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usual, the giant oaf, and less than ten minutes later another squad car cruised to a halt in front of B flats. I saw the five of them go through the door.
    And then I waited. It was seventeen minutes by the clock before two of them led the mother out. My Christ, she was a mess. The woman could barely keep her feet shuffling between them, although they held her up. Her scalp was bald in patches, perhaps from the stress of living with that bully. More likely he had torn it out in one of his famous flare-ups. The car ticked over for a minute or two, and then, as if it had been waiting for yet another squad car that drew up behind, it did a turnabout, and left.
    From then on I was sure – sure as I’m writing this – that what I’d see next would be one of the other officers carrying out that poor boy’s body, wrapped in a filthy blanket. I never touched the tea. I just stared, worried that if I even blinked I might miss what was happening.
    Then this plump, balding, fatherly man led out the boy. The child came through the double doors and startled like a horse. It wasn’t even all that sunny, but he blinked hard in the light. I don’t believe he could have been much more than seven years old. He looked about the sort of height my Harry was when he moved from the infants to the junior school.
    Someone inside the squad car swung the door open as the two of them came close. I knew the bloke who’d fetched the boy out of the flats could not be a policeman because he didn’t shove the boy’s head down as he pushed him in the car, the way they do. (You learn a lot about police habits when you live round here.) The boy clambered in the back as clumsily as if he wasn’t even sure which way he would be facing when he got inside.
    The car door shut as one last officer rushed out of the flats to join the driver in the front. And then they drove away.
    ‘Job well done, Betty!’ I congratulated myself and, looking down, reckoned that I deserved a brand-new mug of tea. One hot and fresh, not stewed and stone-cold like the one sitting in front of me.
    I put the kettle on again then, trembling, sat at the kitchen table and wept my heart out with relief.
PC Martin Tallentire
    I won’t try saying that I’d never seen the like before, because I had. By then I’d been in the police force for eleven years. I’d been the first to reach road accidents. I’d seen boys who’d been daft enough to tangle with rough-house drunks, and I’d rolled tramps and homeless druggies over in doorways, only to find them frozen stiff. I’d held down the flap on a girl’s bleeding face after a trivial cat fight turned into a full-on duel with broken bottles, and was at Mr Templeton’s the day the housing officers finally managed to winkle him out. (That was an object lesson in how much filth and garbage one mad man can fit in a one-bedroom flat.)
    But I had never seen a sight quite like that woman. She was barely human any more. That bastard had ripped out so much of her hair that she was halfway to scalped. I thought at first the thin, weird keening I could hear was coming from that armchair – as if someone had left one of those joke rubber bags leaking under the cushion.
    Then I saw her leg move. I didn’t recognize it as a leg at first, because of the way it twitched. And it was black. Christ knows, I’ve seen some bruises in my time. Nursed some myself, after the odd weekend round-up of revellersat the far end of Marley Road. But livid flesh like that – green, blue, purple, yellow, black. The woman was a rainbow in herself. That Harris must have gone at her pretty well every night. Small wonder she was just a cowering bag of torn clothes in a chair.
    Strange job, this. We deal with all types, all ages. Posh ones who ask you in and patronize you as they make you tea. Loudmouths who jeer as you pass. Toe-rags who hurl rocks at the car from around corners. You have to learn to keep the world from getting under your skin. But every now and