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JIM
A phone call from Emma woke me up. Fraser had sent me home to catch up on a couple of hours’ kip
since I’d worked through the whole of the night preparing for the raid. The buzzing of my mobile
dragged me up out of a deep sleep, where the disappointment that we’d wasted so much time and
budget and were no nearer to finding Ben Finch was feeding me vivid, uncomfortable dreams.
Emma said she wanted to talk, said she would come over, wouldn’t say what it was about.
I was out of the shower and dressed by the time she arrived, about to call Fraser to check I hadn’t
missed anything that morning. ‘I’ll come down,’ I said to the intercom. ‘Do you mind if we talk on the
drive in?’
I pounded down the stairs of my building and I took her in a hug when I found her on the pavement
outside, but she was somehow awkward and I only got a bit of a dry-lipped peck on the cheek in
return. She had a pool car with her, a green Ford Focus that hadn’t been properly cleaned out since a
couple of sweaty DCs camped in it for a surveillance job. She handed me the keys. She was oldfashioned
like that sometimes. My dad would have loved it.
We set off into the city, and within minutes we’d got locked in a traffic system round Broadmead
where Saturday shoppers and roadworks had brought everything to a standstill.
It was one of those moments where it seems surreal that ordinary lives go on around you, that other
people can actually afford to tolerate delays, when all you can focus on is the gigantic ticking clock
that’s your head, counting time on somebody else’s life.
We were diverted onto Nelson Street, the city’s so-called open-air street art gallery, where graffiti
murals covered every dank, depressing concrete facade available: psychedelic art meets calligraphy
meets art deco meets the recesses of the minds of a dozen artists from around the world. A
dreamscape all of its own.
I waited for Emma to start talking, but the whole time she sat motionless beside me, coat buttoned,
collars pulled up, scarf wrapped high on her neck, just staring out front.
‘Em?’ I said when the silence started to get to me. ‘What do you want to talk about?’
Still she said nothing. If anything, her silence seemed to have settled deeper on her, like it meant to
bury her. I pulled over into a loading bay.
‘What’s going on?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’
The ignition was still running and the wipers squealed as they made a pass across the windscreen.
There was so much happening in her eyes that I felt my insides wrench.
‘Emma?’ I said. Whatever the thing was, I was desperate to sort it, to make it right. I put my hand
on hers, but she kept her fingers curled away from mine, pressing her palm flat onto her leg.
‘I don’t know how to say it.’ Her voice was small, as if she’d swallowed half of it.
‘For Chrissakes try.’
She made me wait for an answer until I was fit to burst.
‘I’ve done something bad and I don’t know what to do.’
‘What have you done?’ And even then I was thinking, it can’t be so bad, Emma’s so hard on herself
that whatever she’s done will be easy to put right. I thought that even as I watched her shut her eyes,
and press her lips together until her face folded around them and she didn’t look like the girl I knew.
Not one bit.
Her next two words were her confession, her downfall, and the first sparks of a wildfire that was
to burn through everything we’d had together with startling speed.