Hard Time Read online

  While she was playing Happy Families, the guv had been in the hands of a cop killer. Another throat-burning drag. Should’ve left the Pages to their pathetic devices. She’d legged it the second she could. Left Mac and the team mopping up.

  He’d tailed Page’s motor but it was the Midget parked in the close that rang Mac’s alarm. Unlike Bev, he’d not played superhero. He’d radioed control, requested assistance. At Marlborough Close, officers had entered at the front as Mac smashed his way through a back window.

  Richard Page put up no resistance; last she’d seen of him was in the back of a police motor; Holly in the back of an ambulance. Her wound wasn’t fatal. The entry angle missed vital organs. A wonder the stiletto went in at all, given how Jenny had attached it inside her sleeve. Holly would live, then get life. Extenuating circs would probably lead to a suspended sentence for Jenny. Right now, Bev didn’t give a fuck. Even the tearful mother-son reunion left her cold. Kids. Who’d have them?

  She leaned on the horn, ran a red. More radio static. Shouts. Silence. Had they gone in? What was going on? She slammed a palm on the wheel.

  George Road was cordoned off. Tough. She mowed down the police tape, narrowly missed a police officer. Flashing a card, Bev ignored shouts, returned hand signals. There’d be a disciplinary to face for the Page fuck-up: if you’re going to hang, sod a sheep, make it a flock. Adrenalin, nicotine, incandescence? Whatever. She was more wired than she could remember.

  Two wheels straddled the kerb, door gaped; she glanced around, took in events. Four armed officers on the street. How many located out of sight? An AR vehicle was up at the top. She jogged towards it. Heightened senses; shortened breaths. Something was wrong. Three flak-jacketed men stood in a group, talking. Too casual. There were too many people around, too much idle noise. Bev was clammy-palmed, light-headed, nauseous – a classic panic attack. Sod that. She started to run, tripped, almost fell. A horn blasted behind her. Flashing blue lights. An ambulance. And a meat wagon. It was all over.

  Byford had no doubt he was about to die. The gun was cold against his temple; Young’s hot breath in his face. The superintendent closed his eyes, not ready but resigned. A shot rang out, deafening in the small room. His body’s desperate heave toppled the chair sideways. Overwhelming pain as his head hit the floor.

  Unconscious, he was unaware that the shot, from a police marksman, had taken out the light. And totally unaware of the second shot that took out Grant Young.

  They brought Young’s body out first. Paramedics were working on Byford. They’d been in there twenty minutes, feeling like another lifetime to Bev. The senior officer, a burly thickset woman she barely knew, wouldn’t let her in. Crime scene; fair enough.

  “Will he make it? All I need to know...” She’d asked just about everyone else. No one would look her in the eye. Not even Mike Powell, who was about somewhere.

  “I’m no expert,” the woman said. “He’s drifting in and out. Head injuries causing concern.”

  Disciplinary? Suspension? Sod it.

  “Hey! Where are you going?”

  Bev didn’t look back. The guv was on a stretcher, unrecognisable. Face a bloody open wound, a black hole where his teeth had been, chips of bone showing white through the battered flesh. The paramedics were talking to him, trying to keep him awake. Keep him alive? Fractured skull, pressure on the brain, touch and go. Drips were in place, the medicos making leaving noises. One of them turned at the sound of her footsteps. He opened his mouth, said nothing. Maybe her face said everything.

  She knelt at Byford’s side, gently stroked the blood-matted hair, voice soft and low. “Looking good, boss.” His eyelids fluttered. He couldn’t smile: needed a working mouth for that.

  Hers was tight as she fought tears. “Not George Clooney good...but, hey, you can’t have everything.” She bit her knuckles, tasted blood. “Loads to tell you, guv.” Gently she ran a finger along his jaw. “Best let you go for now. Get a few running repairs, eh?” His eyelids fluttered.

  She bent close. “Ever do this to me again...” She pressed her lips against his forehead. “I’ll bloody kill you.”

  Six weeks later

  He’d missed her birthday; she was taking him presents. How did that work?

  Bev was walking to the house, trying to get fitter, keep down the kilos. No hardship on a day like this. The long avenue of trees formed a cool green canopy backlit by the sun. The sky was the colour of her eyes; the new dress a close match. Her fringe was a pain; she’d not had a chance to get a trim, but maybe she’d keep it longer anyway.

  The goodies in her bag weren’t Bev’s only gift to the guv. She’d given him her time too, visited him every day in hospital, brought vineyards of grapes. Not that there’d been a bunch else to do. Her suspension still had two weeks to run: insubordination (two counts); contaminating a crime scene (one); failure to communicate (countless). The disciplinary board hadn’t ruled out busting her down a rank.

  Yeah, right. Excommunicating Jack Pope had been a major boob, and the board didn’t even know about that. The reporter had twice tried to speak to her, to tell her about the likeness between Jenny Page and a young woman on a TV programme, Lost and Found? By ignoring him, she’d not even looked.

  A stone took the brunt of her frustration. It wasn’t as though the guv could put in a good word; he’d not be back at work for months, if at all. The teeth weren’t the only things he’d lost: his memory and balance had taken a bashing. He’d come out of intensive care after a week, took three more coming out of the coma. Talk to him, they’d said. So she had. She gave a wry smile. Very nearly talked him to death.

