After shift I joined the queue at the carwash. My car was filthy, and I just wanted some time to dawdle and think. A car wash is a good place to accomplish this. You move slowly through the sections and get washed and wiped, whilst getting a twenty-minute breather to think with no outside interference.
I'd turned off my mobile. I just wanted to sit and think, and get washed and wiped along the way. So I sat and thought. Thought about how the job was changing and how I wasn't entirely sure I liked the new regime.
Superintendent Heaton had moved on, had been head-hunted to form a Specialist Trafficking Unit, and he had, in turn, head-hunted Stuart Turner and Kezia Walker to join him. So not only had the top of the station changed, but my best friend had gone too.
It was only when Stuart was gone that I realised just how much I really did miss him. We hadn't worked a case together in a while, but still we did things together, had had each other's backs. Then some three months after leaving the station, he'd returned. After a fashion: flat on his back in St Hugh's with a broken leg. Even having his right leg in a cast from the hip to toe hadn't slowed his copper's instincts.
But I sensed something wasn't right with him. Stuart had grown quiet and reticent in a way he never had been before. Stuart Turner was the poster boy for self-belief, and he could be a fearless self-promoter. Nowadays he seemed anxious and slightly confused, which wasn't my sometimes bombastic best friend's style at all. Something which shook his confidence that badly had to be a major problem. I spent a lot of time attempting to cheer him up, and then protecting him from Stevie's wrath when he insisted on sticking his nose into the case which he had uncovered at St Hugh's. So we skirted all round his troubles, he recovered from his injury, and went back to work; I had the feeling that there was something which was going to come back to bother us, and he would tell me in his own time. We had had dinner twice since his return to work. I was still waiting.
All of which leads me neatly to my own troubles: the unsettled feeling that the changes at the top had left me with, and then there was Stevie. I would stand shoulder to shoulder with Stevie Moss on any investigation; she's clever, fearless, intuitive and caring. But standing behind her and following her lead is another matter entirely. I could never doubt her loyalty, her commitment, or her copper's nose; it's more a case of doubting her objectivity. Okay, maybe Stu's detachment was a step too far in the opposite direction, as sometimes he came across as unfeeling or insensitive. But Stevie's passion was perhaps too involved. Too close. It left me, and some of the others, feeling unsettled. We love Stevie, we want to give her a chance in her new role as DS, but...crucially, there's that but.
Back to me, in the thought bubble of the car wash. My car door opened and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I glanced down, where a hand was wiping a cloth around the inside of my door frame. The hand had a grubby bandage wound round it, but I knew that hand anywhere. Startled, I looked from the hand to the owner's face. Very anxious brown eyes met mine.
"I'm in trouble," he muttered. "Big trouble."
The shock was so great it was a wonder I retained enough sense not to speak his name aloud and presumably blow his cover to smithereens. But the sight of DS Stuart Turner undercover was a major jolt. I yanked my brains back into some kind of order.
"My place, after dark," I muttered.
He actually looked back over his shoulder, his features gripped in the tension of paranoia, and my stomach tightened at the sight. But he nodded and moved along to the back door. I paid, and drove away. Glancing in the rear view mirror, I could see those dark eyes were watching me. Even from fifty feet and moving further away, I could sense the stress in his body language.
I drove home. I made myself some dinner, and started on my laundry as if it were an ordinary night after shift. Outside it grew dark, and I found myself completely unable to settle. The memory of the fear in Stuart's eyes was unnerving.
About an hour after dark, when my nerves had been stretched tight as piano wire, there came a muffled thud from the back garden. As I happened to be in the kitchen at the time, I peered out of the window to see what it was. A dark shape detached itself from the wall and headed towards the steps up to the kitchen door. I yanked open the back door and he was standing there.
I grabbed his arm and pulled him inside, and got my first proper look at him since I had last seen him two weeks ago.
"Stu!" I looked him over in horror. He looked thinner than when I had last seen him at our dinner three weeks ago; his clothes, a brownish zip-up hooded top and a pair of worn-looking cargo pants, were damp and dirty. He was unshaven, and when I pulled him into a hug I realised he hadn't washed all that recently either. He hugged me back as though his life depended on it.
"Jo... I..."
"Explanations can wait." I let go, and fighting the urge to wrinkle my nose, I checked him out from head to foot. He looked in need of a square meal, a hot bath and a decent night's sleep. And he was going to get them, no arguments accepted.
First things first. I bent over my laundry basket, my grey towelling robe on top, and dug down to find a couple of towels. I handed these to him. "Every last stitch, Stu," I insisted as I discreetly turned my back and started to pour out some soap for the washing machine. I could hear him starting to pull his clothes off. I turned back in time to catch sight of the bruises on the right hand side of his body as he pulled my robe on with some difficulty.
