Crossing the Line (Kerry Wilkinson) (2 page)

be blamed for any of it. I was just responsible for the giant bag of Skittles that was left on night shift’s desk.’

Esther laughed as the man chatting to the police officer on the plaza gave a cheery wave, picked up

his supermarket carrier bags, and continued walking away from the stage.

Finger pressed to her ear again, Esther breathed a sigh of relief. ‘The minister’s car is on its way,

so he’s nearly done. We’re one short for the escort to the train station but I doubt he’ll notice.’

‘Which station?’

‘Piccadilly.’

Jessica pointed to the road adjoining the plaza directly in front of her in between a coffee shop and

a bank. ‘What, the Piccadilly Station that’s five minutes’ walk that way?’

‘Don’t ask. The PM had an escort, so he wants an escort. If we get away without the sirens going,

it’ll be a miracle.’

Esther picked up the binoculars and did another sweep of the area. ‘Let’s hear it then.’

‘What?’

‘Your old DI went on gardening leave, didn’t he, and never came back?’

‘Jason?’

‘Reynolds, or something. Was it true he leaked that story about the teacher and the student?’

‘More or less.’

‘Good man. Wish I’d had the balls to leak a few things over the years. And you got his job?’

Jessica tugged at the sleeve of her jacket, feeling uncomfortable. ‘Something like that . . .’

Esther’s description of events wasn’t that far away from the truth – but Jessica’s promotion had

only happened after a period away from the job which she didn’t particularly want to talk about.

She’d been trying to move on and the new job was at least helping, partially because of the amount of

paperwork she had to either fill in or sign off.

A large group of student-types – jeans below their arses, expensive trainers, smiling – walked out

from Oldham Street and started to cross the area from one side, just as a tram pulled into the station

on the other and a horde of commuters emerged.

‘You do realise this is the worst perimeter I’ve ever seen for an event?’ Jessica said.

‘The minister didn’t want it closed off because he wanted the public to be able to “get involved”. I

think “accessible” must be some buzzword at the moment because his advisor mentioned it a dozen

times.’

‘So he wanted us to have a “presence” but he also wanted to be in public, with everyone able to

“get involved”?’

‘I think he wanted his arse wiping too but he’s got all those blokes on stage lining up to do that.

This is the best I could manage.’

There were seven uniformed officers standing at the back of the crowd and another two on the

stage. Off to the side, a dozen more were fighting to get a clear view through the shoppers.

‘Chilly, innit?’ Jessica said, changing the subject.

‘They reckon it’s going to get even cooler next week. Some grinning weatherman was saying last

night it was the coldest start to a May on record.’

‘Knobhead.’

‘Quite. It’s like they relish giving bad news. Imagine sending one of them round on a death knock –

they’d take party balloons.’

Jessica pointed towards one of the students with hair gelled into thick spikes jutting off in various

directions. ‘Look at that guy – he’s got shorts and a T-shirt on. It’s just above freezing.’

‘We should nick him just for the hair.’

As the two groups met in the middle of the plaza, it almost doubled the crowd in front of the

politician. Perhaps buoyed by the increase in audience, the man in the pink tie leant into the lectern,

angling towards the camera, and said something that he at least looked like he believed, punctuating

each word with a pump of his fist. It got a limp round of applause, which was more than it deserved.

Esther was on the radio again, louder this time. ‘Well tell him to pull his finger out – and if he

doesn’t, tell him I’ll rip it off and shove it sideways up his—’ Another angry flap of her free arm.

‘No, I don’t need you to write it down, just tell him.’

As Jessica was beginning to wonder if the pins and needles in her leg meant it was colder than

she’d thought, she realised it was actually her phone buzzing in her pocket. She plucked it out and

tried to read the text message before tutting and hunting around in her jacket.

‘What’s up?’

‘Bloody glasses. I’m always losing them.’

‘I’ve never seen you wearing glasses.’

‘I only need them for reading close up. Plus I look like an idiot in them.’

‘Weren’t you on your phone a minute ago?’

