‘I want to help you, Mark,’ she continued. ‘But you’re going to have to work with me here. We are in the middle of a murder enquiry, so when I say I want you somewhere at 9.30 a.m., you’d bloody better be. If you can’t do that – or don’t want to – then I will get you transferred or suspended. Do you understand?’
Mark nodded.
‘No more vodka breakfasts,’ Helen continued. ‘No more lunchtime trips to the pub. No more lies. If you trust me, I’ll help you and we can get through this, but I need you to trust me. Do you trust me?’
Mark raised his eyes to meet hers.
‘Of course I do.’
‘Good, then let’s get on with it. Team briefing in five minutes.’
And with that she resumed her work. Mark left her office, wrong-footed but relieved. Helen Grace never failed to surprise him.
Biking home to her city centre flat, Helen replayed the conversation with Mark in her head. Had she been too hard? Too soft? Was she repeating mistakes she’d made before? She was still chewing on it when she shut her front door behind her. Slipping the chain on, she headed straight for the shower. She’d been up for forty-eight hours straight and she needed to feel clean again.
She faced forwards, the water pummelling her neck and breasts, before she turned round. The steaming hot water struck her back and immediately pain coursed through her body. It was agony at first, but slowly the stinging subsided and Helen once more felt calm.
Towelling herself down, she walked back into the bedroom. Now dry, she dropped the towel to the floor and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She was an attractive sight naked, but few had seen her like this. Cautious of intimacy and wary of the inevitable questions, her encounters had mostly been casual and short-lived. Not that the men had cared – by and large they had seemed extremely pleased to find a woman who would go to bed with them and didn’t hang around afterwards.
Opening her wardrobe, Helen eschewed the rows of jeans and shirts in favour of sweat pants and top – she was due at a BoxCombat class later and there seemed little point in changing twice. She paused briefly to take in the police uniforms, neatly preserved in pristine suit bags, that she used to wear when she was on the beat. Those days had been the making of her. The first day she tied her hair back, strapped on the stab vest and hit the streets was one of the happiest of her life. For the first time ever she felt she belonged. That she mattered. She revelled in the way it changed how she looked and felt – the sexless anonymity of the uniform allied to the security and strength it provided. It was like a disguise, but one which everyone recognized and appreciated. There was a small part of her that longed to be back there, but she was too ambitious and restless to have remained a PC for long.