CHAPTER 47
I watched her at the bar with her new friends, as she passed Marlene a cardboard box of some sort. Marlene drew herself up to her artificial maximum, and said something that left Debbie corpsing, the new girl open-mouthed and Miss Curls shaking her head in disbelief.

I kept an eye on the group, as the bulk shot off to what I presumed was the disco, and I was struck by the way Debbie steered them, like a mother hen. Not nervous, just always seeming to be aware of their position and distance from her. Amina clearly read my mind.

“Not just her, Jen. That Kim’s the same. The hairy one, aye? Going to bet that one or both of them will check the disco room in a mo”

“Any idea what the box was about?”

“Not a clue. Pint? I’ll ask Lil or Marlene”

“You okay talking to Lil?”

She sat down, with a quiet “For fuck’s sake!”

“Jen, Lil and I have spoken about things, and that should be obvious. I know she spoke to you, because she asked me for permission first”

“What?”

“As eloquent as ever. We don’t hate each other; we just didn’t, couldn’t, work as a couple. That’s all. There’s no side to pick; it just is what it is”

“And what does Lil say?”

“Honestly? That the two of us, that’s me and you, not me and her, we’re… She thinks we’re well suited”

“But we’re so different”

“We’re both starry-eyed romantics, in her words”

“I’m not a romantic!”

“What is more romantic than changing your name the way you did?”

“How did you know about that?”

“Because you file your personal papers next to your cutlery. It was sitting on top when I opened the drawer looking for spoons”

“Oh”

“Yes, ‘oh’. Your personal admin is crap, Miss Bradley. Now, I think I’ve made my point. Pint?”

I nodded, and watched her as she went to the bar, placed her order, asked Lil a question, and promptly burst out laughing. I didn’t miss the nod she’d given Lil after that woman had looked my way, nor the squeeze Lil gave Amina’s hand. It seemed I was on my way somewhere whether I wished it or not.

Amina put down our fresh drinks, but stopped my hand as I reached for mine.

“No. Got to tell you what’s gone on, and I do not want you spraying me with beer”

“And?”

“That new girl, Gemma, she’s a baker. Seems that Kim, the hairy one, tried to make a pun, joke, thingy, with some of her cakes”

“How, exactly, do you pun with cakes?”

“Well, Marlene got it. The box had a couple of cream cakes either side of a fruit thing, and she just says something about it summing up her dream, a fruity tart with two creamy horns to nibble on. Yup: that’s why I said to leave your beer alone till I’d finished. Anyway, then Marlene asks me if I would like her to flash me her box. Surely she has a limit?”

“I am beginning to doubt that, Amina. I mean, we’ve both seen people try, and she always outdoes them”

“I do not know how she does it. Anyway, Lil sends her best, and she gave me this”

It was a business card, ‘F.P. Bakers’ with an address in Cathays.

“I got a look at the cakes, Jen, and they look really good. Don’t know how they’ll taste, cause Marlene made it very clear that they were all for her and not for sharing”

She turned from amusement to a far more serious mood just then.

“Jen, I have packed a few things in my bag. I’d like… They’re for your flat. Toothbrush and spare knickers. There. That’s said”

I realised that she wasn’t so much telling me as asking for my permission, and that brought another realisation: I could make all the ‘rational’ decisions in the world, but when she was there, right in front of me, I couldn’t hold to them. I think we both realised that she would be coming home with me that evening, despite all my good intentions, and that is what happened. I’d lost control.

It was still slightly awkward the next morning, but Amina made a point of keeping everything light, avoiding that bloody enormous elephant, but when she left, she had claimed a drawer in my bedside cabinet.

Tom and I were on mid shifts for the next run, which spared us a nasty that Mickey and Ailish picked up, a rape out at Southerndown. We don’t usually see rapes, as they are predominantly domestic or semi-domestic crimes; the lurid ‘man with a knife’ of the popular press is a rare event. This one, though, was every horror story imaginable, with the fortunate exception that the victim was still alive. Ailish was still shuddering about it days later.

“Girl was only fifteen, Jen. Fifteen! And he broke her bloody cheekbone, punching her. Then, get this, while she’s on the ground, what’s left of her knickers still round her knees, he bloody well PISSES on her! What is it with bloody men?”

Mickey was shaking his head.

“The plod say that’s the third one there, over about ten years. Same story each time. Punchy, pissy, same m.o. every one”

Tom was quietly fuming.

