Divorced

Lisa’s hand is on the handle of her car door when she hears the factory doors open behind her and someone shout “Oi!” at her.

She turns to see Carla striding towards her, looking furious.

“Do you seriously think we’ve deleted that footage or something?” Carla demands when she reaches the detective.

“All I know is that the footage is gone,” Lisa shrugs. Is it inappropriate to think that Carla looks hot when she’s angry?

“It was probably just a power cut or something.”

“Yes, it probably was, but a teenager has been threatened with a knife and that was vital evidence, gone. Without it it’s just he said she said,” Lisa explains. “My IT team will examine the data, they’ll be able to tell if it was deleted after the fact or not. They might even be able to recover it, depending on how thorough a job the person who tampered with has done. If it was tampered with, that is.”

“Ok, well that’s good then, but I can assure you that none of my staff would do something like that.”

“You think you’ve got that good of a handle on things?” Lisa smirks, infuriating Carla with her cockiness.

“Probably better than you have,” Carla shoots back.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lisa frowns.

“Well by the looks of it, you can’t even control your own daughter,” she snaps, instantly regretting it when she sees the way that Lisa’s face darkens. Lisa steps towards her, and Carla notices how good she smells - but shakes the thought from her head because it’s definitely not the time to be noticing things like that. “I’m sorry-” she stammers out.

“You don’t know the first thing about me or my daughter, so in future I suggest you keep your opinions to yourself, got it?” Lisa says, voice low. Carla nods, stepping back as Lisa gets into her car and slams the door.

Lisa drives away, leaving Carla standing on the pavement, stunned and speechless, for the second time that day.

***
All afternoon, Lisa’s mind keeps wandering back to what Carla had said that morning. What annoyed her the most, of course, is that she was absolutely right. She didn’t have a handle on Betsy, not in the slightest. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have a handle on everything else. She’s always found it easier to control hardened criminals than her own daughter.

Her phone buzzes with a text from Becky: Just picked Betsy up from school. I spoke to her Head of Year and she was definitely there all day. They’ve stuck her on report again and she’s not happy. Hope she’s in a better mood when I drop her off at yours on Saturday.

She won’t be, Lisa replies in her head. Betsy never seems to be happy at Lisa’s house these days - all they do is clash. She knows that Becky struggles with her behaviour too, but at least the pair of them seem to get on better. Lisa has always felt like a spare part, even when she was still married to Becky.

“Sarge?” Craig says, rushing into the room. Lisa sighs internally, putting her phone away. She likes Craig, she really does, but he can be a bit too eager to please in a way that’s endearing at first but gets increasingly irritating over time. She does have a soft spot for him, though, as she suspects she was the same when she first joined the force.

“Yes, PC Tinker?”

“I just heard back from IT Forensics. About the CCTV.”

“And?” she prompts when he pauses. She hates it when people don’t just get to the point.

“They weren’t able to retrieve anything. They think there was a power outage, which reset the CCTV. We confirmed with the power company that there was a disruption in the power supply on Coronation Street in the early hours of yesterday morning,” he explains, handing her the report.

“Right,” she sighs. “Back to square one, then. You’ve checked that there was no other CCTV in the area, no dash cams or anything like that?”

“Nothing,” he confirms.

“Ok. Thank you.”

Craig nods and scarpers off.

***
Lisa arrives home to an empty house again - although this time it’s supposed to be empty, because Betsy is at Becky’s for the next three nights. She still finds it tough, being away from her daughter for so long. Even at their worst, when they’re fighting constantly and Betsy is unmanageable, she misses her presence. They used to alternate weeks, but neither Lisa or Becky could cope with being away from their daughter for a week at a time, so they switched to their current arrangement of switching every three or four nights. It was tough, but not as tough as it was at the end of their marriage. Things were tense between them, not because either of them had done anything wrong - although Lisa’s lack of work life balance was certainly a factor - but because they’d fallen out of love. They were so much better apart, so much happier as best friends instead of wives. She was lucky, she supposed, that she got on so well with her ex-wife. She knew from her friends that being so close after a divorce wasn’t the norm.

Lisa settles on the sofa with a glass of wine - just one, given she had to work in the morning, and turns the TV on. It’s on Channel 4 - specifically Married at First Sight - a sure sign that Betsy had been the last to watch TV. She’d spent years being forced to watch reality TV by Becky, and now her mini-me had inherited her love of brainless entertainment. Lisa couldn’t stand it, much preferring to watch true crime documentaries, or detective shows - not without picking apart the inaccuracies of investigations, of course. Her running commentary on the shows did lead to Becky - briefly - banning her from watching them in her presence. But Becky had moved out, so Lisa could now happily watch them whenever she wanted to.

Detective show chosen, Lisa sits back to watch it but she’s not fully paying attention. She’s thinking about Carla, again. Had she been too hasty in suggesting the footage had been deleted? Maybe, but seeing Carla wound up was worth it. Lisa wasn’t one to enjoy winding people up, usually, but something about how Carla looked when angry made her hope that the opportunity to annoy her arose again soon.