he wanted a break.’
It took me a moment to process that. ‘From me?’
She shrugged apologetically.
‘You’re saying this is just him breaking up with me?’
‘Men. They eat your pies and tell you lies,’ she offered. It was our joke, the phrase with which every conversation we’d ever had about my father would eventually end. But I wasn’t in the mood, and she saw it. ‘I’ve got to get to work, sweetheart.’
‘Me too. I’ve got a shift with the kids. What?’ I said, when she made a face.
‘Maybe best call in sick?’
‘What? Why?’
She spread her hands but didn’t answer my question. Didn’t need to. She didn’t want me to go because she wanted to keep me out of sight.
She thought I’d killed him.
Had I killed him?
After she left, I stood in the hall, taking in our dingy home. Nothing to mark it as ours. Our rent paid in cash – everything always paid in cash – so we could leave at a moment’s notice if anyone came knocking on the doors, asking questions about me, about Jodie. Mum used a different name, Christine Scott, wherever she could. She chose agency work over proper contracts because it meant wages in cash, and there were always agencies with a relaxed approach to background checks.
Our whole existence, Mum’s jobs, everything we did, was built around Siggy. Everything in her life was about me: boyfriends had been dismissed when they started to ask too many questions, jobs abandoned when demands were made that took her away from her duty to me. She’d given up everything just to cover my tracks and keep me happy, or at least keep me safe. Even before Jodie, we’d never put down roots, but since? I’d lost count of the number of times we’d moved. Always in a hurry when someone recognized her. It made her curse herself for ever having had success: if she’d never been on TV, it wouldn’t be half this hard.
I padded back to where the calendar hung on the wall: my shifts marked in pink highlighter.
It’s not like it’s actually a job.
I was coming up twenty years old. I was the same person I’d been at fourteen. Afraid of everyone and everything, locked into the bedroom in my mother’s flat every night for fear of what I might do if I was free. Whatever she said about my value in the world, I was jobless, dependent.
But I had Matt. Loving, understanding Matt. Patient. Blindly at risk.
I made a promise right there and then, that if Siggy had hurt him in any way, that I was ending it. I’d take her with me. I didn’t care.
Nobody wins, Siggy. Do you hear me? This ends here.
Siggy heard. Her black eyes flashed wide, but she shrank back, flattening into the shadows. Didn’t move, not a moment of a challenge. She’d been around me long enough to know when I meant what I said.
Mae arsed the access door open and climbed the steel steps, steep enough to make the toe of his size twelves clang on the underside of each one as he ascended. The fire door at the top swung open and banged against the wall. He squinted as he went out. Bright. Stretching his arms out, opening his chest, he made a circuit of the flat roof then leaned out across the suicide bars, looking down to the street below.
He bit into his bacon roll. He’d lost DC Catherine Ziegler shortly after she’d handed it to him in the canteen. Or maybe not lost, exactly, more turned and walked away from, without checking she was behind him.
He rarely ate in the canteen. The food was adequate, but the place was rammed full of cops. For him, up here was the place to be. He chewed slowly, felt the cold on his skin, had a stretch. Movement at the edge of the roof caught his eye: from the door of the shed-like block that housed the steps came his new TI. Striding out across the felt roof like an uncaged animal.
‘Sarge,’ she called, ‘got a sec?’ She carried a sheet of paper, the other hand visored across her forehead against the sharp November sunshine.
Mae jerked his chin to greet her, then chased a dot of brown sauce from the corner of his mouth with his tongue.
‘Love it up here, too,’ she said, tilting her head back to the open sky and filling her lungs. An exchange of car horns sounded, and she glanced over the edge of the building.
She laughed softly. ‘Funny little bastards.’
‘Who?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. All of us.’
Mae followed her eyeline, down to the stop-start of traffic by the junction of Boston Manor Road. Tiny faraway people pottering around, in and out of shops and cars and offices, fluid masses of them sloshing out of buses and onto the streets where they dispersed easily, innocuous as peas from a split bag. When he looked back at her, a smile had risen over her face.
‘Did you need something, Ziegler?’ he said, popping the last mouthful of the butty into his mouth and balling up the bag.
‘Please don’t call me by my surname, Sarge. Makes me feel like I’m at boarding school.’ She followed him back out towards the steps and passed him a printout. ‘Got a new one in. Misper.’
Mae glanced at the sheet she was holding out, swept his eyes over the first couple of lines. Just a log from a triple-9. He handed it back, frowning.
‘Give it to uniform. If it’s already marked as low-risk they’ll do the work-up. They hand it over as and when.’
‘Usually, yeah. But I thought the name might be of interest,’ she said.
He sighed, took the sheet back. They went down the metal steps into the blue-walled normality of the nick. ‘What was the name?’
‘Matthew Corsham,’ she said, peeling the top sheet off, handing it to him. ‘White male, twenty-six, some kind of technician at Hanwell Hospital. No history of missing, not a pisshead or a junkie.’
He nearly choked. ‘I think that’s supposed to read, no history of drugs or alcohol abuse.’
She shrugged and moved on. ‘The workmate who called it in said he’s worried because it was the guy’s last shift yesterday, dismissal was a bit out of the blue and he was distressed. Corsham promised to take his work computer back, and didn’t show, which is very out of character because he swore he’d be there and he’s very reliable. So the workmate calls, but it goes straight to voicemail, so goes round to his place – he lives on a boat, just up towards Isleworth – and he’s disappeared.’
Mae scanned the text for dates. ‘What timescale we talking?’
‘It’s only half a day. Leon, the colleague, says he spoke to him yesterday and he was really agitated about having lost his job.’
‘Half a day? Give the bloke a chance, Christ! They never heard of a bender?’
‘I think that’s supposed to read, excessive period of alcohol consumption.’
Mae gave her a look. ‘And anyway, I don’t know a Matthew Corsham. Am I supposed to?’
‘Not him. The girlfriend.’
Mae returned his eyes to the document. And his heart skidded to a stop. Eleanor Power.
Kit leaned against the doorframe. ‘Rings a bell, right?’
It wasn’t a question, and they both knew it. He gave her a quick glance. ‘You like your homework, then?’
He read the whole thing en route