I slide my feet back and forth along the concrete walkway. Testing the grip, as the paths are slippery with rain and frost. To fall would be bad news. To lose my balance could mean to lose my life and that can’t happen. I’ve got too much to do.
Here he comes. I slip into the shadow of the doorways, silent, moving like a whisper. He appears as a silhouette, barely there, clothes black on black, hands encased in black gloves with too much space between the fingers on his right hand, the leather carefully stitched to conceal the stump. He is a dangerous nothing. Just like me.
There is a homeless man yards away. Another shapeless, drifting thing, concealed in a blanket which has more holes than material. In the darkness I see the whites of his eyes, gleaming, glittering, as though he knows what I am about to do. Blink; he has vanished. I wait, watch carefully; he is still there. He has simply closed his eyes.
He will not watch, but also he will not intervene. I nod, as though he can still see me and turn back to my quarry.
He is close now, feet away. I step out of my hiding place, walk slowly but with intent down to the water. Now comes the thrill. I can’t see him, he is behind me. This is the man known as The Pusher, the one that has created havoc in my home town. The one who kills indiscriminately, whoever and wherever among the sprawling network of canals takes his fancy that night. The one that the people know is out there but who the authorities will not admit exists.
As I approach the water, one sense is gone; my sight. I listen keenly, tilt my head back as though I can smell his approach. A slight change in the air, a minuscule swishing noise. Sudden hot breath on the back of my neck. Instinct screams at me to turn, to face him, to deal with him, but I force myself to wait.
Fragments of a second pass and I spin, see the face half hidden beneath scarf and hat. At my sudden movement he jerks to the side. I caught him unaware. He is wrong-footed; I am poise, grace and balance. And I am strength. I hook my arms sideways, one round his ribs, gripping so tightly I can feel the points of his bones. My other hand goes around his neck. A pull, his shoes skidding across the walkway which is slick with moss. The pull turns to a push, his fingers grasping air. I step back so he cannot take me with him.
The splash resonates around the silent canal but he never makes a sound.
I wait until he has vanished before retreating back to my place in the shadows. The homeless man is still there, eyes big, staring now. I tip him a nod. He closes his eyes again.
The Pusher is gone.
There’s a new one in his place.
Me.
Detective Sergeant Carrie Flynn closed her door and leaned against it. She massaged her chest, trying to loosen up the ache inside that always plagued her after she visited her mother. Pulling off her hat, she shook out her shoulder-length blonde hair, dragging her fingers through the tangled curls.
Leaving a trail of clothes, she headed straight to the shower. The water scalded her and she accepted it gratefully. The scent of sanitised hallways and medicated rooms swirled down the plughole. She stared down, resisting the urge to put her foot over the hole so it couldn’t rise back up and cover her again.
When her emotions had been washed away, she tilted her head back and let the flow of water take her tears.
Back in control, Carrie turned to her physical self. Taking a deep breath she scrubbed her body vigorously and then turned the water cold to let the icy needles pummel her skin. She tried to visit the gym every day, and the freezing plunge helped to keep her flesh tight and taut.
When her evening ritual was done, she sat on the side of the bath and wept quietly.
Later, in the dark of her fifth-storey flat, she edged out onto the tiny balcony and stared out into the neon-lit Manchester night. Her penthouse home overlooked the North Bay section of water, just one of the several locations where a body had been pulled from the treacherous canals.
Although the bright lights of Media City and Salford Quays were almost blinding, down there, at the waterside, it was dark. It was deadly.
Pulling the sleeves of her dressing gown over her shoulders, Carrie leaned on the railing. Would she have taken on this apartment and the huge mortgage that came with it if she’d known the biggest case in her career was to be based beneath her home? It wasn’t fear that had her up half the night, sitting on the dark balcony, staring down at the water. Carrie feared nothing, after all. No, it was desire to catch him, or her, she supposed; a woman was a possibility. But she was pretty confident the Pusher was a man.
And what would she do, if that night that she longed for arrived, and she witnessed him in person committing a murder?
