‘Because the moment I heard D&C were checking with other forces for female officers who were authorised and experienced with firearms, I knew the long-term plan was to put them out there as bait …’
‘No, you didn’t. You thought it might. But even that was enough to give you the willies.’
‘Am I not supposed to be concerned about you?’ he said. ‘I mean, throw your mind back nine months – when I cornered that nutter who’d been chucking acid in people’s faces. I chased him across the railway bridge at Mile End, remember, even though he’d threatened me with a butcher’s knife as well as the usual jar of concentrated sulphuric. I managed to nab him. And what happened when I got back to the nick? You slapped me across the bloody face!’
‘You saw him and recognised him. We could have picked him up afterwards, team-handed. In perfect safety. He’d have been bang to rights.’
‘He could have gone to ground, he could have stayed on the streets for days. Besides, I was confronted by him in the course of an investigation. A split-second decision, and I had to chase …’
‘Everything okay in here?’ the squat, bull-like shape of DS Harry Jenks wondered from the open doorway.
‘Everything’s fine,’ Heck snapped.
Jenks glared at him, unconvinced.
‘Seriously, Harry,’ Gemma said. ‘Everything’s okay.’
‘Hmmm.’ Unconvinced and clearly unwilling, Jenks withdrew.
‘The point is, Gemma,’ Heck said, ‘you didn’t get this decoy gig thrust on you, you weren’t railroaded into it. You volunteered after careful consideration. You consciously put yourself in extreme danger.’
Gemma heard this out in a growing fury, but by the same token she could tell that Heck was upset; he was pale-cheeked, almost breathless. She’d come close to getting hurt many times in the job; it happened regularly to all of them, but he’d never responded this way before – and now she had an inkling why.
‘Of course I volunteered,’ she said slowly. ‘Would you have expected the married women on the team to step forward? The women with families?’
‘Isn’t that what we were planning?’ he said.
Stoically, she resumed typing.
‘Gemma, seriously … is it so wrong of me not to want my wife-to-be volunteering for this kind of duty again?’
She shook her head. ‘You can’t lay those kinds of stipulations on me, Mark.’
‘I’m not saying I don’t want to be married to a hotshot lady detective. Of course, I do. You’re a force of nature, Gemma. That’s what I love about you. But I don’t want the mother of my kids sitting in anymore cars at midnight, or standing on street corners, providing a honey-trap for homicidal maniacs …’
‘That is so unfair!’ she said, hot-faced. ‘We face risks on a daily basis, but you more than most …’
‘Look, I’m …’
‘Please don’t say it, Mark … that you’re the man and I’m the woman. Or, let’s put it into the correct parlance, you’re the bloke and I’m the bird. I suppose it sounds slightly better that way.’
‘I’m … not saying you can’t make arrests,’ Heck said patiently. ‘Or that you can’t run down violent offenders. I just don’t like what happened last night.’
‘It happens once in a blue moon, and you know it. But you want me inside, don’t you – in a nice warm office, checking process cards all day. Maybe working Area somewhere, showing kids across the road, holding hands with little old ladies.’
‘That isn’t true, Gemma … but we can’t both be buried in this job to the point where our lives and health are on the line. That’s hardly a basis for starting a family.’
‘Good job we’ve got no immediate plans, then, isn’t it?’ When Gemma hit the keyboard this time, it had an air of finality. She didn’t shift her eyes from the screen.
A second passed, then Heck walked to the door. ‘Well done on last night’s takedown,’ he said. ‘An extremely fearless piece of work. You’ve got guts of steel, love.’
‘Careful, Mark … you almost sounded as if you meant that well.’
He turned in the doorway. ‘Look, Gem … there’s a refs room down the corridor. Let’s go and have a coffee.’
‘No.’
‘Just so we can have a quick …’
‘No. I’ve too much work to do. And I’m sure you have too … soon as you get back to Bethnal Green and get on with it.’
That hadn’t been the end of them, Gemma reflected, as she and Hazel trudged on. But it had been the beginning of the end. She’d pondered it long and hard ever since, wondering if she could have handled it differently. Sure, Heck had done his usual thing, come crashing in feet first, leaving wreckage all around, but, though he could have been a lot more considerate given what she’d just been through, his concerns had only been those any genuinely caring partner would have felt. It had continued to enrage her until long after she’d been promoted and thus was raised beyond the reach of such sordid escapades as decoy work, but maybe she ought to have been more touched by his attitude at the time than she actually was.
He’d certainly been right about one thing. If both of them were to run a daily gauntlet of risk, that was hardly the ideal start-point from which to raise a family. But she knew Heck intimately well – better than anyone else in the job – and she was all too aware he’d never be the one to step back from the more menacing demands of his work. His was a positive, pathological need to remain on the front line. He’d turned down an offer of promotion once because he wanted to stay on the streets rather than ‘spend his days administrating’. It was unhealthy, with Heck. It went beyond courage or a sense of duty, into self-destructive obsession. The acid-attacker had been a good case in point. Only someone with no concern for his own safety would have tackled the suspect in that situation – on a narrow footbridge over a railway line, the only angle of approach from directly in front, the madman armed to the teeth with his ‘instruments of vengeance’, as he’d told the press in his rambling, spidery letters. Yet Heck had gone at him full-on, at a hundred miles an hour. And by some miracle had emerged unscathed, with collar in hand.
Too right she’d slapped his face afterwards. She’d slap it again for the same reason, if she thought it would do any good.
But ultimately, what was she supposed to do? This wasn’t just her job, it was her life. Gemma’s father had been a copper too; he’d died in the line of duty. Maybe, as such, she was a tad on the obsessional side herself – her mother had always said she and Heck were perfectly designed for each other – but Gemma was in this for the long haul. She always had been, with no turning back. How could she progress if she only opted for the safe work, the indoors work, the boring work?
Even now, Gemma still wondered if she could have been nicer to him that day. A bit more understanding that he too had been badly shaken. It had passed without either of them really noticing at the time, but he’d said something revealing – ‘that’s what I love about you’. Up to that point, though they’d loosely been planning a future together, he’d never used words like ‘love’ and ‘you’ in the same sentence. Neither had she, for that matter. It wasn’t that they weren’t very close; they’d been exceedingly close. It wasn’t that they weren’t happy together; they’d been happy, too. That said, Gemma had often wondered if that happiness might ever become strained if she, as she hoped and expected, had begun to rise through the ranks, while Heck – thanks to his always playing fast and loose with the rulebook – had progressed more slowly. Even so, after a few months of