Dead Watch Read online

  Jo looked down her nose at him and shook her head. ‘You really are a disgusting piece of shit. You know that, right?’

  Their laughter was broken up by the sound of the bells going down, telling them they had another call.

  Jo

  Jo dipped her arm into the water, cupped some into in her hand then splashed it onto her face. Even though it was May and she was in a river as opposed to the sea, the cold temporarily took her breath away. She inhaled deeply then submerged below the surface. When she came up again, she had to force herself not to gasp. The race would be starting in the next few minutes, and she had to be ready for the scrap that would inevitably take pace in the first fifty metres. The swimmers would be climbing over each other to try and get ahead at this critical stage, and fists, elbows and feet would be flying indiscriminately in the carnage. That was not the time to acclimatise to the water temperature. The other competitors would be ready for the chaos, so she needed to be firing on all cylinders too.

  While the rest of the Watch were eating their breakfasts, Jo had driven to Arundel to take part in the triathlon. Ginger Balls off Green Watch had come in for her an hour early to make sure she was ready for the nine o’clock start. She had done him plenty of favours in the past, so hadn’t felt guilty about asking him to give up his precious free time on a Sunday morning.

  The events of the previous night were weighing heavily on her as she dipped her face again and waited for the onslaught. As Dylan had slept his way through the early hours of the morning in the dorm they shared, Jo had laid with her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, wondering what the hell they had done. It wasn’t so much the thought of possible recriminations that was bothering her. She thought that, given the circumstances, it was highly unlikely anyone would ever find out what had happened.

  What was really eating away at her was, for the first time in as long as she could remember, she had let other people influence her thinking, pushing her into making a decision that she usually would have resisted. Jo had spent her life doing the exact opposite of what had been expected of her. But less than twelve hours earlier, she had capitulated to peer pressure, and it bothered her greatly.

  Some people would have let that worry affect their performance in the race, using it as an excuse when they finished in a far worse position than they should have done. But not Jo, not Wonder Woman. She would take that negative energy and channel it into something positive. She’d feed on it, using it to make sure she finished in a place she deserved to be. That was why, unlike so many people she met in her day-to-day life, she was a winner. She didn’t let shit like that get in her way and slow her down. Jo was a hard-ass. A woman who had fought her way up in a man’s world without ever giving an inch to the doubters who didn’t believe she wasn't up to it. Long before she had joined the fire service, she had taught herself to not only ignore the men who hadn’t believed in her, but to positively step all over them.

  She hadn’t listened to her parents when they told her she needed to go to university if she wanted to get a good job that paid well. Jo believed the best way to maximise your potential was to gain as much practical experience as possible. Armed with three C grade A-levels, she went out into the world with her newly typed up CV and posted it to as many companies as possible until she snagged her first job. The irony of her finding that role in a recruitment agency was lost on her at the time. All she cared about was that she was working and earning money.

  Jo had flourished in the role, and after only a few months, she was earning as much commission as some of the seasoned veterans who had been doing the job for years. She was pushy, but not too much, staying just the right side of playful in her calls to clients. By the end of her second year, she was the top earner for the company. The jealous looks she received from the rest of the staff meant nothing to her. Those people were her colleagues, not her friends, and if she was honest, she didn’t give a shit about any of them. Success was what mattered.

  Three years later, she didn’t listen to her bosses when they virtually begged her to stay with the company and not move to London and take up the post she had been offered with a large corporate recruitment firm. Those guys were head-hunters, they told her, unscrupulous bastards who would do and say anything to make their commissions. They were the people who gave recruitment such a bad name. But she knew that already, and she didn’t really care. That was where the real money was, not in some little company in Southampton where the money she got for finding a temporary PA who could type so many words a minute was hardly worth the effort.

  When she got to London, she loved every element of her new job. She relished the lies and the underhand tactics she used on an everyday basis. Firms didn’t want their staff speaking to head-hunters at any cost, and so the lengths she went to secure phone time with potential targets were downright shocking. In order to make first contact, she had told receptionists that their bosses’ wives were in hospital and that she was a doctor. She had created CVs for potential recruits and applied for jobs on behalf of them without their knowledge. If they got to the interview stage, she would contact them and promise them the earth if they dumped their own companies and uprooted. If the candidate chose to do the honourable thing and stay put, then sometimes, because she was pissed at them for ruining her deal, she would phone up their bosses and tell them they’d been speaking to head-hunters; a sackable offence. No matter which way you looked at it, and she would admit it herself, she was a first-class bitch most of the time.

  A few years later and she was again one of the highest earners in the office, and in a business like hers, that meant serious money, we’re talking six figure basics before commission and bonuses were even taken into account. Her fiancé, Jake, was a junior partner in the company and made her pay scale look meagre. They had just bought their first house; a three-bedroom Victorian terrace just off Clapham Junction that was worth far more than it had any right to. For Jo and Jake, the two Js, life was good. Business was booming, and in a couple of years, they’d be married, with her taking a six-month break to make little Js before they were carted off to boarding school. Yeah, she was happy, all right, at least she thought so, that was until the day the someone accidentally smashed the break-glass fire panel at work.