“And why hasn’t it been sorted? I mean, same style, same bloody place? Got to be the same man. And I don’t think that sort of turd restricts himself to one bit of fun every three and a bit years, do you?”

For some reason, he was really upset by the event, but I didn’t think it right to push it just then. Leave it for now, Bradley. Perhaps that visiting Inspector, Powell, might have shaken things up a bit, but I doubted it. Rape is not something dealt with properly by the law, after all. Tom would tell me why he as so angry when he was ready, I was sure.

The weather was warming up nicely, which meant a wonderful shortage of cold corpses to bag up, but it did mean the re-emergence, as sure as lambs in Spring, of the fair-weather biker.

There are some psople who commute by motorbike all through the year, and they always seem to look exactly the same whatever the weather, in full waterproofs. There are others who only come out on sunny days, in leather outfits that cost more than a new car, on spotless race bikes that cost more than a house in Newport, and then there are the others, who ride in Summer wearing vests and shorts.

We almost never have to deal with Mr Commuter, but the others are regular customers. The full race leather crew are, unfortunately, all too often beyond our help.

We got a call one lunchtime to an RTC on the Pyle roundabout just off the M4, and pulled up just behind the Traffic car. A small Renault, clearly having pulled onto the roundabout from a side road, had its right front smashed, and a dented sports-tourer type bike was propped up against a chevron board. A huge biker was pacing to and fro, and it was a second before I spotted the second bike, and then the casualty, lying on his back on the tarmac, almost in a crucifix position. I got the Big Green Bag.

“Hi, Bryn. What do we have?”

“Ah, bike on roundabout, car drove into it. Missed his legs, thankfully. Looks like it highsided”

“Sorry?”

“Bike goes round corner, loses grip, slides, lowsider. Bike starts to slide, then tyres grip again, bike throws rider at road. That’s a highsider, Trouble is, you hit the road at twice the speed the bike was doing. Usually headfirst”

“Oh…”

“I’ve checked the wear pattern on his tyres, and this is not a knee-down nutter. His mate loosened the helmet strap because the casualty was turning blue”

“Ah”

“Swallowed his tongue. Lad fished it back out; hope he washed his hands recently”

I knelt down beside the figure, noting the very ordinary leathers, a full set, thank god. There was a crack right down one side of the lid, but what caught my attention was the jacket, an old-fashioned sort with a stand-and-fall collar like a shirt. Over the top of it was a sleeveless leather jerkin with a similar collar, so that there were four thicknesses of leather round his neck. That surely must have helped save the upper spine.

I unfastened the jerkin, then unzipped the jacket, careful no, t to move his head until we could get a box brace around it, and reached in to seek a pulse in his neck. It was there, and I was just about to start counting, when it simply stopped.

Fuck.

“TOM! DEFIBRILLATOR!”

He was there on the trot, and I set up the sparker as quickly as I could.

“CLEAR!”

THUMP.

Nothing. The machine whined as it recharged, and then I tried again.

“CLEAR!”

THUMP

This time, thank god, there was a pulse. Before I ripped his lid off for mouth to mouth, he drew a shuddering breath on his own, which settled to a steadier rhythm along with his pulse. Just as I was about to ask Tom for the head box, a car horn went off, and not just once. Bryn shook his head, rising to his feet, and walked over to a black BMW that had somehow wriggled its way through the traffic and up the right hand side of our wagon. I couldn’t hear what was said, but Bryn’s gestures were eloquent, including pointing directly at the other biker. The driver visibly cringed, and Bryn was back with me.

“Single-crewed today, Jen, so I’m going to get that lad to help. I assume you’ll be wanting this one on a board?”

“Absolutely. What did the tosser want?”

“How do you know he’s a tosser?”

“Driving a Beemer. And blowing his horn like an impatient twat”

“Say what you think, girl! Believe it or not, he’s in a hurry, and if we could just drag this one a bit further over, he can get his car through”

“Bloody hell!”

“Tried explaining, and he just doubled down. Told him he could either sit and wait, or I’d walk away and not see whatever way this one’s mate might choose to explain things. Worked, too. How do you want me to hold his neck?”

“Can’t feel anything obviously wrong there. Tom’s got the brace’ if you can just roll the lid forward so it comes off, and I’ll support his neck”

“Got it”

It went smoothly enough, and then we had the slightly trickier job of getting him onto the board and then the whole lot onto our trolley. His friend helped, along with two drivers, and we bluelit him to the Princess of Wales hospital as the nearest available.

Lucky, lucky man.