* * *
Although everyone was busy preparing for the raid, she managed to grab Gill’s attention for a few minutes, wanting her to do something about Rachel Bailey. ‘She didn’t need to act like bloody Jenson Button. I’d radioed control. There were half a dozen patrols could have done the job. I can’t do six weeks of this, Gill.’
‘Were you hurt?’
‘I was petrified, and she ignored me when I told her to slow down. I could have been hurt. It was a miracle I wasn’t. And you could have been visiting Ade with a death message.’
Gill raised an eyebrow. ‘Not the teeniest bit exciting?’
Janet gave her a baleful look. ‘Are you mad?’
Through the window Janet saw Rachel at her desk. Noticed her glance quickly away. Could she tell that Janet was still pissed off? You’d never have guessed Rachel had been up half the night in the aftermath of her Top Gear stunt. News of her escapade had spread through the nick like wildfire and her desk had been festooned with a large chequerboard flag and a mashed-up dinky model of a police car.
‘Very fitting,’ Gill had said when she spied it. ‘Down by lunchtime.’ She allowed the team their horseplay and practical jokes but expected the office to look like a place of work, to reflect their professionalism.
‘It’s pushed things forward,’ Gill told Janet, ‘the cabbie, the drugs.’
‘We’d have got there anyway, but Bailey had to be centre stage, acting like a one-man SWAT team. She’s doing my head in. You know what she said about the victim’s mother? “Should have been sterilized at birth”.’
‘We all have our opinions.’ Gill started moving towards the office door.
‘Yeah, but we don’t all say them out loud. Aren’t you the slightest bit bothered that she trashed the car?’
‘That is a black mark,’ Gill agreed, ‘but you know they palm us off with the old jalopies; it was never going to make it through the MOT.’
‘They probably won’t replace it,’ Janet said.
‘That’s for me to worry about.’
‘They’ll be giving us scooters next,’ Janet said.
‘I can just see it, Rachel on pillion.’
‘Funny.’
‘You OK?’ Andy said, meeting Janet in the corridor.
‘No, I’m not,’ she said. ‘I think she was wrong to drive like that with me in the car. If she’d been on her own…’
‘Her funeral,’ he said.
‘Exactly.’
He smiled and Janet smiled in return and felt that lurch again. ‘And I’d happily send flowers but-’ She shook her head.
‘Impetuous,’ he said of Rachel.
‘And then some: headstrong, tactless.’ Like Taisie, Janet thought. Though a wilder streak in Rachel, something dark there, something damaged even. No excuses, Janet told herself; she nearly killed me.