  It was a shitty winter’s day when the staff stood outside the building, shivering as they listened to the alarm sounding behind them. Some people were secretly pleased to have an extra ten minutes off work to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, but not Jo; she had business to attend to and couldn’t deal with this bullshit. She’d encourage Jake to find and sack the joker who’d smashed the glass, whether it was an accident or not.

  But then, the fire engine had turned up, and she watched as a woman, no older than she, got out of the front seat and strode into the building. A man got out of the back of the vehicle and followed her inside, but it was clear she was the one in charge.

  Five minutes later, the ringing of the alarm had ceased, and the young woman had left the building with her co-worker in tow. She had removed her helmet at this point and was carrying it proudly under her arm. As they got back in the fire engine and drove away, Jo had already made up her mind – she was going to be a firefighter.

  Everyone told her that it was a crazy idea and she was mad for even considering it, especially Jake, who positively hated the thought. The pay cut alone was almost too ridiculous to talk about. Jo was having none of it; she may have loved her job, but she’d always had a sense that something was missing. It was only when that female firefighter had turned up, did Jo realise what that something was. The thing she most craved was action.

  The name Wonder Woman was bestowed on her while she was doing her sixteen-week initial training course, and for the most part, it wasn’t intended as a compliment. Jo had elbowed her way onto the course, letting the other recruits know in no uncertain terms that even though it wasn’t a competition, she was the one they needed to be worried about. When she found out that actually there was a comp
etition of sorts running alongside the course and that the best recruit would win the prestigious Silver Axe, she swore that it would be hers.

  It was too; she won it hands down. She worked harder than everyone else on the course, both on the fire-ground and in the classroom, and when it came down to it, she was pretty much unrivalled. She was also universally disliked by the other recruits, and the instructors weren’t too fond of her, either. They quickly recognised what a momentous pain in the arse she would end up to be when she got posted to one of the stations. The Silver Axe was a warning to her soon-to-be Watch that they had a real handful heading their way.

  Jo’s ambition didn’t stop at the training centre. There had been other female Watch managers in the brigade, but she decided that none of them would have reached the position in as quick a time as she intended. Her five-year plan was to complete her probation, become a crew manager, then after a couple of years gaining the necessary experience, take on her own Watch.

  Things didn’t happen that way. First, Jake left her. He said it was because he couldn’t deal with her being away from him for four days at a time, but in truth, he was jealous, and the thought of her being surrounded by a bunch of men for long periods and in such close proximity was too much for him. She was phased for a while, but like anything in her life, Jo dealt with it and moved on. After the money from the sale of the house in Clapham had been shared, she had enough to put down a handsome deposit on her new flat in the heart of Brighton. She was still the main girl.

  When she got sent to East, the Silver Axe warning proved to be true. Within days, Jo had managed to rub everyone up the wrong way. Her aptitude for the job was never in doubt; she just had a habit of pressing everyone’s buttons. First, she refused to make the tea, letting the Watch know what a sexist bunch of dinosaurs they were. They tried to explain to her it wasn’t because she was a woman she had to make it, but because she was the probationer, and that’s just what probies did, and all the guys had done it, too, but she was having none of it. Then, there was her constant nagging at the Watch manager to get out into the drill yard. No one minded helping out the new recruit with pump and ladder drills, it was part of the territory, but Jo wanted to be out there twice a day, on nights and even weekends. Red Watch weren’t used to such demands, and their lazy afternoons being so rudely interrupted. In her quest for perfection, Jo even managed to make an enemy of Bodhi, possibly the most laid-back guy in the service.

  Her biggest faux pas, though, was when she told Harrison that unlike ninety-nine percent of front-line firefighters, she would not be joining the union as she believed that a live-and-let-die mentality was what made people strong, not collective bargaining. Patiently, and with an abundance of facts at his disposal, Harrison spent two hours ripping apart her argument, highlighting just how much the FBU had done to improve the working conditions of firefighters, particularly women. It was the first time Jo conceded she might have been wrong and signed the joining papers. It wasn’t the last time, either; the longer she did the job, the more she realised that the ambitions she had started with were not what was important to her anymore.

  As time went on, she became less ambitious and, as a result, more accepted by the Watch. Rescuing someone from an RTC, or seeing the relief on a mum’s face when they released her daughter from a locked bathroom, or the joy on a child’s face when they sat in the back of a fire engine, had become more important to her than promotion. She learnt that being a part of the Watch and a team that functioned in unison, with everyone working towards a common goal, was far more rewarding to her than reaching the top. She stopped caring about being a high flyer (and subsequently being such a bitch), and rather than ruling them, she just wanted to be one of the team. Like many people before her, once she understood the true nature of the job and what they were there to do, her ambitions took a back seat. That’s not to say they still weren’t there – she would still be a Watch manager one day – she was just in less of a rush to get there.

  Jo’s ambitious nature at work may have subsided, but that had only made her more of a competitor when it came to sport. Before she joined the job, she had always been fit but more of a lunch time warrior – circuit training, hot yoga, Zumba and anything else that got her sweating. Once in the brigade, she discovered and fell in love with triathlon, and like everything else she did, she was pretty awesome at it.