  Only one thing she hadn’t told him. Hadn’t told anyone. Not even her mum.

  She sat on a bench, lifted her face to the sun; didn’t want to arrive early. She’d mostly avoided mentioning work to the big man, just passed on the odd snippet from Mac. Daniel was back with Jenny, pending her court appearance on the wounding. Richard Page was on remand, looking at a lengthy custodial. He was denying collusion but had clearly been involved for months. Page was in it up to the neck he was now desperately trying to save.

  Holly was unlikely ever to be released. Criminally insane and cunning as a box of foxes, her game plan had had a long smouldering fuse. Landing a job at Page’s ad agency was the first carefully calculated step; seducing a besotted Page the next; kidnapping Daniel the final move.

  The kidnap had played right into Grant Young’s hands, not to mention Operations Hawk and Phoenix. The police had been running round like headless poultry anyway; by fingering Maxwell, Young had not only kept himself out of the frame but had muddied already murky waters. The child-porn rumours stemmed from only one source: Grant Young.

  The media man had served time with Maxwell years back; knew about his hatred of cops, heard his boasts about the wreaths and the death threats. Who better to point the police at? Throw in a few anonymous tip-offs and pay serious money to one of Maxwell’s heavies to film a funeral and the signposts were all there. Garden path, big time.

  Holly had inadvertently helped Young’s anti-Maxwell campaign when she hired Dunston as post-boy. Dunston was just a loser who’d get sent down on the menacing charge. The crime boss – at least in this instance – was innocent. Probably why he was still kicking up a stink about unlawful arrest.

  Bev scowled: nasty taste in the mouth. Seeing what it had done to the guv, the job had seemed futile for a while: a load of fuckwits fouling up their lives, cops having to take the fall-out, clear up the shit. Simon Wells’s funeral had added to her grief. Later, a chat with a five-year-old Doctor Who fan had gone a small way to a change of heart, if not mind. Helping people, especially kids like Daniel, was why she’d become a cop in the first place.

  Had to admire Powell in that respect. He was convinced gang masters had killed the Eastern European couple’s son as a warning to other illegals who wanted a life as opposed to slavery. The DI was angling for a trip to Albania, hoping to cast a net with the authorities th
ere. Powell saw it as his personal mission to track down the bastards. He’d also ditched the BM business. She gave a wry smile. Mind, she did have a big mouth.

  Couple more minutes. Delving for a ciggie, she was reminded she’d given up. Didn’t taste the same, anyway, without a pinot in the other hand. She hadn’t had a drink since her birthday, the big three-O. Sick as a dog for days after. Oz’s guest appearance with a female DI on his arm might’ve had something to do with that. She sniffed. Frankie’s surprise party had certainly lived up to its name. Yeah, well, get over it. Today was worth celebrating.

  Two o’clock, he’d said. She rose, hoisted her bag. First day back from hospital, the guv had wanted a few hours to acclimatise. Her stomach was a butterfly farm as she rang the bell. First time she’d seen him in a suit since the attack.

  “Looking good, boss.” The smile lit her eyes.

  “George Clooney good?” That was another thing she’d mentioned.

  “Can’t have everything.” She winked.

  They sat in the garden, drank tea, laughed a lot. She sensed his gaze on her; studied him when he wasn’t looking. The bruising and swelling had gone, the stitches were out, teeth were temporary but they’d get fixed. That reminded her. She dug in her bag, brought out the pressies. The Laphroaig went down well. The box of straws was probably a tad tactless. Took it in good spirit, though.

  Everything was warm, relaxed, felt good. She didn’t want to leave, knew she couldn’t make a move. Not now. Not till she’d decided.

  Byford sat forward, elbows on knees, suddenly serious. “So, Bev, what you going to do?”

  She scrutinised his face again. The guy was a medicine man, not a detective. He couldn’t possibly know. “’Bout what, guv?” Dead casual.

  “I can read the signs, Bev.”

  She felt the blush rise. Oz’s last stand. Talk about a fucking mistake. Stupid, careless, life-changing, career-threatening, and yet...

  “Dunno what you mean.” Hated lying to him. At the time she’d put the nausea and feeling rough down to a crap life-style. And she’d been right. But a month later the sickness had returned – and hadn’t gone away.

  Byford pointed at her bag. It wasn’t closed properly, and the pregnancy kit she’d bought, to double-check the positive result of the first test, was well visible. “If you are, will you keep it?”

  Oz Junior? Morriss minor? Would she? She hadn’t got a clue.

  Author’s note:

  At the end of Baby Love – the previous title in the series – I likened Bev to a cactus with tiny pink flowers. I wrote that passage four days before Christmas, and later that afternoon, I happened to see a cactus, complete with tiny pink buds, languishing outside a florist’s near my home. I had to buy it, didn’t I? It flowered brilliantly then nothing but leaves for twelve months. As I was writing the final chapters of Hard Time, I noticed pink shoots emerging. By the time I delivered the first draft, the cactus was in full glorious bloom. No journalistic licence here: I captured it on camera.

  The script went through several revisions and as time passed, not surprisingly, the flowers faded and fell. I thought that was it florally for at least a year. Several weeks later as I started work on the final draft, I noticed two more tiny buds. As I finished the novel, they were in flower.

  As Bev might say... Sentimental? Moi?

  Maureen Carter

  February 2007