really notice someone rather than just knowing that they were there. It had got all of them talking at the station, which neither of them wanted but accepted would be the case. Rebecca was relieved, however, that Jeff Barton hadn’t been th
ere that night because he was still on his holidays in Hong Kong. She had finally accepted that there was no future for her and Jeff but she didn’t want to appear to rub his nose in it or stick two fingers up at him by moving so swiftly onto the next man, especially when he was on the same work team, which could lead to complications.

  Nothing had happened that night of the kiss. They’d got into their cars and driven away in different directions. The next morning they didn’t go anywhere near it. They didn’t speak about it at all. There were lots of embarrassed silences and they both ran away from it all, not confronting it or acknowledging it in any way.

  Until earlier this morning when they bumped into each other doing their Sunday morning weekly shop at a branch of Tescos. For a moment they’d looked at each other and wondered what on earth to say. They were standing by the cheese counter. A quick look at their respective trolleys gave the game away. They were carrying the essentials like bread, milk, a chicken to roast, packs of vegetables to microwave, bags of bananas and apples, a steak, a couple of lamb cutlets, a couple of frozen pizzas. And half a dozen bottles of wine. They were both advertising the fact that they were single and having to fend for themselves with no surprise additional mouths to feed but they weren’t planning to survive on junk food alone.

  “What did you do yesterday?” asked Rebecca.

  “Saturday? I slept in, I caught up on the week’s papers, I wished it was Sunday and a day closer to going back to work. And you?”

  “Pretty much the same,” said Rebecca. “Managed to avoid going round to see my friend who is not only head-over-heels with her new man but also pregnant by him.”

  “You can only take so much of other people’s happiness when you’ve no life of your own.”

  “That is so true,” said Rebecca. “I’m happy for my friend. I’m happy for anyone who’s happy. I just wish some of it would come my way for a change.”

  “Yep. I know.”

  “I hate weekends when we haven’t got a case on,” said Rebecca. “I go to my parents and have Sunday dinner with them plus my sister and her family. It all goes fine until afterwards when my parents are sitting at the table with my sister and her husband and I’m in another room, playing with the children, as if I’m not worthy of sitting at the grown ups’ table because I’m not married and don’t have children. Don’t get me wrong, I love my nephews dearly and get so much joy out of being with them, but my life is stuck. It won’t move on. And I’m in danger of staying this way and watching my nephews one day overtaking me and starting to go out on dates.”

  “One of my nephews has overtaken me and is dating his first girlfriend,” said Joe.

  “You see? It happens.”

  Joe laughed. “And what sad bastards we are that we envy our nephews for their love lives!”

  Rebecca decided it was time to take control. One of them had to and it may as well be her. It was okay for women to do this sort of thing now. At least, it was for some women. Rebecca had once got into a furious argument with a fellow woman police officer at a training day who was a strident feminist and felt that women hadn’t spent years fighting for their equality only to use it to make themselves what she called “easy” for men who are just wanting to score. She also hinted that it was unprofessional for a woman police officer to behave that way. Rebecca had countered by saying that her colleague was basically arguing for things to go back to when men who engaged in casual sex used it to enhance their reputation whilst women who engaged in it had their reputations destroyed by it. Well, Rebecca wasn’t going to stand for any of that nonsense. If she wanted a man who clearly wanted her but was too shy to say so, perhaps because she was his senior officer, then she just had to go for it.

  “Joe, do you fancy going off to your place or mine and having sex? It could be the best alternative we can find to the whole family Sunday dinner thing?”

  “I thought you’d never ask!”

  “Let’s go then.”

  Rebecca hadn’t taken much notice of Joe when he first joined Jeff Barton’s team along with DC Adrian Bradshaw. Of the two, Adrian was the better looking and he kept himself in shape. But he was a widower and Rebecca had been through all that with Jeff. Trying to tell a widower how you feel, trying to work out how he feels about you, trying to work out when they’d decided it was time for them to move on and contemplate being ready for another relationship and then trying to work out if they were just using you to get back in the saddle. It was all a nightmare of heart shattering proportions. She was steering clear of widowers from now on. It just never ends well when you can’t match up to a ghost.

  In the carnal sense, Rebecca had been pleasantly surprised by Joe. He wasn’t exactly ugly. and she didn’t have to force herself to enjoy being in bed with him. She hadn’t had to drink him handsome and she’d been surprised at his stamina and sensitivity - very pleasantly surprised.

