The Girls Beneath

‘I don’t want to hear that. And no, I won’t want to see you.’

‘I’m going to come round. Stay there. I’m coming round now.’

‘Please don’t. That might make me very angry. People change. Good luck.’

10

‘Can’t. Dah dah dah dee door, dah dah, dee dah…’

I see a girl, when I say a girl this time I mean a woman, mid to late twenties. My age. She wears a green dress. There is a song playing. She is walking away from me towards a car near a forest. I follow her. She knows I’m there. She looks behind her to check. When she sees me she doesn’t smile and nor do I. Smoke rises from the forest. But it doesn’t seem to be on fire. It smokes majestically, like a cigarette. She has blonde hair.

‘Can’t. Dah dah dah dee door, dah dah, my head…’

She slides into the car and waits for me there. I lift my pace. I take a look behind me. Around the corner comes a man. He also has blond hair. He has something in his pocket. I turn forward again and speed up but don’t want him to know I’m scared. I don’t want him to know I’m up to something. I get faster, incrementally, but I’m getting no nearer the car she lingers in, her seat pulled back so she can lean into it languorously.

The car seems further away with every step I take, and I can see she’s waiting, not dreamily now, somehow agitated. She pulls her seat forward and starts the engine. I’m so far away.

I turn. He’s right behind me. He’s so close. It ends.

It feels like a dream. And this time, it is one.

*

When I wake it’s 2pm, I stayed up most of the night ‘reading’ and thinking. We’re on the night shift this evening. I do a couple of half-shift nights in the week to mix things up. Then I take Saturday off and do only five hours on Sunday.

I rearranged the spread of my week when I came back as my priorities had changed. I want to work pretty much as many days as possible now to keep up my routine. Bartu wanted a different rota but I said I ‘like my way’, and he’s stuck with me for now, so we left it at that.

I lock eyes with the cat. He’s probably pretty miffed that I haven’t spent much quality time with him thus far. I’ve fed and watered him well though and we already had a cat flap from a brief stint with a feline named Muffin when I was young, so he can’t deny all the facilities are there.

‘You okay, cat?’ I say, solemnly, unsure of my method of approach.

He gives me a certain kind of fuck you look and takes a seat on my ankle. The naming issue is becoming a significant one for him, I infer, so I set off on a trial run.

‘You okay… Dean?’ I say. Nothing.

‘You okay… Chris?’ Nonplussed.

‘You fine, Mr… Chair,’ I say, having looked around for inspiration.

‘You okay, Mark?’ A meow. This confirms a suspicion I had earlier. I knew he was a Mark.

I thought of the name as soon as I saw him and considered how interesting it could be to try to dictate a story about his life if it were so. ‘Can I ask you a question, Mark? Question-mark.’ One section would go. I wonder whether technology has developed enough for an app to decipher this sentence. I realise it’s an odd thought but I have copious alone time and the mind does wander. An excess of which is exactly what Mark is supposed to combat.

I stare at him and urge myself to connect. It would be good for me, Ryans had promised.

‘Can I ask you a question, Mark?’

I take his quiet as compliance.

‘What sort of person has that many fireworks in the boot of their car?’

He breathes out and deflates almost entirely. I jettison the possibility of conversation and do my exercises. He watches disapprovingly, silently judging me with his smart arse eyes, waving at me mockingly every so often with his smart arse tail, tasting every bit of himself with his smart arse tongue.

The buzz of seeing the car go up took a while to fade. To our surprise, when we reported it, what came out was the truth: ‘We saw a car on our way home and thought it seemed suspicious. I was a bit overzealous, Bartu made an error, but no one got hurt.

‘He wasn’t to know it was filled with carbon monoxide, or that the boot contained enough fireworks to mount a decent church display. Anyway, it made for a hell of a back to work celebration, sir,’ I said.

‘At first, we thought it was a car bomb, chief,’ said Bartu.

It wasn’t, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a trap. All options are open.

The chief is supposed to be in charge of this place but he seems to me to be a rather nervy and unimpressive man. He was more concerned about me on the whole. How I was ‘feeling’, if I was ‘safe’. We were told to be a lot more careful around cars in the future. We nodded like children, then the chief placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder, which was anything but. Then he went back to his paperwork before I knew that the conversation was over, like an errant stepfather doing just enough to make his lover’s kids feel like he actually cares.

But that was it. No further reprimand. Workers in Argos break TVs when they come down the chute. Milkmen smash glass bottles. Cats piss on the carpet. PCSOs blow up cars filled with Catherine Wheels. It’s nothing to worry about. Consider our wrists gently slapped. Our one point of contention came when the chief sent us to file a report with the duty officer, who seemed to take umbrage with my claim to have smelt a leak.

‘That’s not possible,’ said the duty officer.

‘Really?’ I said, concealing the fact that really I saw it rather than smelt it. And that it tasted of ink. And sounded like an E flat.

‘It’s odourless. Humans can’t smell it.’

‘Oh. Well I can, it seems.’

‘It’s odourless,’ he said, perplexed.

‘Oh, well. Just lucky I guess.’

I discovered in my home research that it’s not entirely true that carbon monoxide is undetectable or odourless. Some people have been known to sense it but up to now all of those people have been dogs. I’m not entirely sure how dogs have made that clear, or why my sense of smell is more akin to a dog’s, but there we are.

In the debrief room myself and Emre Bartu say little. We’re playing a game I think, which is tough for me, I’m better focusing on the literal than anything that involves subterfuge. It makes me seem a touch autistic, I suppose, but that’s not it. People with autism often don’t like the nature of ruses themselves, whereas I’d love to partake in one, I just find it mentally difficult to squeeze out anything but the truth.

So, I’m attempting to pretend to be concentrating on various things. Our notes. Thinking through our work plan for today. When, in fact, we’re both listening. Pretending to take no notice in an update Anderson and Stevens are giving about Tanya Fraser.

They say they checked her home and there’s nothing to suggest any foul play there. Which I suppose there wasn’t if you weren’t looking effectively.

They say that they’re ‘not ruling anything out’ but are ‘interested in her truancy record’.

They say they know she’s gone missing overnight before, and it turned out that she and a school friend were staying with her cousin in Essex, where they roamed around parks and shopping centres, smoking.

Having taken advice from the missing persons bureau, who use data compiled from 3,000 previous cases, they leaned heavily on the belief that she would, in all probability, come back of her own accord.

You see, two hundred and twenty thousand children go missing in Britain every year. Thirty percent of fifteen to seventeen-year-olds come home without police intervention. Eighty percent of missing teenagers turn out to be less than 40km from their homes. Just over ninety-nine percent are back home within three days. I know the maths is on their side, I did the numbers myself, but what if Tanya’s story lives in the minorities?

At least an inspector named Jarwar has also been asked to give it the once over. And let’s hope she shares our curiosity, because to me there were a hundred unfinished sentences in the bedroom alone.

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