Now, pushing herself off the cold, slick railing, she looked over her shoulder into the open-plan apartment. Her trainers were by the door, where they always were if they weren’t on her feet. Her home was five storeys up, and she knew from hard practice she could reach ground level quicker on foot than in the lift.
Carrie turned back to the canals. Christmas was fast approaching, as was evident from the early decorations that had gone up in the flats opposite. The public spaces, too, she noted now, dropping her gaze to the lower levels of shops, bars and restaurants. As soon as Halloween was over, Christmas was thrust at the consumers. Carrie thought back to the last Christmas she had enjoyed. Twenty years ago, aged eight, before her life collapsed and her childhood vanished overnight. Since then there had been nothing; no birthday celebrations, no festive family get-togethers. When she had been released from the care home and pushed out into the big, wide world on her eighteenth birthday, work had been the only thing to aim for.
With the tiniest tinge of sadness, Carrie couldn’t ever see there being anything else in her life.
Annoyance flared inside. She’d done her maudlin ritual earlier in the shower; her emotions were not supposed to come out again for at least another day, or until the next time she visited her mother. She stalked back inside and through to the kitchen. Pouring herself an orange juice, she carried it into the lounge and flicked the TV on for background noise and company. With the balcony door closed, she couldn’t see anything going on by the canal, but with the fanlight window ajar her ears were ever open to the sound of trouble below. She sipped at the juice, making a face at the cold beverage. She wished she drank sometimes, a measure of whisky or brandy to warm her on a winter night such as this. But Carrie didn’t drink. The feeling of being out of control and helpless all those years ago had steered her away from drink and drugs. Putting the juice down, she glanced at her watch; too late for coffee. But too early for bed. If she turned in now, she would lie awake, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about the visit to her mother. That would turn her mind back in time, to things she had done which she couldn’t take back or change now. Meanwhile the clock would tick on, two, three, four o’clock, until there was no point in staying in bed any longer.
Instead she pulled the throw from the back of the sofa around her shoulders and reached for the case file on the Pusher’s victims.
Even though she could quote all its contents off the top of her head, Carrie began to read.
The television had gone into sleep mode when she woke. Carrie swore softly, her neck cramped and stiff. She looked at her watch – almost 11 p.m. – and felt a slight sense of relief. It wasn’t too late; still time to go to bed and get a half-decent sleep.
But as she stood up, the bundle of case files tumbled from her lap. As she stooped to pick them up, random words leapt out at her. Inebriated, sober, drug addict, clean, young, middle-aged…She slipped the papers back in the file, looking over at the second pile on the coffee table. And even though she knew that delving into it would cost valuable sleeping time, she was unable to resist pulling them over.
Same cause of death – drowning – but two separate killers. Or were they? Carrie’s team was undecided. After all, this man, woman, this person, whoever they were, had killed seemingly innocent bystanders by pushing them into the various sections of canals around Salford. But the MO on the most recent crimes was different, the victims themselves were different. So Carrie had made two piles of cases: the victims of the first pusher, and – in her mind – those of the second. Her personal theory.
She slid the profiles of the victims that had occurred most recently in front of her. Graham, aged thirty-eight, a notorious pimp who had been arrested more times than Carrie cared to remember for beating his ‘girls’. Calum, aged twenty-five, in court for attacking three gay men. Sol, forty-two, a man who had briefly done a spell inside for selling drugs to kids around the local schools. And Gary Fisher, the most recent one to have been pulled out. A man Carrie was familiar with from his presence on the sex offenders register. Not pillars of the community.
She tapped her fingers on her lips as she pulled the original ‘Pusher’ files over to her. What a contrast in those victims, back in the day. Random, a mixture of good and bad, old and young, working-class and well-off and all those in between. But predominantly gay.
Carrie’s phone shrilled, vibrating across the coffee table. She snatched it up, and even before she had answered it, she became aware of the slow and steady pulse of blue lights outside.
Running to the doorway she burst out onto the balcony, sliding her thumb across the screen of her iPhone.
‘Hello?’ she answered breathlessly, not even listening to her work partner, DC Paul Harper, on the other end. Instead she looked down and across to where the water glowed with floodlights set up by her colleagues.
