Team Spirit (Special Crime Unit Book 1) (33 page)

‘Haven’t
seen this guy since school,’ Juliet told Jasmin. She looked shellshocked. ‘He
was in our class. Jesus.’

Jasmin
nodded, a haze before her eyes. She was trying to remember her training, trying
to imagine herself inside the attack, to empathise and know better when to be
gentle with the victim, when to press. This time she couldn’t do it. Lucky was
one of their own and this couldn’t, shouldn’t have happened.

‘Did
he have a weapon?’ she said.

‘No,
he didn’t.’

‘A
knife?’ She felt sick. ‘A gun? Anything?’

‘
Nothing
.’

‘Lucky,
I must ask this. Did you try to stop him?’

They
stared at one another.

‘No.’

‘Did
you say, “Don’t,” or anything that - ?’

‘No,’
Lucky said, on the brink of more tears.

‘
No
?’

‘But,
Larissa...’ Juliet said.

‘But
what?’

‘You’re
a copper. You’ve been trained.’

‘Tell
me about it.’ Lucky blinked desperately and turned to Jasmin. ‘Want to know why
I didn’t? It should be bleeding obvious.’

‘I
don’t -’ Jasmin said, at once aware and furious with herself that this sounded
like the waffling it was.

‘You
don’t understand,’ Lucky said. ‘Nor do I. Two weeks of endless, sleepless
nights, asking myself. I’ve got four years in now, I’ve faced down G20
demonstrators, street robbers, kids with knives. I can look after myself, I
know I can; I’ve proved any number of times I can. And some sick scumbag breaks
into my house and forces me to have sex with him. I did everything wrong,
Jasmin. I didn’t scream. I didn’t fight. I did everything he told me. I lay on
the bed when he told me. I even took off my own underwear, can you believe
that?’ She turned to Juliet. ‘You’re right. I should’ve used my training. What
I should’ve done was bite his fucking nuts off. He knew I was Job. I had every
bloody opportunity
and I did nothing to stop him
!’

Now
she cried. She collapsed onto Juliet and bawled into her neck, her friend’s
trembling arms trying absurdly to protect her against the nightmare that had
already happened. Jasmin felt helpless. This was not discreet, ladylike
weeping. This was the howling of a soul in anguish, a flood of tears flung
before a burst dam of fear, anger, shame, frustration only Lucky could feel but
could make the others shrink from in horror.

To
stem the torrent took twenty minutes and the rest of the Kleenex, shared
between the three of them. There were damp spots on Jasmin’s notebook. Lucky
looked ghastly, her eyes and nose red and swollen, whipcords of wet black hair
striping her cheeks, thick smudged mascara scarring her face like burns. She
looked up with an expression you saw on the faces of beggars outside East
Croydon station.

‘I
get it,’ Jasmin said, her voice shaky.

‘No,
you don’t.’

‘I
begin to.’

‘Well,
I’m glad,’ Lucky snapped, ‘because buggered if I do. So tell me, Jasmin. What
do I do now?
Tell
me!’

To
her despair, Jasmin couldn’t answer. She felt terribly that she was letting
Lucky down.

She got home at
eight with no appetite. Instead she settled down with
Nostromo
, of which she was now in sight
of the finish. By ten she was onto the last three chapters and dead beat. She
undressed, went and had a bath, poured herself into bed and turned the light
out.

Every
time she closed her eyes, she could see Larissa Stephenson sitting in the rape
suite, saying things she didn’t want to hear, things she couldn’t bring herself
to believe. She tried to tell herself a female cop was at the same risk of
attack, remote though that might be, as any other woman. But surely,
surely
a cop ought to know enough to
dissuade a potential rapist, or at least put up a fight. Damn it, she’d
seen
Prosser. Sure, he was tall,
intimidating, evil-looking if you liked, but there was nothing to him. No way
should he have been able to overpower a fit young woman like Lucky without even
a struggle.

