He was opening for the defence at the Old Bailey tomorrow. He would be down at the station now, Piccadilly to Euston. Manchester city centre lay on the far horizon, muffled in cloud, the Hilton tower breaking through, a tall, straight line. A special effect from a horror movie, but this was real life, her life. Sparrow’s fart, November and she could see her breath, the same colour as the mist that hovered over the recreation ground, rising and floating a couple of feet above the grass. Rachel shivered and stamped one foot then another. The place looked tired and mucky this time of year, the brick dull, trees bare, the grass on the field yellow and scrubby. The houses gradually changing from these brick mill terraces to stone-built weaver’s cottages, getting smaller and sparser as the developments petered out on the foothills of the Pennines. The city bled into the satellite towns that ringed the plain: Oldham, Rochdale, Ashton and on to even higher ground. Manchester didn’t really stop, Rachel thought there were boundaries of course, but you couldn’t see the join. Rachel had been brought up in streets like this well, dragged herself up, more like. One she could see had its name picked out in white brick on the square mill tower: Heron. From her vantage point, at the edge of the recreation ground, she had a view across the rows of rooftops that rippled down the hillside, punctuated here and there by the bulk of a mill rising from the streets built in the same red brick as everything else.

RACHEL BAILEY STOOD, freezing her tits off, on a crime-scene cordon in north Manchester.

Dead to Me by Cath Staincliffe