One
She slid out from beneath Gary’s sleeping body and eased herself to the edge of the bed. Always the same, the way he would turn towards her each night, arm and the heft of his thigh heavily upon her. Weighing her down. Since they’d been moved here it was worse. He couldn’t sleep without her. Holding her breath, Michelle waited for the thin squeak of the bedframe to still. Cracked lino cold at her feet. Gary sighed and when she looked round she could see his face, young in the faint light, open-mouthed. She saw the way one hand gripped the sheet, the knot of skin above his eyes, and was thankful she knew nothing of his dreams.
Slipping one of Gary’s sweaters over her T-shirt, a pair of his socks on to her feet, she left the room.
The children had a bedroom of their own along the narrow landing, but these past weeks it had been too cold. Ice overlapping on the insides of the windows and their breath pigeoning the air. Get an oil stove in there, neighbors had said, keep it low. But Michelle knew of two house fires less than half a mile from here since winter had set in, ladders reaching up too late and never close enough, kiddies trapped upstairs and overcome by fumes.
Now they banked up the living-room fire with slack, made sure the guard borrowed from her parents’ home was fixed in place. Natalie’s cot they lifted into the middle of the room once the TV had been switched off and Karl’s bed was the settee, curled beneath a nest of coats and blankets, thumb in mouth and dead to the world.
Downstairs, Michelle smiled at the baby, who had wriggled round again until her head was pressed against the bottom corner of the cot, one leg poked through the bars. Raising both hands to her mouth, Michelle warmed them before touching her daughter’s tiny foot and easing it back, carefully, out of the cold. Both of them would need changing when they woke. She was reminded that it was her bladder that had woken her and she braced herself for the bathroom, the old scullery that had been converted and badly, quarry tiles laid on bare earth and made uneven by the frost.
She rubbed a circle from the inside of the window and the dark looked back at her. No more than two or three blurred lights pale along the street. If she were lucky, she might yet sit with yesterday’s paper and a pot of tea, a little stolen time before the children woke to crying and she heard Gary’s feet upon the stairs.
Resnick had been awake since four. So attuned to disruption, he had been blinking back sleep and reaching towards the telephone before, it seemed, he had heard its first ring. Kevin Naylor’s voice was indistinct and oddly distant and Resnick, irritably, had to ask him to repeat everything twice.
“Sorry, sir, it’s this mobile phone.”
All Resnick heard were particles of words, breaking up like starlings in the early morning air.
“Redial,” Resnick said, “and try again.”
“Sorry, sir. Can’t hear you.”
Resnick cursed and broke the connection himself and when Naylor rang back he could hear him perfectly. A taxi driver had been taking two youths from the city center to an address in West Bridgford; as they neared Lady Bay Bridge, one of them had tapped on the window, asked the driver to pull over as his mate was feeling sick, like to throw up. When one young man got out of the car on to the pavement, the other went around to the driver’s side and threatened him with an iron bar. Before the driver could pull away, the windscreen had been splintered in his face. The youths dragged him out of the cab and beat him around the head and body. He had been crawling across the center of the road when a milk lorry turned on to the bridge and stopped. The youths had run off and the driver’s takings had gone with them.
“The weapon?” Resnick asked.
“Tried to chuck it into the Trent, sir, but only landed in the mud.”
“And the driver?”
“Queen’s. Accident and Emergency.”
“Who’s with him?”
“Uniform patrol should be there now, sir. There’s nobody …”
“Graham Millington …”
“Leave, sir. He and the wife, they were going away. In-laws, I …”
Resnick sighed; he should have remembered. “Divine, then. But I want someone with him all the time. The cabbie. We don’t know how many chances we’ll get.”
“I could …”
“You stay where you are.” Resnick narrowed his eyes towards the bedside clock. “Twenty minutes, I’ll be there. And see no one gets their sticky fingers all over that cab.”
Absent-mindedly, he lifted away a cat that had folded itself into his lap and set it back down on the bed. One of the others was over by the bedroom door, scratching its head against the heavy edge of wood. The last time something like this had happened, the weapon had been a baseball bat and the taxi driver had died. Quickly, he showered and dressed and went downstairs, grinding coffee for a cup he would only half drink before stepping out into the cold light of another day.