‘That was just arsing around to look busy. Do it around the station, tut a lot as if you’ve got stuff on and no one bothers you half the time.’ Jessica finally found her glasses in her top pocket and put them

on, only to delete the message instantly. ‘Some spam saying they’ll get me compensation for an

accident.’ She re-pocketed everything. ‘Go on, you can say it.’

‘What?’

‘I know you want to.’

‘Fine, you do look a bit . . .
weird
. . . with them on.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Not in a bad way, just . . . all right, I’ll stop digging. Anyway, we’re keeping an eye on that Heaton

ParkFest shambles at the end of the month. I could probably sort you a ticket or two if you fancied it?’

‘Don’t even get me started. I’ve already got tickets – not my choice.’

‘Ha! I was just being nice, I didn’t think it’d be your thing.’

‘If I wanted to spend a freezing afternoon swaying gently in a field, I’d—’

Jessica’s sentence was cut short as a woman’s scream rippled across the plaza, followed by

another and another until it sounded like the entire crowd was braying at the top of their voices.

Jessica set off at full pelt but Esther was already barrelling ahead, bellowing into her radio mic for

details. The cold air filled Jessica’s lungs in seconds and by the time she was close enough to have an

idea of what had happened she could barely breathe. People were running in all directions, the thin

line of uniformed officers struggling to maintain anything approaching a perimeter, let alone keep

control.

As Jessica put her hands on her hips and tried to catch her breath, sirens blared in the distance,

drowning out a man’s hysterical cries: ‘He’s down, call an ambulance’.

2

DCI Jack Cole sat in the sparsely filled temporary incident room on the first floor of Longsight Police

Station, looking at Jessica and the four unfortunate PCs who had been walking through reception when

Jessica had grabbed them to make the event look busy. The actual incident room in the basement had

been closed the previous week for renovations, with no one seemingly thinking CID might need

somewhere to work in the meantime. As an alternative, some of the far smaller, damp-riddled

storerooms had been cleared out upstairs. The fact there was no adequate heating system in rooms

usually filled with boxes didn’t appear to be a priority for anyone, meaning coats and gloves were a

necessity.

The chief inspector seemed to be losing hair by the day, sporting a receding hairline that could

have been parted by Moses. The worry lines across his forehead were now permanent features,

although if Jessica had had to tell a superintendent about the bowling-ball incident, then she might

have them too.

Cole stared at Jessica as the PCs shuffled nervously, probably wondering why they were there. ‘So

to sum up, I’ve been in meetings since first thing this morning,’ he said. ‘The Home Secretary’s back

in London on the warpath, telling all and sundry that there weren’t enough officers on duty and that

he’ll be pushing for a full investigation.’

Jessica was feeling defensive. ‘I wasn’t even officially there! I was doing Esther a favour and it

wasn’t her fault either – he said he wanted to be accessible, how were we meant to know some loon

would turn up with a bottle full of acid?’

‘Aylesbury’s gone bananas – it’s been on the news channels non-stop all day.’

‘I’m surprised the super found time to get himself off the golf course. It’s not as if it was raining.’

Cole silenced Jessica with a ‘you’re-an-inspector-now’ look, something she had seen a few times

recently. No wonder he was losing his hair.

‘Where is everyone?’ Cole asked.

‘Half of them are still out cleaning up from the weekend, the rest are on it. We’re a DS down too . .

.’

Jessica had constantly been onto the DCI about the fact she hadn’t yet been replaced, meaning that,

although she had technically been promoted, she was now doing an entirely new workload as well as

much of what she had handled before. ‘Budgetary constraints’ and ‘I’m aware’ were his favourite

responses. Cole ignored her, nodding towards the empty whiteboard.

‘Someone keeps nicking the pens or there’d be stuff on there,’ Jessica explained. ‘If you don’t nail

it down around here, some bugger walks off with it. Someone should get the police in.’

Cole wasn’t amused.

