‘You all right?’ he asked – concern softening his features. She pulled a half shrug, half nod. ‘You did get my message, after the inquest?’
‘Yeah, thanks for that, Matt. Sorry I didn’t reply. I decided to have a quiet weekend, you know, after all the hoo-hah last week.’ She’d almost taken Matt up on his suggestion of a few jars down the local to celebrate the result, but after seeing the news report with Kyle Furnell’s mum, she just hadn’t felt like it.
He nodded. ‘I can imagine. I just wanted you to know that everyone here was made up for you, after the coroner gave you the all-clear?’
‘Ah, bless them,’ she said. A year ago, after the shooting, when she’d got back to the unit, all the guys had made a point of coming over to tell her they’d have done exactly the same thing in her situation. Well, nearly all the guys. ‘What about Lee Carver?’ she asked, eyebrows raised. They both knew there would be a few in SCO19 who’d be revelling in her recent troubles, older guys who still had a visceral reaction to the idea of a woman carrying – aka armed. Lee Carver, a firearms training instructor in his fifties, was one of them.
‘Well, maybe not him.’ Matt sank his head into his shoulders and deepened his voice to an inarticulate growl. ‘The only thing I want to see a female carrying is my dinner – on a fucking tray.’
They both laughed – but Kershaw’s heart wasn’t really in it.
During her first week of firearms training, Carver had more or less blanked her – pointedly avoiding eye contact and only addressing her when it was absolutely necessary. Then, out on the range one day, just as she was lining up on a target, he’d dropped to a crouch alongside her. ‘Help me out would you, Kershaw?’ he murmured close by her ear, all friendly curiosity.
‘Yes, Skipper?’ Men like Carver loved being called Skipper.
‘You are a woman, right?’ He let his eyes flick down to her breasts, once – as if they puzzled him.
‘Yes, Skipper.’
‘That’s what I thought.’ She could still see his hot blue eyes, inches from her face, and smell the gusts of his notoriously rank breath. ‘So what exactly are you doing here – on my fucking range?’
Pretty much everyone on the course – all of them guys her age or a few years older – thought Carver was a knuckle-dragging gobshite. And if Kershaw had reported his outburst, he’d have been chin-deep in shit. But that wasn’t her way: never had been, in all the four and a half years she’d been in the Job. No. Her response was to memorise the instruction manual and use every second of the target practice on offer, as well as doubling the hours she spent in the gym. Marksmanship was only half the story: you had to be superfit, too, especially when it came to the fiendish ‘run and shoot’ exercise. Sprint for 100 metres, adopt shoot position shouted by instructor, one shot at target. Miss and you fail. Exceed 45 seconds and you fail.
After five or six weeks, Kershaw was hitting body mass on the bad-guy-shaped target, 46, sometimes 48, times out of a possible 50.
By the last day, of the sixteen who’d started, only Kershaw and seven others had gone the distance and qualified – and she’d risen to become the second best shooter of her intake. Later, when everyone was down the local celebrating, she’d picked her moment to collar Lee Carver at the bar. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, Skipper,’ she said, smiling up at him, ‘I probably would have packed it in after the first week.’ He stared down at her, confusion and three pints of Stella narrowing his eyes. ‘So … I got you a thank-you pressie,’ she said, handing him a Boots bag. Left him staring at a bottle of Listerine.
The thought of Lee Carver and his kind getting off on her current predicament did have one positive, though: it iron-plated her resolve to get her firearms authorisation back and prove them all wrong.
Taking a gulp of tea, Kershaw started to go through her email inbox, but found her thoughts drifting back to the day she’d qualified, almost a year ago. At the moment the chief instructor had handed her the little red book that was her authorisation to carry, she’d fizzed like a freshly popped bottle of champagne. But on the heels of the elation came a deep sadness. She’d convinced herself, wrongly as it turned out, that such a big life landmark would bring the return of something she had lost.
Because the worst legacy of getting stabbed hadn’t been the loss of her spleen, but the disappearance of something she valued far more: her dad’s voice. After he’d died of cancer nearly five years ago, she would still hear him popping into her head with one of his sayings or daft gags – his East End drawl, always on the brink of a chuckle, sounding as clear and real as if he was standing next to her. He usually appeared just when she most needed a word of consolation or encouragement – or even, now and again, a telling-off.
But ever since the stabbing – even at the moment she’d won her spurs as a firearms officer – silence. Just when she’d needed him most, his voice had disappeared. Like Scotch mist.
‘Nat? Are you all right?’
Looking up to find Matt’s worried eyes on her, she realised she must have said the phrase – one of her dad’s – out loud.
‘Sorry. Must be going bonkers.’
‘Good job you’re seeing a shrink, then.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘How’s that working out for you by the way?’
‘Like having a root canal and a bikini wax at the same time.’
The phone on her desk trilled. After a brief exchange she hung up, blowing out an exasperated breath.
‘What’s up?’ asked Matt.
‘Guess what I’m gonna be doing the rest of the day?’
Matt shrugged.
‘Cleaning weapons in the armoury. Five years as a cop, two as a detective, all that grief getting my ticket to carry? And now I’ve literally been demoted to oily rag.’
The nail bar business that Kasia co-owned with Barbara stood in one of the farthest reaches of Stratford’s old shopping centre. Built in the early seventies, when poured concrete was the building material of choice for the trend-conscious architect, the mall squatted sulkily in the midst of Stratford’s one-way system, ugly sister to the glittering new towers of Westfield Stratford City across the way.
In fact, Janusz had always preferred the older, shabbier development over the flashy new pretender. For starters, it still housed an old-fashioned market on weekdays that – alongside the familiar ranks of anaemic Dutch tomatoes and golden delicious – now also boasted a Lithuanian stall selling passable kielbasa and decent pickles.
As he pushed open the door of Elegant Nailz, he was hit by a vaporous wave of solvent that made his eyes water. The place was more of a glorified kiosk than a proper shop, the original premises having been split down the middle to create two shop fronts, the other housing a shoe repairers run by a family from Hong Kong. There was barely enough room for three nail tables, but Kasia and Barbara did a brisk enough trade in acrylic and gel extensions to keep them busy past 7 p.m. most evenings.
Barbara was working on the nails of a pretty black girl with long straightened hair. Turning on the tabletop fan, she left her client drying her talons under the air stream and came over to the minuscule reception desk, to embrace him.
‘I kept getting your voicemail,’ he said. ‘So I came straight over. What’s up?’
‘Have you heard anything from Kasia?’ Her anxious eyes scanned his face.
‘Nie. Not for a couple of days.’ Seeing Barbara’s pretty features crumple at his response, Janusz felt a physical sense of dread – as if someone just blasted his gut full of quick-setting cement.
‘I haven’t seen her since Saturday,’