The heat that year was annihilating. The endless, fever dream days passed slowly, and afterwards you wondered if they’d even been real. Beneath the hum of air conditioners, the chink of ice in glasses, you could almost hear it. The slow-drip of people losing their minds. The city was brilliantly lit, like an unending explosion you were expected to live inside, and the nights, when they finally came, felt hallucinatory, charged with electricity. You could see the sparks – the girls in their summer clothes, the boys with their flashing white teeth – everywhere you went.
There’s a particular look on their faces between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. Falling in and out of bars, kissing on street corners, swinging their arms along the pavements. Whatever’s happened to them before is long gone and, for a few hours at least, they feel like tomorrow might never come. Most of them are students, sheltering from the economic downturn in degree courses they’ll never pay off. The others work minimum-wage jobs and live for the weekend. When I see them they’re living in the moment, for better or worse, and the doubt, their default setting during the daytime, is replaced by some kind of certainty. I was on my 120th night shift in a row. Six months into what felt like a life sentence.
My own kind of certainty.
So I watched their faces, the young people, between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. I watched life literally passing me by. I nodded when they did, smiled when they smiled, and tried to stay in the moment. I kept my head down and took the positives, the sparks, wherever I could get them.
We were already on Wilmslow Road when the call came through. An enormous interconnecting through-line, it runs almost six miles, linking the moneyed properties south of town with the struggling city centre. It’s the busiest bus route in Europe and always alive with taxis, double-deckers, commuters and light. And lately, with fires that someone had been setting in the steel dustbins lining the road. Because these fires were low priority, likely meaningless, and always set after dark, they fell to us, the night shift.
There were only two permanent members of the team.
Young detectives rotated through, just to say they’d done it, and some of the no-hope floaters did a few shifts a month to cover our days off, but permanent night duty meant one of two things. No life or no career. In my few years on the force, I’d managed to satisfy both requirements.
The dustbin fire was already out when we got there. My partner and I arrived to smouldering cinders, asked some questions and had begun to pack it up when we saw a crowd gathering on the other side of the road. I checked the time and drifted through the traffic towards them.
They were preparing a midnight vigil for a kid called Subhi Seif. Supersize to his friends. Until a few hours before, Supersize had been an eighteen-year-old fresher, living in a city for the first time in his life. Then he’d seen a girl being mugged and gone after the man who did it. He’d run into the road without looking for traffic and been obliterated beneath the wheels of a bus.
The mugger got away.
Alongside the torches, UV lights and flowers already laid in tribute, ten or so of Supersize’s friends were standing marking the spot. They played sad songs from their phones and passed sweating cans of beer to keep cool. I reminded them not to stray out into the road themselves, then crossed back to the car where my partner was waiting. We drove an unmarked matt-black BMW that criminals could still spot at a glance. Mainly because of the man usually crammed into the passenger side. My superior officer, Detective Inspector Peter Sutcliffe. At a glance he could only look like a cop or a criminal, and I still wasn’t sure which was closer to the truth.
‘How are the Chicken McNuggets?’ he said, not looking up from the sport section. Sutcliffe was one of life’s great nature–nurture debates. Was he a born shit, or had he just grown into one because of his unfortunate name? His suit jacket, filled to breaking point by his body, looked water-damaged with sweat, and he was giving off so much heat that we sat with the doors wide open.
‘What’s on the radio?’ I said, nodding at the scanner, the reason he’d waved me back over the road.
He turned a page, sniffed. ‘The Hamburglar’s struck again.’ I waited and he sighed, folded the paper. ‘It was sexual harassment, or assault, or something …’
‘Sexual harassment or something?’
Sutcliffe’s face, neck and body were swollen in odd, ever-shifting places, and his skin was deathly pale. He looked like he’d survived an embalming. We never used his full name, just called him Sutty to avoid distressing the public any further.
‘Jesus Christ, this heat.’ He ran a hand through his glistening, thinning hair. ‘Feels like I’ve had a blood transfusion from Freddie fucking Mercury.’ He looked up, remembered I was there and gave me a yellow smile. ‘You know me, Aid, I zone out as soon as I hear anything “sexual”. We’re going to Owens Park, though, if you wanna crack on …’
Sexual harassment or something.
The only thing Sutty hated more than young women was me. I watched him as he began applying the alcoholic skin sanitizer that he used compulsively, whenever I got in or out of the car. It made him look like he was rubbing his hands together with glee. I gave him a smile to keep things interesting. Then I indicated and pulled out into the road.
2
It was almost midnight when we arrived at Owens Park. The largest halls of residence in the city and home to more than two thousand students, most of them first years. Set in spacious, leafy grounds, the campus comprises five main blocks, including one tower which can be seen from the street, glowering out over the trees. Grey buildings clash hard with green surroundings. The baby-boomer wet dream. It had been built to last in the sixties but was looking its age now. There was talk of tearing the lot down and starting from scratch but it would be a shame when they finally got around to it. So much of the city already looked like a building site.
I parked up and looked at Sutty.
‘You coming?’
‘That’s a personal question. Just give us a call if her knicker-drawer needs searching.’ He returned to his paper. ‘You’re always so good with the little girls …’
I got out of the car, ignoring his tone, frankly grateful not to be taking him with me. Sutty and I were two different kinds of bad cop. Our being partnered together was a sort of punishment for us both, and we each tried to make things as difficult as possible for the other. It was the only thing we had in common.
I walked through the gate. Followed the stark white lights, blazing in the darkness. I smelt the freshly cut grass and felt a flicker of excitement. I’d never lived here but had visited a few times when I was younger, crashing parties, seeing friends. It was strange to think that I wasn’t in touch with any of them now, that dozens of people must have occupied their rooms, their beds, their lives, in the intervening years. For a moment I felt like I was walking into my past, going through a gateway into Neverland. I heard a scream of laughter and saw a teenage girl run by, being chased by a boy with a super soaker. Looking over my shoulder, I watched them melt into the darkness, still laughing. It reinforced a cruel, universal truth. I would age. Owens Park would always be eighteen.
I consulted the campus map, found the block I was looking for, buzzed a first-floor flat and waited. The grounds were eerily quiet now and I turned to look around. Felt the latent power of a day’s heat, humming up from the grass. Across the path stood another firm, grey block of buildings – lit windows glaring at me. I heard the bolt of the door click and turned to open it.
3
I went through the hallway. Past some street bikes, under a bare light bulb and up the stairs. The block was badly ventilated, built decades before in a city where heatwaves were unimaginable. I felt the sweat spiking out of my skin. There were listless, conversational voices behind closed doors. Adolescent smells of deodorant, drink and drugs.
It felt like a pressure cooker.
On the first-floor landing there was a teenage boy, pacing back and forth. He was black. Handsome and wearing a smart, dark tracksuit. He took a swig from a large, frosted glass and frowned when he saw me.
‘Thought you’d be a woman.’