‘All right, fine,’ she added. ‘Councillor Luke Callaghan was hit in the face with some sort of acid

thrown from something we’re not sure about yet. We’re going to have to wait for the results but the

paramedics reckon it was nitric. It’s not the type of thing you can buy over the counter, so we’re trying to get a list of suppliers and potential buyers. Izzy says there are loads – plus some of the businesses who store it have thousands of staff on their books. It was only a small quantity, so we’re looking at

all sorts of places, mainly labs. Don’t expect anything any time soon – we’re getting nailed on

overtime, so the late boys might have to help out.’

One of the PCs had found a marker and written the victim’s name on the board. In Jessica’s mind,

this made him prime suspect for the spate of pen thefts.

‘Who’s Luke Callaghan?’ Cole asked.

‘He’s a councillor for the Old Moat ward – got in at the last election with a narrow majority.

Thirty-five, married, runs some sort of technology company.’

PC Pen-Thief wrote ‘Old Maid ward’, ‘techno comp’ and ‘nitro acid’ on the whiteboard in

appalling handwriting.

‘How is he?’

‘He’s still in surgery. The acid hit him in the face but we’ve not heard anything else. The media

haven’t got his name yet but it’s not for the want of trying. We caught some master-of-disguise

journalist trying to sneak into the ward wearing a white coat. He’d managed to wander through

reception, past hospital security and was outside the door getting out his camera phone when one of

our boys nabbed him.’

‘Who does he work for?’

‘No idea – he’d probably sold his mother to get the coat, you know what journalists are like. Either

way, his phone was accidentally trodden on by one of the officers as he was being escorted out.

We’ve been trying to get hold of Callaghan’s wife but with no luck. There’s no answer at the family

home and we don’t know where she works.’

Cole turned to the board, new worry lines joining the old ones as he scowled at the spelling. ‘I’m

judging by the focus on the victim that there’s no news on who actually threw the acid?’

Jessica had long been worried by how transparent she apparently was to Cole. They had been

working together for far too long. ‘We’ve got half-a-dozen people going through every CCTV camera

in the area.’ She pulled a folded-up printout from her pocket and handed it to PC Pen-Thief, who

attached it to the board with a magnet. ‘We’ve got our guy getting off the tram, mingling through a

group of students and then joining the back of the crowd who were listening to the Home Secretary.

As you can see, he kept his hood up.’

Jessica realised the ‘as you can see’ was an exaggeration given how poor the photograph was.

Cole turned to look at the photo, tilting his head to the side and creating another worry line.

‘That’s a snap taken from the camera on the tram station,’ Jessica said. ‘We’ve been trying to get

one from the actual tram but some little shite had covered it with duct tape and no one apparently

noticed. We’ve got a couple of shots from the back but I doubt we have too many people who can ID

him from that. If they can, I’ve got a stack of CCTV hoody shots they can have a go at first. The only

other ones we have are from the side but it’s nothing useable – the media will have a field day if we

stick any of them out.’

PC Pen-Thief wrote ‘hoddy’ on the board.

‘Witnesses?’ Cole asked.

‘Our hoody gradually made his way to the front of the crowd. It wasn’t tightly packed so he didn’t

have any problems. Most of the people there scarpered as soon as the screaming began, so we’re

trying to identify them too and we’ve got the usual appeals out for help with our inquiries, blah, blah, blah. The only ones who didn’t make a break for it, predictably, were the ones who didn’t see

anything.’

Cole dragged a chair towards the board, screeching it along the hard floor like a nail down a

blackboard. ‘Do we at least know where he or she escaped to?’

Jessica pointed towards the printout on the board. ‘We’re assuming “he” – roughly five foot nine or

ten – and it looks like he might have a hint of a beard on that picture. It could just be the dodgy camera though.’

The word ‘Man’ appeared on the board, spelled correctly but in such dreadful handwriting that it

looked more like ‘Nom’.

‘We’ve got him heading along Oldham Street and then disappearing into the Northern Quarter

alleys. We’re trying to get the CCTV enhanced but it’s the same old story. After that, there’s nothing.

We’re checking number plates just in case he had a car waiting but there’s nothing so far and I