The Night Stalker (Detective Erika Foster 2)

Sometimes things are just meant to be, she thought, leaving the flat and locking the door behind her.

52

For the anniversary of Mark’s death, Moss had invited Erika over for a barbecue at her house, saying she would invite Peterson too. Erika was grateful for their concern but said she wanted to spend the day alone.

What surprised her was that she heard nothing from Isaac. He’d been fairly quiet for the last week or so, and she realised she had last seen him at the post-mortem for Jack Hart. Maybe her objection to Stephen had cooled his friendship with her.

Erika woke early, and one of the first things she did was to take down her kitchen clock and the clock in her bedroom. She kept her TV, laptop and mobile phone switched off. Four-thirty in the afternoon was burned on her brain. This was the time, two years ago, when she had given the order to raid the house of Jerome Goodman.

It was another hot day, but she went for a run, pushing herself in the humidity as she pounded the streets, then circumnavigating Hilly Fields park amongst the dog walkers, the people playing tennis on the free courts and the children playing. It was the children playing who got to her. She stopped after two circuits and came home.

Once she was home, she started drinking, working her way through the bottle of Glenmorangie she’d opened for Peterson.

She sat on the sofa, the heat circulating through the house, the drone of a lawnmower in the background. Despite everything she had told herself about moving on, about moving forward, she felt herself being pulled back to that baking hot day on that run-down street in Rochdale…

She could feel the protective police gear sticking to her skin through her blouse. The stiff, sharp edges of the Kevlar bulletproof vest as it rode up, meeting her chin as she crouched against the low wall of the terraced house.

There were six officers on her team and they also crouched against the wall, three each side with the gatepost between them. Next to her was DI Tom Bradbury, known as Brad – an officer she’d worked with since she’d joined the Greater Manchester Police as a new recruit. He was chewing gum, breathing slowly. The sweat poured down his face and he shifted anxiously.

Next to Brad was Jim Black, or Beamer. He had a serious face, which could be transformed by an enormous smile, hence the nickname. It always made Erika laugh that he could be so fierce and stern in his police work, yet crack a wide dazzling grin. She and Mark had become close friends with Beamer and his wife Michelle, who was a civilian support officer at their nick.

On the other side of the front gate was Tim James, a rising star and new to her team. He was a brilliant officer. He was tall, slim and utterly gorgeous. He arrested rough-looking guys during the day, then went round the bars looking to hook up with them at night. Tim James had earned the nickname TJ when he’d joined her team, and when his fellow officers had heard he was into guys, he’d become BJ – but it was an affectionate nickname and he was sensible enough to realise that.

Next to BJ was Sal, whose full name was Salman Dhumal: a fiercely intelligent British Indian man with jet-black hair and eyes. His family went back four generations in Bradford, but he still had to suffer the taunts of ‘go back where you came from’ doled out by scumbags on the beat. His wife, Meera, looked after their three children, as well as being one of the top Ann Summers reps in the north-west.

And, finally, on the end was Mark. He was always just Mark. Not that he was boring, or uninteresting. He was everyone’s friend, so easy-going and fiercely loyal. Mark had time for everyone, and Erika knew he was the reason she had so many friends – he took the edge off her abrasive personality. He softened her hardness, and in turn she had taught him not to just let everything wash over him.

So there they all were, at 4.25 p.m. on July 25th, sweating in a row outside the house of the drug dealer Jerome Goodman. He’d been on their radar for several years, and in the past eighteen months he had been involved in the bloody slaying of a major drug dealer in a pub in Moss Side. In the resulting power vacuum, Jerome had taken over the supply and manufacture of crystal meth and Ecstasy. And on this baking hot day on a run-down street in Rochdale, they were waiting to storm this large terraced house – one of his strongholds.

A vast support network at the nick had backed up Erika and her team. The house had been under surveillance for weeks, and images of it were burned into her brain. Bare concrete out front, overflowing wheelie bins. A gas and electric meter on the wall, with its cover ripped off.

An undercover officer had sought plans of the interior. They had planned their point of entry: straight through the front door, up the stairs. A door to the left of the landing led through to a back bedroom, and that’s where they believed they were cooking the meth.