She cut Paul off mid-speech. ‘I’m coming now,’ she said, and ran to her bedroom to change.
It took two days for Emma to come and knock on Jade’s door. In that time between the tragedy and her arrival there was silence, punctuated by an occasional raw, deep shout. The walls between the terraced houses were thin.
‘Mummy, why’s Aunty Emma shouting?’
Jade looked down at her daughter, Nia.
‘She’s sad,’ said Jade, her own voice hoarse with grief. ‘Jordan had… an accident…’ she tailed off. How did you explain this to a four-year-old?
Jade hadn’t even known at first what was wrong, and the shrieks followed by the awful silence were so out of keeping with Emma’s usual, controlled demeanour that Jade had frozen. She knew she should go round, let herself in, find out what was wrong with her best friend, comfort her, but the angst in that first, single shout paralysed Jade. She hovered by the shared wall, her own heart drumming painfully against her ribs, the blood pounding in her head.
Finally, after much silence Jade opened the front door, waited a while as she looked left and right down the road. What was she looking for? The answer, when it came to her, was for help. Someone who knew what to do. Since Nan had gone, Jade felt like she hadn’t grown up at all. The nerves and the terrors were still inside her, hidden, smothered usually, but if routine was disrupted they came rushing right back at her, and Emma was the one who fixed it, fixed her fears, fixed her. Now that Emma was broken, there was nobody else.
In all the years they had lived side by side, Emma had been the helper, the sorter, the listening ear, while Jade was always the one who needed help. This role reversal was new territory. It was a chance, Jade realised, for her to step up, and no longer be the weaker one, and she knew it, knew this could be the thing that put her on an even keel, let her prove herself and her capabilities to her friend in need. And yet Jade remained in her home, hidden, until she forced herself hesitantly to look outside to find out what was happening next door.
Eventually it had been another neighbour who had filled Jade in.
The old man was in his front garden, one hand plucking at the crumbling cement of his brick wall, his shoulders hunched against the years, watery blue eyes regarding Jade as she approached him.
‘Her son’s missing,’ he said, bluntly, in answer to her unasked question, his eyes flicking in the direction of the now silent house next door. ‘Too young, much too young.’ He was matter of fact in the way that only elderly people seemed to be. Like they’d lived so long and seen everything and had so many people die that their emotions had been deadened somehow. Nan had been like that, too.
Still touching the wall to steady himself, the old man started to walk away, back into his own house. Jade called him, moved closer to the fence that divided their homes.
‘How?’ she asked, her voice no more than a whisper, but shrill at the time same time.
‘Looks like the Pusher again,’ he said. He made a diving motion with the hand that wasn’t using the wall as a support. ‘Into the canal.’ He snapped his fingers. Jade watched them, darkly fascinated. ‘Gone, just like that.’
Her heart beat in treble time and she darted back into her house even while her neighbour was still talking. She closed the door, stood in the hallway, her hands over her face.
Jordan was gone… Her best friend’s son, one of the few constants in Jade’s own life… into the canal, into the deep, dark, unearthly waterways that were only a road away from Jade’s own home.
Nia came down the stairs, chatting away, grabbing her mother’s shirt, demanding to be picked up. Jade did as the little girl asked but lifted her from behind, so Nia was facing away from her. Jade buried her face in her daughter’s hair. Nia tried to turn around, but Jade held her firm. She couldn’t look at Nia’s face, not yet, not having just learned what she had.
Next door a strange keening started up, and now she knew the reason, it pierced Jade’s very being. She moved quickly, carrying Nia through to the kitchen, the furthest room from Emma’s house. There, the sounds from next door were muffled, at least.
Later, the awful noises stopped and in her darkened living room Jade sat up straight.
Go to her, she instructed herself. Go to your friend now or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Prove yourself worthy of her friendship!
Like an awakening, Jade pushed herself up from her chair, ran to the front door and wrenched it open. She was too late. Emma was coming to her instead, and the shape of her friend, hunched over as if in pain, moving slowly past the teddy bears and the tealight candles and the poems and pictures and letters that mourners and well-wishers had left on the pavement outside quickened Jade’s breathing.
