‘Grab her,’ Joe shouted. ‘Overdose. She’s thrown it up. Keep her walking. Ambulance on its way?’

The woman nodded. She didn’t need to. They could hear the siren in the distance.

‘Right. Keep her awake. Keep her on her feet.’

He reached for his phone and dialled. His hands were shaking, and there was blood on his fingers, mixed with the slime of her vomit. He looked down at his Burton’s two-piece. It shone in the morning light, as if a monster slug had crawled across it. And to be honest, he told himself, it didn’t look much worse than normal.

‘Rita? I’ve got her.’

Epilogue

47

He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked across the street. The old red brickwork was a rich, dusky brown, as though the house had been sitting on a beach for the last twelve decades and had now reached the point at which it couldn’t get any more sunburnt. The lintels, though, were a little lighter than he’d expected. Someone had been having at ’em with a scrubbing brush, just like his grandma used to do.

To his right, out across the main road, was the Brick pub. He checked his watch: still plenty of time. So he stayed where he was, turning to look again at the terraced houses in front of him, craning his neck to admire their black slate roofs, neat and symmetrical after all the years. His grandparents used to boast that the builder had gone bankrupt after building these. He’d used high-quality materials, too high, put himself out of business.

The front door opened and a woman appeared. She had long auburn hair and pale skin. With the door ajar she hovered there, neither in nor out. She was looking at Joe, but standing at an angle, trying to make it appear that she wasn’t. For a second he considered walking briskly away. Yet he paused. And as that second of indecision became two, then three, he realized how unnerving it would be for her if he were to leave now; that some weirdo had been staring at her home, only to disappear with no explanation.

He raised an arm as he crossed the road.

‘Sorry!’ he said, noting that the tiny patches of lawn in the front yard were well-maintained, and dotted with plastic toys.

He repeated his apologies as he got to the gate, speaking across the four or five yards that separated them, his voice raised against the niggling wind. Meanwhile, she regarded him with a strange combination of trepidation and amusement.

‘I’m a police officer.’

The words worked some sort of magic. Her face relaxed, and the door swung open.

‘DS Joe Romano,’ he added, holding up his card as he walked up the narrow path for the first time in twenty-odd years.

She nodded, looking at the bandage on his right hand as he approached.

‘I thought I recognized you.’

‘Really?’