CHAPTER 26
Paula looked round the table, her eyes lingering on Rhod, and I could read her mind. ‘Souvenirs’, Moira had said, and I had to assume she meant one or more varieties of hepatitis. I had read the briefings, spoken to enough girls; was it dirty needles, or simply taking the extra cash for bareback sex from dirty men? It wouldn’t have been HIV, because she almost certainly knew it is nowhere near as contagious as good, old-fashioned liver death.

Once more, I found myself cursing Ashley Evans. I mean, it wasn’t his fault, not all of it, but he would stand as a placeholder for me, the bastard. Change the subject.

“So when’s the big day then, Paula?”

“Dunno! We still have a lot to do, me and him. Sounds amazing that… You ever found it such a big thing, you two? Being able to say ‘us’ instead of just talking about yourself in the singular?”

Blake looked up from cleaning the boy’s face.

“Careful, Paula. That study is leaking out”

She laughed, and once more it was with happiness.

“Oh, mate, you wouldn’t believe it! I spent so many bloody years trying to fit in with the girls and the punters, to lose that public schoolgirl voice, vocabulary, whatever”

I held up a finger, simply saying “Lexis and register” before grinning at them both.

“Look, I did a bloody languages degree, so you can both bugger off. Choice of words, choice of style. Both best used as appropriate to where one is and who with. Sometimes the non-verbal aspects are more important”

My sweet husband made some remark about the non-verbal aspects of pepper spray, baton, Evans and Pritchard, and the mood remained nicely broken.

“So, date? Tell, girl!”

“Well, a lot to do just now. Paul needs clearance from some sort of ethics body before we can actually set the time and place, but no, it’s not a provisional engagement. Trust me on that one. Trust him as well”

“And you do”

“Oh, yes. One decision I made… No, that was going to come out wrong. I have made a lot of decisions in my life, but most of them weren’t made freely. This is a free choice, but it’s not the big decision I am talking about”

My man’s voice was so, so gentle just then.

“When you decided to take a chance, love? Come round with him to Deb’s?”

“When I first decided to get into his car, decided that he wasn’t going to try and shake me down, get a freeby, or simply drive me all the way out of the city and leave me in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, there are coppers who do all of that shit. That was my big decision. And you know how I knew when I had made the right choice? It wasn’t when he took me to a caff and bought me something decent to eat, a hot drink. No. It was when he talked, and it wasn’t about me, but it was, aye? Not about shopping people, just about letting him know if the other girls were having problems, nasty punters, things like that. No condemnation of us for being on the game, none at all, no value judgements, no morality tales. Just a polite request to let him know if there was anything he could do for us to keep the unnecessary shit away”

She paused, then smiled once more.

“A proper copper, like you two, and your mates. The way it should be”

There wasn’t much else we could say to that, so we wrapped up our boy and left her to her signing, taking with us more than one book of our own. By that, I mean one for Mam and Dad; the rest of the team could get their own editions, and I was pretty sure they would be doing so.

Spring came and went, and so much of it was occupied by odd little cases that involved free association, odd insights and the occasional visit by my brother-in-law, although I suspect he was drawn more to Rhod than me, the cheeky so-and-so.

It was one particular investigation that Candice cracked that showed how useful our networking had become, a case involving bikes. The odd thing was that it covered both bicycles and motorcycles, and while it left me doing what seemed to be my party piece and looking through almost endless hours of video, it was the Office Blonde who saw the link for the first thefts and her Fresh Meat Lexie who followed both our leads onto offence number two.

Candice was, well, candid about where she had got her inspiration from. The thefts had been legion, and involved both sorts of bikes disappearing almost wholesale from a couple of parking areas.

“Well, years ago, I was seeing this biker, going out for a few rides together, and yes, Alun, some of them were THAT sort of ride! Anyway, he was a Geordie, down here on a short-term contract, so we would go out to odd places, usually biker sort of things, and we’d been off to some weekend in Weston Super Mare”

Lexis had snorted.

“Bloody high life, innit?”

“Yeah, and love you too, and your arse does look big. Where was I? Oh, yeah. We had been kicked out of some big pub on the sea front for being evil baby-eaters or something, and we’d found this wine bar, of all sorts of place, in a back street. There was a multi-storey car park behind it, and a sort of triangle of pavement between the way in and the way out, so that gradually got covered in bikes”

Jon had raised a hand.

“Yes, Mrs Rhys?”