You waited too long, she berated herself. You made her come to you.
Jade looked at the memorials that had been left, instead of at her friend’s painfully slow progress. Jade couldn’t remember seeing them earlier when she had spoken to next door, and it was as though Emma didn’t even see them now as she glided ghostlike towards her.
As Emma shuffled up the path she reached out blindly. Choking back a sob, Jade opened her arms, stumbling a little as the slightly older woman lurched into her embrace.
‘I thought I would know if anything happened to him,’ Emma said, sitting in Jade’s front room, on the old familiar sofa, cradling a cup of tea but not drinking it.
Her voice was thin and scratchy, her words a whisper. The rough, strange shouting had stripped her vocal cords bare. Jade still had no words. All she had to offer was silent comfort.
‘I thought,’ Emma went on, ‘if something happened to my son that I would feel it, right here.’ She banged on her breastbone, thumped so hard that Jade winced.
She knew what Emma meant, though. She thought about Nia, how it would feel if she lost her. Just imagining it was enough to bring a hollow feeling to her belly. She didn’t say it; she didn’t want to remind Emma that she still had her own child, safely asleep – Jade hoped – upstairs.
Emma’s hair, usually a sleek, straightened, glossy brown bob looked unkempt and oily. Her hazel eyes, normally sparkling with laughter, were lost.
‘But I didn’t know, did I?’ Emma went on, her voice rising an octave, nearing the hysteria that Jade had heard through the walls.
Emma’s hands ripped at a tissue she held, worrying at it in her lap. Suddenly she tilted her head back and drew in three long, jagged breaths. Jade’s tears spilled over as Emma tried to speak, her words cut off by breathless sobs. Jade pulled her into an embrace, shocked at how tight Emma held onto her, her fingers digging into her shoulders.
Emma drew away, and spotting a packet of cigarettes on the coffee table she shuffled forward, fumbled with the packet. Gently Jade took them from her, slipped one out, lit it and held it towards her friend.
Emma stared at the glowing tip, and like a mother feeding her child, Jade moved to sit beside her, slipped the filter between her dry, chapped lips. She sucked and Jade blinked back tears as the smoke swirled around her.
‘I thought if something ever happened to him, my heart would fracture, at the exact moment that his stopped beating.’ Emma inhaled, blew a plume of smoke to the ceiling. ‘But I didn’t know. I didn’t know.’
Jade retreated back to her chair, lowered her face, hid from Emma’s gaze behind her white-blonde mane of hair.
‘Jordan,’ Emma called for her son, waited the requisite twenty seconds, and shouted again. ‘Jordan! Come here.’
He wandered in, winding his scarf around his neck at the same time as he picked up his keys and iPhone.
He didn’t acknowledge her. He barely gave her a glance as he held the long end of the scarf between his teeth and plucked his coat off the back of the door, shoving his things in the pocket.
She wound the scarf round his neck for him. Taking advantage of his hands being busy elsewhere, she grabbed his face and planted a kiss on his cheek.
He pulled away at the same time as rubbing his face on the scarf. ‘What did you want, anyway?’
Somewhere in the back of her mind she buried deep her hurt at the rebuke, the fact that he never let her touch him anymore. She drew him over to the table, moved the sandwich she’d been eating and, still clutching his hand, pointed at the newspaper.
‘Look, someone else has been killed, pushed into the canal.’ He pulled away again. A little flower of panic bloomed in Emma’s chest. ‘No, wait, they’re targeting boys, young men, just like you, Jordan. I know you go down to the bars by the canal, promise me you’ll stay in a group, you won’t walk home alone, you won’t—’
He stared unblinkingly at her. ‘They’re not targeting young men. These guys,’ he interrupted her, flicking his hand over the picture of the youth that stared out of the page, ‘these guys are queers, faggots—’
‘Jordan!’ Emma stared at him, aghast, the worry that had been biting turning into anger. ‘Don’t you dare call them that, that’s not how I bloody well raised you.’
He lowered his face, his fringe of jet-black hair falling across his eyes. From what she could see of them they were dark, expressionless.
‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ he said, eventually. ‘These men being pushed, they’re… gay. And I’m not.’ He swept his hair back off his face before shoving his hands into his pockets.
Emma sighed. Moving towards him she picked up the end of the scarf as another memory caught her.
‘This looks silly,’ she said.
They both looked down at it, the Armani scarf that had been the first piece of designer clothing he’d bought himself when he had started work. It was black, thick-ribbed, classy and cool, but through the centre of it, entwined in the material and running the whole length of the scarf, was a long, disjointed strip of lime green wool. It looked like it had been crudely sewn in there by a child. It looked like that because it had been.
‘I thought you’d be so mad when you found out what Nia had done,’ Emma said, biting her lip at the recollection.
It was last winter when Jade had popped over with her then three-year-old daughter. Both of them treated Emma’s house like their own, so as Jade and Emma opened a lunchtime bottle of wine, they didn’t pay any attention to how quiet Nia was being.
‘Look, I made Jordan a present!’ she lisped as she came in, trailing the scarf behind her, pushing her hair out of her eyes with one hand, a crochet hook clutched in the other. ‘We’ve been learning croching at school.’
‘Crocheting,’ corrected Jade absently. And then, ‘What is… oh, no, Nia!’
Emma wrenched the scarf from the little girl’s hands, exchanging a horrified glance with Jade.
‘NIA!’ shouted Jade, and her daughter immediately burst into noisy tears.
A shadow fell as Jordan appeared in the doorway before stepping over to Nia and picking her up.
‘I-I j-j-ust wanted t-to make you a p-p-present!’ Nia screamed, opening her lungs fully at both the injustice she faced and her new, willing audience.
Emma held out the scarf, waited for his explosion. With his hand he took it, held it up.
‘Did you do this, Ny-ny?’ he asked.
‘A present… f-for y-you,’ she hiccoughed, tucking her puce-coloured face into his shoulder.
Jade and Emma didn’t even breathe.
‘It’s beautiful, Nia,’ Jordan said, throwing a glare at his mother. ‘Thank you, I’ll wear it always.’
Nia’s eyes, a blue that matched those of her mother, peeped out from behind her blonde curls. Those too came from her mum, but were far more unruly than Jade’s carefully tamed hair.
A stunned silence from the two grown-ups as Jordan wrapped the scarf, green wool and all, around both of their necks. As he walked out of the room with Nia still in his arms, Emma and Jade exhaled.
‘I liked it, I still like it, that little girl…’ his mouth twitched in an almost-smile, just for a single, blink-and-you-miss-it moment before the look was gone. He regarded his mother, an expression on his face now that she couldn’t fathom at all.
‘Hey,’ Emma said sharply. ‘Will you call me when you’re finished at the pub? I’ll come down, meet you, walk home with you.’ The newspaper distracted her, and she pulled it towards her, looked at it again. ‘This man, this… this Gary, he was twenty-three!’ she cried, ‘and a big guy.’ She squinted at the photo, her heart catching as she thought of this Gary’s mother, sitting somewhere, probably right here in Manchester, looking at the same picture in the same paper of her dead son. ‘Just be careful, and call me,’ she said.
Jordan didn’t reply. When she looked up, she saw that he had already gone.
Emma wandered around her house, lost, worrying. Did the concern for your child ever end, she wondered. She had nobody she could ask, no friends who had a child of her own son’s age.
Briefly, she contemplated whether she’d given him too much freedom growing up, but that had been a conscious decision, never to stifle her son. She had given him the liberty and trust that had always been refused to her by her own parents.
She’d never denied him alcohol, always allowing him a small glass at Christmas and then, when he was seventeen, offering him a beer on the weekend when she would chill out with a glass of wine. The same went for cigarettes. She never hid her own smoking from him, and when she thought she detected the smell of smoke on him in high school, she sat him down and offered him one of hers.
‘If you’re going to smoke, I’d rather you didn’t hide it from me,’ she had said.
He declined.
‘It stinks, and it gets in my hair and in the curtains and carpets and both of our clothes.’ He frowned at her holding the packet, folded his arms.
She had smothered a smile of relief, ignored the little voice inside her head that whispered, are teenage boys s. . .
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