‘Hands. Now. Put your hands through the gate,’ Janet repeated.
He did as she said, tears streaming down his face, coughing and swinging his head as if he could dislodge the blindness caused by the chemical.
Janet snapped the plastic cuffs on, effectively tying him to the bars.
Rachel saw the vans pull up on the roadside near Janet. The men piling out. The sirens cut out with one last ‘whoop’ and she heard shouting, glimpsed Mrs Tandy dropping her shopping bags, yelling, and one of the men restraining her.
Rachel moved to lean against the wall, head spinning in time to the blue flashing lights, filling with bubbles, so dizzy, and her knees dissolving. Everything falling away.
Janet waited for Rachel in A &E. If she never had to see the inside of a hospital again it’d be too soon. They should have given her a uniform by now, or a mop and bucket. First there’d been her own near-death experience, belly sliced open requiring multiple surgeries, then once she was up and running, her mother had collapsed at home, thankfully having enough time and wit to call Janet for help. After the emergency appendectomy Dorothy had needed a hysterectomy. Then there had been Olivia. And now Rachel.
Janet clung to the fact that Rachel had been upright and able to go after Connor. Surely it couldn’t have been anything major if she could run like that? But what if the bullet had nicked a lung, or some minor debris had worked its way round to her heart or brain?
Janet got to her feet, walked over and stared unseeing at a noticeboard. Elise hadn’t hesitated when Janet heard Rachel needed her. ‘Go, Mum,’ she’d said, ‘go.’
But a thousand worries flew through Janet’s head: I should be here with you. Family first. I might be putting myself in harm’s way.
‘I’ll be fine,’ Elise said, sitting up straighter, ‘go on.’ Elise understood the friendship, how much it meant, how deep it went. Something Janet’s mother had never been able to fathom. Because Janet and Rachel were so very different. Rachel with her devil-may-care approach, her appalling choice in men (though maybe Sean was a turning point), her indifference to kids, her dysfunctional family; then Janet – daughter of teachers, hard-working, reliable, solid, settled. Until the Andy business. The one definitive thing she and Rachel had in common was the job, love of the job, commitment, compassion. You had to have that to survive in the syndicate.
Janet could not imagine work without Rachel, though in time if Rachel passed her sergeant’s exam the process of moving up and away would start.