Yet
that was what he’d done to five other women, some who could defend themselves,
some who couldn’t; more if the reports were true, reports of boxes filled with
dozens of objects whose original owners might never be traced. Even without
those facts, there was no doubting Lucky’s upset, the raw, violated distress as
she cried until her lungs withered. She heard the doubts still pitter-pattering
at the back of her mind, and felt ashamed. Who could tell how they’d react in a
frightening situation? Jasmin, whose attitude had always been that any intruder
she disturbed would not remain in possession of his dick for very long, was no
longer so sure.

Now
wide awake, she listened with raw nerves to the passage of an express train
outside her window; to the engulfing, angry silence that surged in its wake.

She
swore, got up and got dressed.

The
468 bus stopped two minutes from her front door and ran beyond midnight. One
came by with considerate promptness and she rode it to the Swan and Sugar Loaf
in South Croydon. Using the map app on her phone, she found her way to a big
Edwardian house whose walls were cloaked in Virginia creeper. She pushed open
the gate and stepped onto a path through an unkempt front garden. The hall
light was on.

Jeff
Wetherby seemed only mildly surprised to see her. With the nervous
embarrassment of the unprepared host, he ushered her into a large, sparsely
furnished room at the back of the house, with original fixtures that even
included a disused socket for a bell rope. French windows opened onto a patio,
a rockery and a long, large lawn. These, like the front, looked wild, but it
was too dark to make out much detail.

Jasmin
was speechless. All she had in the world would fit into one
corner
of this room.

‘Have a seat,’ Jeff offered, ‘if - ’

But
she was still taking things in. ‘Big, huh?’

‘Oh,
aye.’

‘Ah!
Right,’ she said abruptly, his invitation registering. She chose an armchair
and flopped into its enveloping depths. With a heavy sigh she leaned back,
kicking off her shoes.

A
muffled thump from outside made her turn her head to see a flash of orange
going past the French windows. Shortly afterwards a distant querulous mewing
started up. ‘Only Buster,’ Jeff smiled.

‘Buster?’

‘Cat.
Better let him in.’ He paused in the doorway. ‘I was about to heat some soup.’

‘I
don’t want to be trouble.’

‘No
trouble. I hadn’t eaten. Not much of an appetite, last couple of days.’

She
nodded to let him know she was in the same mood. ‘Then sure. Thanks.’

She
smiled, settled deeper into the armchair with a contented wriggle and closed
her eyes. With a last affectionate glance, Jeff left the room.

Buster was on the
kitchen windowsill, his worried ginger face pressed against the glass. He
jumped down when he saw Jeff, who walked over and opened the window. The cat
jumped in and landed at his feet. Jeff shook his head wearily. All cats have
their idiosyncrasies, and one of Buster’s was a disinclination to use the door
for going in and out of the house.

He’d
been a kitten when Jeff had met him two days after moving in. He’d shown up on
the front porch, wearing an expression that said, ‘Own me.’ There was no collar
and Jeff had gone door to door, put up posters, advertised on Craigslist and
contacted the RSPCA and the Cats Protection League, all to no avail. Before
long Buster was well established, and had been his lodger ever since.

Jeff
shovelled cat food into a bowl, washed his hands and put the stock on the stove
in a big aluminium pan. He stirred in water, the shredded remains of the
chicken, rotelle, chopped vegetables, garlic powder, black pepper and an extra
stock cube for body. Twenty-five minutes ought to do it. He turned the gas down
and went back to the living room. Jasmin was dozing, but she stirred and looked
up as he came in and sprawled out on the settee.

‘Comfy?’

‘
Ja
!’ She closed her eyes and
tilted back her head. ‘I can’t remember last time I could relax in an
armchair.’

‘How
about house calls?’

‘That’s
work,’ she said. ‘It’s not relaxing.’

‘True.’
He recalled the spartan furnishings of Jasmin’s bleak room. No armchair there,
no curling up by the fireside on a cold, frosty night. Every waking moment was
a quest for constant movement, every muscle coiled against the unrelenting
chill. Hardly surprising she looked run down. He wondered when her last decent
night’s sleep had been.