“Piss off, woman. Anyway, didn’t the bar owner think you were going to rape his hamster or bit the head off his poodle or some such?”

“Na, place went from empty to forty or fifty paying customers in ten minutes, and he wasn’t stupid. Anyway, ma and Bear, no, Lexie, B-E-A-R, we are looking out the window at all the bikes, and he gets to musing about home. Place he called Westgate Hill”

She had paused to take a mouthful of tea, her grin threatening to make it rather a difficult process, then continued.

“He told me one story, which I will leave to another day, but both tales were about bike thieves. This Hill place, it’s apparently THE biker area of Newcastle. Motorcycle dealer next to leather shop next to chip shop next to tattooist next to bike breaker’s next to porn shop”

Jon had laughed out loud.

“Everything for the spotty yoof in one place, then?”

“Absolutely, Jonny Boy! And out the back was a big car park with a smaller bike park, and that was the problem, that and the fetish clothing place”

She’d let the silence linger just long enough to let the confusion settle into her audience.

“There were Council CCTV rigs by the car park, but they were the sort that could swivel, track, pan, whatever the word is. Lots of young girls shopping for fishnets and leather microskirts, all tits and hair. Operators spent more time perving than serving. Anyway, the bikes kept disappearing from the bike spaces, and it wasn’t till they got a bit of a hint through story number two that they realised the nicked bikes were only moving about two hundred yards, to a breaker’s. Frame and log book scam”

That one had lost me completely, and Candice had grinned happily.

“Gotcha, Di! Old DVLA game; you could buy a motorcycle frame with a registration document. Older bikes just listed the frame number, so all the expensive bits like engine and bodywork can be swapped from a nicked bike and bingo, one apparently kosher motor. Now, if we were to speak to our Queen of Driver and Vehicle Licensing, and perhaps your bro-in-law, and look at the financial performance of a few local firms…”

She had been spot on, of course, and we ended up with a short-list of local firms to run past Chris at the DVLA and Sean at Revenue and Customs. I got handed the time-lapse job: watch the footage of the bike park until the operator decided to stock up his wank bank, then see which bikes had moved and run their numbers through our ‘reported stolen’ database.

Two directors and four of their staff jailed for a sizeable term, and one CCTV operator handed his cards. I had been more than a little curious as to why we had been handed the file, as we were supposedly a ‘serious’ crime unit, but that confusion vanished once I saw how much some of the bikes cost. That shock was only amplified when I read the list prices of the bloody pushbikes we were then tasked with!

Lexie was the one to crack that one, when she spotted the equivalent of a two-wheeled Bugatti on sale in a local second-hand shop for £100. She pulled together the Blonde’s ideas, and yet again we delivered a neatly-packaged file to what I was thinking of as our clients. I couldn’t imagine a better job.

Candice didn’t release part two of the story for a few weeks, and it took a few drinks before she let slip, in a team session at the Eli Jenkins, Rhod with my parents.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t want to get the lad into trouble, do I?”

Lexie was feeling her own oats by then, and her remark about ‘Bear’ getting Candice into trouble met with a round of applause. Blondie held up her hands in surrender.

“OK! So, the bike park, yeah? There’s this lad walks across to see some bloke working on a bike. Got the saddle off, the side panel, doing something with a screwdriver and pliers, and so the lad says “Nice bike, pal’, and the man says, ‘Yeah it is’. ‘What’s it do, then, flat out, like?’ And the man says he doesn’t know, cause he’s never had it flat out, and the lad says ‘No, you haven’t, cause it’s my bike’ and then proceeds to kick nine colours of shit out of him”

Rhys was nodding in as sober a way as he could, which, to be honest, wasn’t that sober at all.

“Makes sense to me, woman. So where was Naked?”

“Bear, you sod. Anyway, so there’s this lad, rolling round the floor as he gets a faceful of Doc Marten, and there’s other bikers come across to see what it’s about, and when they’re told he was nicking bikes, what else can they do but help out?”

She took a long pull on her drink.

“Would have been worse if a lad from Traffic hadn’t come by on his Beemer and asked what was going on”

Rhys snorted. “And then?”

“Well, they told the copper it was a thief getting a licking, so he nods and buggers off!”

Lexie was next.

“And bloody Bareback? Where was he?”

Candice put a hand across her mouth.

“My lips are sealed, but he may have been on a BMW at the time”

It was confirmed: I really couldn’t imagine a better job, nor better people to work with.