  “So what happens now, DC Alexander?”

  “I go downstairs and bring us some wine up?”

  “Yes, that will work,” said Rebecca as she stroked his shoulder with her fingertip.

  “Have you enjoyed yourself?”

  “So far, so good.”

  “You mean, you expect me to do all that again?”

  “Well, I’m not going anywhere soon.”

  “So demanding,” said Joe, who couldn’t believe his luck. He’d woken up expecting another same old Sunday and ended up having wonderful sex with his senior officer.

  “Get used to it.”

  “You mean, we’re going to do this again?”

  “Well, I don’t see why not. Do you?”

  They embraced and kissed and Joe was getting hard again. They were positioning their bodies in order to seek further pleasure from each other when Rebecca’s mobile began to ring.

  “I’d better get that,” said Rebecca.

  Joe groaned and reluctantly pushed himself off her. Rebecca pressed ‘answer’ on her phone and Joe watched her expression change from one of flushed and unbridled pleasure to one of business and the job they both did.

  “I’ll be right there,” said Rebecca, who was acting up as head of the team whilst Jeff Barton was on holiday. She slid out from under Joe’s duvet and began gathering her clothes together. “Your further intentions are going to have to wait, young man. We’ve got a spot of murder to deal with.”

  The pathologist, June Hawkins, had begun her work on the murder site and her team were diligently going about their business in the way that scientific types do.

  “The act of killing is fairly straight forward here, darlings,” said June, who was in her full cover up suit all the way down to and including her footwear. “He was stabbed.”

  “No kidding,” said Joe. He’d accompanied Rebecca to the scene.

  “How are you Joe darling?” June enquired. “I haven’t seen you for ages.”

  “I’m good, June, thanks,” Joe replied with a sideways glance at Rebecca. Could it really be that they’d come straight from his bed to this crime scene? Well, yes, that’s exactly what they’d done. He felt like a naughty schoolboy who’d been caught by the headmistress watching porn even though June didn’t know about that day’s coupling. They had to stay discreet. It would be impossible otherwise.

  “There was only one stab wound but it was close enough to the poor bugger’s heart to kill him fairly quickly,” June went on. “She must’ve either been lucky or she knew just where to go with her knife.”

  “So it was a girl who did this?” Rebecca questioned.

  “Oh, yes,” said June. “They’re getting worse than the boys. Speak to your WPC. She’ll tell you.”

  WPC Josie Fletcher came up to Rebecca and Joe and, after introductions had been made, she explained what she knew so far.

  “The shop’s CCTV has captured the whole thing, ma’am,” said Josie. “Sunil Kumar was on duty here, behind the counter. He said the man had been sticking up for him after the girl had been abusive towards him and that’s when the girl pulled
out the knife. They’d been arguing but the attack looks like it was unprovoked. Sunil says he recognises the girl as having been into the shop before but doesn’t know her name.”

  “How old was this girl?” Joe asked.

  “I’d say she was no more than about fourteen or fifteen, sir. Apparently she went running out of here and was picked up by a car which then sped off. But there was no CCTV outside because the machine had broken and was waiting to be fixed.”

  Rebecca rolled her eyes up. “Typical,” she said. She was desperate to get a grip on the case. She wanted to show the hierarchy that they’d been justified in placing her in charge of the team whilst Jeff Barton was on holiday. “Do we have identification of our victim?”

  “Sam Jackson, ma’am,” said Josie. “Thirty-six years old. It looks like he just stopped to get some petrol and this happened to him.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “In a flat in Salford Trinity, ma’am,” said WPC Fletcher. “In his wallet were a number of his business cards. It looks like he worked as a rep selling farm equipment.”

  “Employer?”

  “They’re being informed now, ma’am. I’m also making further enquiries about his background.”

  “Okay,” said Rebecca. “Thank you, WPC Fletcher that was very thorough considering you can’t have been on the scene long.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Not like you to praise uniform so enthusiastically,” said Joe, after Fletcher had stepped away.

  “Well, let’s just say I’m in a good mood,” Rebecca replied. “Can’t imagine why. Any ideas?”

  “Must’ve been the Sunday lunch you had.”

  “Yes, well, the portions were very satisfying.”