Little Darlings. Melanie Golding
you are, mate. And where would we be without you? We’d have to get an automatic door, for a start.’
Phil Gregson was probably ten or twelve years older than Harper, fifty or so, but the years had been less kind to him than they had been to her. Or perhaps he’d been less kind to himself. Either way he looked easily old enough to be her father.
‘What on earth are you wearing?’ He leaned over the desk to point at her feet.
She wiggled her toes. ‘Trainers.’
‘They are not trainers. They’re gloves. Rubber gloves for feet. They’re the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.’
‘They’re good. They’re for running better. Your feet are unrestricted, see?’ She wiggled her toes again.
‘Urg. Stop doing that. You won’t get away with those if Thrupp sees them.’
Harper curled her lip. She knew the five-toes trainers were a bit far out for work. She’d brought her shoes in her bag to change into before the boss arrived but she wanted to spend as much time ‘barefoot’ as possible. It was meant to improve your technique; she was competing in a half Ironman in a few weeks.
‘You can swim in them, too, you know.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Gregson, miming a big yawn.
Though the time Jo Harper spent outdoors had added wrinkles to her face, her body was lean and strong. Whereas Gregson looked as if he was gently melting into his swivel chair. Admittedly there may have been an element of genetic advantage – she had her mother’s great cheekbones and her father’s naturally not-yet-grey hair. Harper had slept with men older and greyer than Gregson, back when she’d thought she only liked men, but the desk sergeant elicited nothing more than a fond daughterly reflex in Harper that he no doubt would have been upset to be made aware of: she wanted to get him a haircut, feed him a salad and some peppermint tea, take him on a nice long walk and make sure he got an early night. Poor old Gregson, with his slowly broadening middle section held in by the wide black police utility belt, and his ear-length hair swept across the emerging scalp. Harper thought he could go up a size in shirts. Maybe two.
Harper made herself a bad coffee in a mug with a joke about dogs on it, the bottom of which got stuck to the tacky surface of the kitchenette that she shared with a hundred or more other officers, none of whom – from the evidence – knew how to work a cloth. The mug jerked as it came away, causing it to spill a little and scald her hand. She was still cursing when she reached her desk, but there was no one there to hear her; at that time in the morning the building was quiet, just the way she liked it. She took a sip of the too-hot liquid and grimaced, then fired up the system for her usual early-morning perusal of the overnight incidents. This was not technically part of her job as detective sergeant. It was a habit, a form of work-avoidance that she could just about justify because sometimes it threw up something interesting, something that hadn’t been handed to her by the DI.
The list from the previous night included the usual stuff – two calls from some angry people between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. about noisy neighbours. Three kinds of drunk people: one who called by accident, asking for a taxi; one who called on purpose, because they’d lost their mates in a nightclub and they wanted the police to help find them; and one exceptionally drunk person calling because there really was an emergency – his friend had been assaulted, then he’d collapsed and stopped breathing. This was where the skill of the operator was crucial, because it was so hard to tell the difference with drunk people. There were also several calls from stupid people (who were sometimes drunk, too, which didn’t help): one calling because the cat hadn’t come back, one because someone had refused to make tea when it was their turn.
Some of it was funny, but much of it was deadly serious. The list itself might have been indecipherable to a civilian at a glance, just columns of lingo dotted with police code and numerical data. But Harper could see that, hiding in the midst of the crank calls, were those entries heavy with the weight of human tragedy. The cold record of the moment a person decided they were not strong enough to deal with whatever was in front of them. These were genuine cries for help.
At the top of the last page, one of the items caught her interest. In the early hours there had been a call from a mobile phone located in the Royal Infirmary Hospital. It was marked as 4 – the lowest possible priority, judged to be a false alarm. But the description read ‘Attempted Child Abduction’ so she clicked on it. Reading the notes, her breath quickened.
Time: 0429: 999 report from a mobile phone
Details of Person Reporting: Lauren Tranter, address (unable to obtain)
Detail of Incident: reported intruder in maternity ward of Royal Infirmary, reported assault, reported attempted abduction of newborn twins. Reporter is calling from inside locked cubicle, both babies inside cubicle with reporter, intruder outside door attempting to breach
Opening Incident Classification: 1 (URGENT)
Action: hospital security alerted by telephone as first-on-scene
Action: mobile patrol officers alerted by radio e.t.a. 16 minutes
Time: 0444: contact by telephone from hospital security: false alarm: picked up by MHS
a. Action: Mobile Patrol cancelled by radio
6. Closing Incident Classification: 4 (NO ACTION REQUIRED)
MHS stood for Mental Health Services. So, whoever had called, the mother of the twins, was seeing things. Those with mental health issues often called the police, and it was quite often ‘picked up by MHS’. All seemed to be in order, in this case. The dispatcher had probably been correct in ranking it 4. Harper went back to the main screen, looked at the rest of the list. Drunk people, stupid people, Road Traffic Incidents. Nothing that needed her attention. Her cursor hovered over the red button in the corner of the programme window. Better be getting on with planning that training session I’m delivering later, she thought.
But she didn’t click the incident reporter shut and open PowerPoint, as she knew she ought to do. The call from the hospital was bothering her. A sliver of dread crept into her stomach, and she tried to dismiss it as ridiculous. But there it sat, black and heavy. Between the lines of text on the screen she read the mother’s fear, her sure knowledge that someone wanted to take her babies away. Harper couldn’t help but feel it herself, that threat of separation. Unthinkingly, she placed her hand low on her belly, where the skin had never quite tightened over the hard muscles beneath.
Perhaps she’d just make completely sure it was nothing, then she could forget about it and get on with her day. One phone call, that’s all it would take. Harper dialled the security service at the hospital.
After the introductions, the guy was nervy.
‘Oh, no, nothing to worry about, officer. The lady in the toilets? Maternity? She was just having a bad trip.’
‘She was on hallucinogenic drugs?’ Harper used a stern, alarmed tone.
‘No, no. No. She was, I dunno, spazzing out.’
‘She was . . . what?’
This what, delivered quietly but ripe with pointed incomprehension, implied a need for Dave, the security guy, to explain himself pretty quick and stop using such offensive out-dated language. Harper could pack a lot of meaning into one word. She was rather enjoying herself.
‘Look, officer, ma’am, I dunno what happened.’ Dave started talking too fast, about how ‘your lot’ had called him and said there was an intruder on the ward so he got up there sharpish. ‘I couldn’t understand how an intruder would get in – there’s a security door, and I hadn’t seen nothing on the monitor. I ran there, fast as I could – it’s about a mile from my office, you know. I made in it five minutes.’
Five