Strangers. Paul Finch

back to the van, he quietly fumed.

      A small man, of thin, wiry stature, the last item he’d taken – the larger of the two mattresses – had almost overwhelmed him with its size and weight. He’d dropped it several times en-route; it had subsequently smeared mud all over the front of his white shell-suit top.

      It was no one’s fault obviously, but Barney was still going to cop it verbally.

      A bloke his size ought to have gone straight to the heavier items, rather than leaving them for his mate. And where the fuck was he anyway? They ought to have passed each other again by now. Kev was secretly hoping that, whatever remained in the van – and it couldn’t have been much – Barney would take care of it all himself.

      But then he came in sight of the vehicle. And stopped short.

      Who the bloody hell had been so inconsiderate as to park up behind them?

      Surely to God Barney hadn’t been right and, by a one in a million chance, some lazy-arsed copper had happened to drive past and spot what they were up to?

      ‘These bastards!’ Kev said under his breath, spittle seething through his clenched teeth.

      But then he realised that the other vehicle wasn’t a police car. At least, not a marked one.

      He padded forward, wondering why both vehicles appeared to be unmanned. If nothing else, Barney still ought to be hanging around. Unless he too had thought the new arrivals were coppers, and had headed for the hills.

      That would be so fucking typical.

      The big daft prat never watched the news, of course. Dear Lord, they weren’t even sending burglars down these days. Did Barn seriously expect they’d find prison space for fly-tippers? Of course, even if such stupidity explained why Barney was absent, it offered no clue about the car behind. By the looks of it, it was a relatively new Ford Mondeo. A posh bit of kit to be driving on a rubbish-strewn wasteland like this.

      Then, without warning, the van’s headlights came on, catching Kev in their full beam. He backed away a step, raising his hand to block the dazzle.

      ‘Whoa!’ he shouted. ‘Barney, that you?’

      The van’s engine chugged and coughed, and grumbled to life.

      With a CLUNK, it was thrown into gear – and then rocketed forward.

      ‘Jesus!’ Kev screamed.

      It crunched headlong into him, its front bumper-bar slamming his thighs with sledge-hammer force, snapping them both like sticks of celery, its windscreen smashing into his face with explosive force.

      Kev was carried forward for several yards, spread-eagled, before the driver hit the brakes. The van screeched to a halt in front of the Portakabin, and he slumped to the ground. At the same time, a heavy, cumbersome form catapulted down from on top of the van’s roof, and landed with a thud on the gritty floor next to him.

      Kev was only vaguely aware what had happened. His body felt like a heap of disjointed wood. There was no feeling in it, and when he tried to turn his head sideways, his neck burned with a bone-deep fire. Even so, he managed to focus on the prone figure at his side. This too was in a broken, bedraggled state, but its face, which had been worked over with some heavy implement until it was gory pulp, was just about recognisable. As Barney.

      This made no sense to Kev.

      Barn had been on the roof of the van?

      Who put him there?

      A pair of feet trudged up behind him. Kev wanted to glance around, but his neck was hurting too badly. With a slow exhalation of breath, someone sank to their knees.

      ‘Two trophies for the price of one,’ a hoarse voice snickered.

      To Kev’s incredulity, his flies were pulled down and someone started unbuttoning his skinny jeans.

      ‘Did you really think you were going to get some?’ the voice whispered. ‘You little shit! You little rodent! Did you and that brainless hunk of meat seriously believe you were going to tap this perfect arse?’

      Kev still didn’t understand. Chill air embraced him as his underpants were ripped away.

      These bastards, he thought as he ebbed into unconsciousness.

       Chapter 7

      The Intel Unit convened that first Monday, in their office on the top floor at Robber’s Row – to find that some wag from somewhere else in the nick had already attached a paper sign to the door, which read:

       Ripper Chicks

      As a general rule, there was dark humour, and then there was black humour, and then there was police humour. It was a psychological defence mechanism, of course. The best way to fend off the stress of spending every day steeped to your armpits in human misery was by laughing at it. But even by those standards, this was seen by several of the girls as a little close to the knuckle. Some, on the other hand, thought it rather catchy.

      ‘Kind of rolls off the tongue,’ PC Julie Ebbsworth from Oldham said. ‘We are the Rrrriiipper Chicks!’

      ‘Well, the blokes have always had cool nicknames, haven’t they,’ DC Val Ashworth from Preston replied. ‘They’ve had the Shots, the Protectors, the Sweeney. Why can’t we be the Ripper Chicks?’

      Perhaps if they’d been investigating the ripping apart of female victims, consensus that they weren’t offended by it would not have been achieved so quickly. It might also have been the case that, given what they were all about to undergo – and no doubt this had been preying on several of their minds for the whole of the weekend – this mischievous rebranding of their unit by an outside party did not seem such a big deal.

      When agreement was reached, DS Sally Bryant agreed to leave the sign there. In fact, she said she’d take it home with her after shift and have it laminated so that it could be a permanent fixture on their office door.

      After this, they got down to business, using the locker room attached to the briefing room to change from the casual attire they’d worn to travel to work, to the street-gear they hoped would help them blend in when they hit the streets.

      Lucy had chosen a clingy blue camisole with lacy ribbons down the front rather than buttons, blue satin hot pants, fishnets and blue suede thigh-boots with platform soles. Over the top, she wore a black plastic mac. Her hair hung loose, while her make-up was loud and garish. All the girls affected similar transformations, looking each other over approvingly before deciding they were ready. There were some titters and sniggers, but an air of nervousness prevailed as the realisation finally dawned that they were going out there more or less alone. They’d have their phones and their ‘guardian angels’, as the plain-clothes TSG guys were now being referred to, but none of them would be carrying radios or wires. If they got into a cat-fight, they’d been advised, they’d have to see it through on their own (unless it turned very nasty), because it was always possible that communications devices could be exposed through yanked or torn clothing.

      Lucy was only thirty, but she was actually one of the oldest present and certainly the most experienced. Deferring to this, more than a couple of the other girls came over seeking words of comfort or encouragement, neither of which she was able to offer in abundance. Detective Sergeants Bryant and Clark were in a similar boat; technically, they were the girls’ line-managers, but in reality they’d be role-playing themselves and thus unable to act as normal supervision.

      Shortly after three, DI Slater appeared, having run through several pointers with the male members of the team in the next room along. He now went through everything again with the girls, and then gave them a quick pep talk.

      ‘This isn’t going to be easy,’ he said. ‘You don’t need me to tell you that. Ordinarily, we’d put you through a month’s training for a job like this, but there