"Stu!"
He actually looked more anxious, and then he shrugged. I wasn't having that. "Stu?" I moved closer, and gently pushed the v of the robe open a little. From what I could see his shoulder, upper arm, the right hand side of his torso and extending down his rib cage were all covered in bruises. I put my hand on his bare shoulder. There I could feel the heat from the bruise, and he winced when I touched it.
"What happened?"
"I'm in too deep, Jo. Honestly, I don't know what I'm doing and they're getting inside info from somewhere."
I stared at him. Something of my disbelief must have showed in my face, because he shrugged again, and turned away slightly.
"What does your handler say about this?"
"Who, Weston? Nothing... she thinks I'm just being paranoid."
"Presumably you last spoke with her before this happened?" I indicated his bruises. He said nothing. I peered at him. "You haven't told her about this, have you?"
"No." He gave me a bit of a defiant look, as though he were a child goading a parent into an argument. I gave him one of my best stares, dropped his dirty clothes next to the washing machine, and indicated that he ought to come upstairs with me.
I ran a hot bath, adding a generous dollop of the Radox bath foam I usually used after particularly rough days. The effects are little more than psychosomatic, but I hoped the aroma would make him feel better at least. I had to help him off with the robe, and he climbed into the bath with some considerable difficulty. But he settled into the foamy water with a contented sigh, which I suspect was mostly faked for my benefit.
"Stu."
"Jo." He slid down and closed his eyes. "Don't fuss."
I was entitled to fuss. My best friend had been beaten to a pulp, so I was going to fuss over him.
I left him to it for now, and turned my attention to getting something hot and nourishing on the stove, and his really filthy and smelly clothes into the washing machine. I methodically emptied his pockets, turning up a small notebook carefully and tightly wrapped in a loose-change bag, and a pencil...the sort you get from the bookmakers. A few coins, a half-eaten sandwich wrapped in cling film. No mobile and no wallet. He was surviving on the streets on little more than his wits. And it didn't require the brain of Einstein to figure out that he had stretched himself far too far.
I was looking at the half a Lancashire Hot Pot I was re-heating in the oven when there was a muffled thud overhead, and a hastily suppressed yelp. "STU!" I shut the oven door with a slam, and came running.
He was sitting on the bath mat, huddled into my bathrobe, clutching his left knee. He was bent over, covering it, so I crouched down beside him to get a better look.
The sight of the bruises on his shoulder and side had distracted me, so I hadn't thought to look for bodily damage elsewhere. The grubby bandage, now soaking wet, was still wrapped around his right hand, but his left knee was my immediate worry. Another bruise, but this one had four distinct puncture wounds.
"Stu." I glared at him, I couldn't help it. "This is a dog bite." Very gently I laid a hand on the bruising, but even that light touch made him flinch and draw in a hissing breath.
Suddenly an impossible idea flashed into my head, a horrible suspicion.
"Stu... how did you get this?"
He eyed me as though he were gauging how much he could tell me. I didn't know whether to feel relieved or annoyed.
"I had no proof," he said finally. "I had to go looking for some."
The horrible suspicion was turning into a reality. He'd had no mobile and no wallet for a reason. "Weston has absolutely no idea where you are or what you're doing... does she?" I demanded.
He had the grace to look slightly ashamed, but a little shifty at the same time. "No. She doesn't."
"Go on." I sat down next to him, not about to let him off the hook. He had involved me, so I needed to know.
"I'm suspended, Jo." He looked even more ashamed. "I know there's an inside connection. But neither Weston or Heaton would believe me. I pushed it and Heaton suggested I take time away to rest. In their words, I'm unfit for duty due to stress." His laugh was bitter.
"So you decided to carry on, on your own?"
He nodded. "I went back to Fallon's place, and tried to find a way in. The dogs were out so I had to get out of there fast, and one caught me." He raised his bandaged hand slightly. "I cut my hand going over the fence, and fell heavily, which is where all the bruising came from."
I couldn't believe my ears. "When did all this happen?"
"Three nights ago."
"And where have you been sleeping?"
He shifted slightly and winced. "On a sofa in a lock-up storage unit."
"For three nights? Stu, are you mad?"
"Can't go home...I'm pretty sure I'm being watched."
"Well, if Fallon's men see all those bruises, they'll know for certain that it was you."
"I know...but I don't know what else to do?! Fallon's bringing in children." He looked me directly in the eye for the first time. "He's selling them on the streets, Jo..."