  Jo was in sixteenth place when she got out of the water (swimming being her weakest discipline), ninth by the end of the bike ride, and by the time the run had finished, she had eaten up another six places and finished in third for the women, (first for her age group). Her time was good and kept her in the GB team. The race had been a good one for her, but she would have still liked to shave another few minutes off her time.

  At the end of the race, Jo was awarded a ten-pound gift voucher for a website that sold equipment for triathletes. As she held it up to get her picture taken with the other podium finishers, she felt proud of her achievement. At that moment, the ten-pound voucher meant far more to her than the hundreds of thousands they had stolen from a dead drug dealer.

  Dylan

  Dylan opened the bedroom door just enough to squeeze his head inside. Even though it was nine-thirty in the morning, the heavy curtains were drawn, and he could only just make out Felicity’s form in the bed. He smiled to himself as he crept into the room. She hadn’t stayed at Annie’s house as she’d been considering the evening before, and that meant if he played things right, he could end up getting some early-morning action.

  He tiptoed to the bed, peeled off his clothes, then lifted the sheet and slipped in behind her. Dylan spooned his fiancée, running his hand gently up her thigh before resting it on her toned stomach. He let it linger there for a minute or two, not wanting to rush things, then slid his hand up towards her naked breasts.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get in until three, and my head’s pounding.’

  Dylan could do little else but smile; as usual, she had his number.

  ‘I just wanted a cuddle,’ he said, doing his best to sound innocent.

  ‘That’s fine,’ she answered. ‘Just so long as you remember that you cuddle with your arms, not your penis.’

  Dylan laughed. ‘So how was your night?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long time since we all went out together. I wasn’t planning on getting quite so drunk, though.’

  Dylan snuggled into her. ‘So, was Nick out with you?’

  Felicity rolled over to look at him. ‘You know he wasn’t. It was a girl’s night. You’ve got to forget about what happened, Dyl.’

  ‘I know I do… I’m sorry.’

  ‘So, how was your night?’ she asked. ‘Busy?’

  Normally, they told each other everything. That’s how he knew the last time she had gone out with her work colleagues, she had got drunk and snogged her manager, Nick. What made it worse was he was only a few years older than her and a good-looking bastard to go with it. As Lennie often reminded him, when it came to Felicity, Dylan was punching well above his weight, and her kiss with pretty-boy Nick had done nothing for his confidence. She could have not told him, he would never have found out, but they’d always believed that honesty was the best policy, even if it didn’t always make things easy for them.

  When Dylan went on a stag-do to Amsterdam and paid the lap-dancer an extra twenty euros to let him kiss her tits, he went home and told Felicity about it, despite the protestations from his friends. He would have felt too guilty to keep it quiet. This time, though, he had no intention of telling her about what had taken place the night before.

  At the canteen table, he had often said with the equipment they had at their disposal, they were the perfect people to commit a high-stakes crime, like break into a bank vault or a security van. He hadn’t really meant it. Like most things Dylan said in the Bullshit Hour, that’s all it was – bullshit. Yet, somehow, he and the rest of the crew had gone out and stolen over half a mi
llion pounds, and it looked like they had got away with it. It should have been awesome, but all he could feel about it was a massive sense of disappointment.

  He already had a good life with Felicity; they didn’t need the money. They were Dinkies – double income, no kiddies – and while Dylan’s wage was decent, if nothing to get excited about, Felicity earned a very healthy sum, and in the future, that would only grow. They’d paid a deposit on the two-bedroom flat they owned with a (distant) sea view and had even had enough left in the bank to pay for the parking space outside. Not that Dylan ever got to drive their little Citroen. He cycled the mile and a half to work every day. They went on three holidays a year: snowboarding in the winter, a beach break in the summer, and a European city break in a swanky boutique hotel, when they could squeeze it in. No matter how he looked at it, while they weren’t rich by any means, the two of them had it good.

  Dylan had always done his best to enjoy life. He loved his job, but he also loved the lifestyle it allowed him. He loved the excitement, the camaraderie and the fact he could say he was part of a crew. It made him feel badass, like he was in Public Enemy or The Wu tang Clan. The shift system, however, was the thing he enjoyed most. The four-days-on, four-days-off rota meant that he got to spend an awful lot of time doing the things he enjoyed. Many of his colleagues did second jobs when they weren’t at work. In most cases, they were the only employed person in the house, or at least the major earners, as their wives or partners often had to look after the children. As they had no kids, and Felicity earned plenty of her own cash, he didn’t require extra work.

  Dylan’s days off revolved around him getting up late, looking at porn, then getting down to whatever he fancied doing for the day. If the weather was good, he’d take his mountain bike up onto the South Downs and spend a few hours taking in the Sussex countryside. If it wasn’t so sharp outside, he’d go climbing at one of Brighton’s indoor walls, stay home and read a book, watch a film or catch up on whatever series he was binge-watching on Netflix.