‘It’s
warm here,’ she commented, as though reading his thoughts.

He
looked around. ‘It’s OK, I suppose. Stays nice and cool in here on a hot
summer’s day. Winter, that’s the sod. Trouble is the central heating’ - he
pointed to an old iron radiator behind the door - ‘runs off a coal-fired boiler
in the breakfast room, would you believe. There’s tons of anthracite in the
cellar but it’s too much aggro carting enough of it up here. One and only time
I ever actually managed to get the thing going it filled the entire house up
with soot. So now I just rely on the fires and you should’ve seen my gas bill
yesterday.’

She
smiled. ‘How long do you live here now?’

‘Nearly
seven years.’

‘How
come you have such a big house?’

‘It’s
my dad’s,’ Jeff said. ‘He inherited it from an aunt, had some vague idea about
converting it into flats but never got round to it.’ He shifted his position.
‘I’d just transferred to the Met, so I moved in here as a sitting tenant, look
after the place. Beats the section house.’

‘This
is expensive, no?’

‘Would
be if there was a mortgage,’ he nodded. ‘Auntie Mary’s insurance paid that off.
I meet all the bills and send Dad rent each month.’ He made a face. ‘Guess I’m
out of pocket a bit, but I can easily get by on what I’m earning.’

Silence
fell, the stern knowledge they’d been avoiding for too long the subject at the
front of both their minds.

‘I
heard,’ Jeff said.

‘How?’
She was surprised and horrified. The promise of spontaneous comfort seemed to
fade. ‘Lucky’s statement is passed round the goddamn office now, huh?’

He
folded his arms and looked hurt. ‘That you’d done the interview, I meant. Is it
true?’ She looked at him sharply. ‘This was two weeks ago?’

‘How
much of it is out?’ Jasmin asked.

‘All
I know is the bits of Prosser’s story I believe. He says two weeks.’

‘He
admits it?’

‘Raping
her?’ He scowled. ‘What do you think?’

‘What’s
his story?’

‘D’you
really want to hear this?’ he sighed. He met her gaze. ‘He was never in the
house. They bumped into one another outside; she has a hysterical fit, decides
he matches the description of the serial rapist and instead of nicking him,
threatens to fit him up.
He
says.’

‘You’re
kidding!’

‘Oh,
no,’ he said thickly.

She
looked him in the eye. ‘You believe him?’

He
thought, recognising a test. ‘No, I fucking don’t. We both saw Lucky’s face,
and him smirking like it was some big joke. I think he raped her, and I’ll
stand up in any court and say so.’

But
you don’t know what I know, Jasmin thought. There’s no way it’s even going to
get that far.

‘He
knew she was a cop,’ she said. ‘He was waiting in her room. She has
commendations on the walls, her uniform in her closet. I don’t get why he was
not careful this time.’

‘Why
he actually raped her instead of using a foreign object?’ Sam said. She nodded.
‘Beats me. Hopefully Zoltan or Summerfield can wear him down so he’ll tell us.’

‘Two
weeks.’

‘Aye,’
Jeff said. ‘Explains a lot.’

She
looked at him in surprise, but he didn’t seem inclined to elaborate. She felt a
sudden, shameful pang of jealousy.

He
said, ‘How is she?’

‘OK.’

‘Bearing up?’

‘She
bears up for so long, believing that today was never going to happen. I think
now that delayed shock is coming.’ She spotted his frown. ‘Juliet is spending
the night with her.’

He
looked blank. ‘Juliet?’

‘Her
friend at the club the other night.’

‘Don’t
remind me,’ he said, rubbing his eyes to cover the anguished look on his face.
He realised what he’d said and paled. ‘I didn’t mean...’

‘No,’
she smiled. ‘I know.’

‘First
Nina, now Lucky.’ He shook his head. ‘God almighty, what’s happening to this
team?’

For
a while neither of them spoke. Jasmin, tilting her head on one side and resting
it on a cupped hand, was acutely aware of Jeff looking at her intently.