She lay on the bed, stared at the four walls of the bedroom and contemplated getting up. It was nearly three weeks since she'd ventured further than the kitchen, a fairly pathetic state of affairs by anybody's measure, and she knew that people were starting to talk. There were, she knew, rumours of a breakdown and she knew that if the rumours were true then there was nobody who'd blame her. Not after what she'd been through. But she wasn't having a breakdown. Breakdowns were irrational and uncontrolled and she wasn't either of those things. She was completely calm and completely reasonable. She couldn't face leaving the house but there was good reason for that. When you'd pissed off as many scumbags as she had there was an element of risk in just walking to the end of the driveway. If she could get herself abducted while doing something as mundane as visiting the supermarket then locked in the house was the safest place for her.
She knew that people were concerned. Sammy had moved back in, giving her some garbage about how he and Orla thought they'd have a few months apart before getting hitched, and people had started come over unannounced. Janet appeared on an almost daily basis asking her if she wanted to go for dinner, or a drink, or a film at the cinema: anything to get her out of the house. She always said no. Julie had popped by to talk to her about going back to work, but when she'd said that she wasn't ready, Julie too had resorted to trying to entice her with dinner at Pizza Express.
And then there was Rachel. Messed up, loose cannon Rachel, who'd proven time and time again that there was nothing that she wouldn't sacrifice on the alter of her self destructive tendencies. Rachel who'd never much liked "Godzilla" and had never made any real secret of it. As much as Gill was ashamed to say it, it had almost relieved her when briefly Rachel's ire had been directed to somebody else although on balance she liked it more when Rachel and Janet got along. And in spite of their rocky relationship, it was Rachel who'd understood what Gill needed. It was Rachel who'd told Sammy not to talk daft and to go back to his girlfriend, and it was Rachel who'd turned up on her doorstep night after night with a DVD and a large bottle of wine muttering night after night that if Mohammed wouldn't go to the mountain…. Rachel had shown a level of understanding that even her best friends and her son had struggled with. While Sammy wanted to escort her everywhere and Janet and Julie talked in terms of self defence skills and security assessments of her home and vehicle – anything to make her feel safe again – Rachel had been brutally honest. Rachel was the only one who'd said that yeah, she'd pissed off a lot of nasty bastards in her time, and yeah, most of them probably wouldn't have been that sorry if Helen Bartlett had finished what she'd started, but that most of them were also safely behind bars. She'd told her that on that day – black Friday, as Gill thought of it with a shudder – when she and Janet had been desperately trying to work out who was in the car with her, they had known that it was Helen Bartlett because there were no other realistic contenders. And now that Helen was no longer a risk she was surely as safe as she ever had been to go about her life as normal. It was logical, Gill could see that, and so she said that she'd at least think about Rachel's suggestion that they take a visit to the Starbucks around the corner one morning. It was an improvement on the many and varied forms of "piss off" that every other offer had received, and yet she still couldn't face it.
It wasn't just the fear that in every supermarket, car park and coffee shop there was some nutcase who she'd upset ready to put a knife to her throat and force her to drive to her death. It was the fact that once she walked out of the front door then she knew what would come next. Once they'd won the battle to get her out of the house then they would start to try and convince her to return to work. There would be suggestions of easing her back in, and of a job away from the front line, but she didn't want any of that.
The job that she'd loved was now a job that she didn't think she could do anymore. She couldn't walk back into the station and pretend that she wasn't riddled with doubt and terrified of making another mistake. She couldn't sleep for thinking about how she, in her naivety, had taken a damaged person and twisted them beyond all recognition. She hadn't seen Helen Bartlett as a person. She had been no better than the people who'd spat at her in the street. She had looked at Helen and she'd seen her as complicit. She might not have thought that Helen deserved a roasting at the hands of Kevin and the gutter press, or that it was particularly fair that the CPS had wanted to press charges, but she hadn't really cared either. Helen Bartlett was of no concern to her. A life that had been a shitshow since long before she'd gotten involved. She wasn't sure that she could ever forgive herself for it and she certainly didn't think that she could go back to her job with the shadow of that mistake hanging over her. She was going to resign but the only person who knew that was Rachel. Janet and Julie would have tried to dissuade her. Sammy might have mentioned the mortgage – he didn't want his mother moving in with him and his new wife when the house got repossessed – and failing that he'd probably have asked whether she couldn't have decided that the police wasn't really for her before she'd sacrificed his entire childhood to one murder investigation after another after another. Rachel simply said that if that was her decision then they'd all support her, but that as far as she was concerned, Gill handing in her warrant card was doing the criminal contingent of North Manchester a massive favour. And then, as if she'd said nothing, Rachel had put on Coronation Street and that was the end of the conversation.
It had taken three days before Rachel had even mentioned it again and then it had been brief and to the point. She said that she'd thought a lot about what Gill had said, and that she'd come to the conclusion that it was bollocks. She said that when somebody had a beginning as miserable as Helen Bartlett's had been then the damage was bound to linger. She knew, better than most, that a shit childhood could follow you through life. She said that as far as she was concerned the only two people who were culpable in the tragedy of Helen's life and death were her parents. The woman's card was marked from the moment she was born to Joe and Eunice Bevan. It was sad, Rachel conceded, but it was most certainly not Gill's fault.
And so here she was. Lying on the bed, unable to leave the house, but resigned to the fact that she had no choice. Rachel said that she couldn't become another life ruined by Joe and Eunice Bevan. There had been too many of those already and if Gill gave up her job then lives would continue to get ruined because the crime rate in the North West was likely to treble. At that Gill had laughed for the first time in three weeks and pointed out that she was a DCI not Batman. That had only encouraged Rachel who, it turned out, was more than willing to turn that expensive tier three training on her boss if the situation demanded. Without even realising that she had, Gill realised that she had agreed to go back to work. As the door opened she sat up, pushed her hand through her hair and adjusted her blouse.
'Are you ready, ma'am?' Rachel asked, standing in the doorway, car keys in hand.
'Yeah' she nodded, taking a deep breath and pushing her feet into her shoes. 'And that's Godzilla to you'