Two
Kim stared back at DCI Woodward for a full minute, waiting for the punchline that would follow her boss’s opening statement.
There was only silence behind his own unflinching gaze.
‘With all due respect, sir, are you having a fu… I mean, are you kidding me?’
‘No, Stone, I’m not kidding you. The Emergency Planning Team is meeting today, at four o’clock, and I need you to be there.’
Kim knew the EPT group, or as she preferred to call it the INEPT group, who met in preparation of any forthcoming major event that could impact on the general public. She’d known them meet for proposed English Defence League demonstrations, discussion of raising the terror threat level and other major incidents, but meeting for the imminent visit of a bloody glamour model signing a few books told her they really did not have enough to do.
‘I understand as CID we don’t normally get involved, but there’s no one else available.’
‘Sir, my desk is full of—’
‘Nothing that can’t wait for an hour. And talking of desks, you need to start giving this one a bit of thought,’ he said, tapping the edge of his work space. ‘I’m not at retirement age quite yet, but the day will come…’
‘No offence, sir, but that desk fits you perfectly; I prefer my desk to be a bit more mobile while I’m out catching bad people doing bad things, not attending—’
‘And I think it’s time you started to learn how to play nice with people outside your immediate team.’
Kim laughed out loud. ‘While I appreciate your faith in me, sir, I’m barely able to play nice with my own dog and he’s my best friend. Is there no way you can send Bryant to the INEPT meeting? He’s so much better with people than I am.’
‘That’s not exactly news, Stone, but it needs to be an inspector. My understanding is that the handover plans from West Mercia to us are in place and this meeting is to finalise details before a walk-through later in the week.’
‘It really needs this level of planning to get an ex-glamour model into the shop to?…’
‘She has her fair share of haters, Stone. Many see her as a homewrecker, and there were a couple of scuffles in Leamington Spa. No one wants to see anything happen on their watch. Once West Mercia hand her over to us, her safety is our problem.’
As ever, Kim was stunned by the double standard. It was the footballer who had been unfaithful, but it was the woman being subjected to the vitriolic attacks. She wasn’t the one who had committed to monogamy.
‘If it has to be an inspector, we could temporarily promote Bryant for the rest of the day,’ she offered hopefully. ‘I’ll even call him boss if you want,’ she added desperately. She did not do well at these meetings.
He shook his head as boredom started to shape his features.
It was over.
The battle had been fought and she’d lost.
Three
‘Okay, guys, what’re we up to?’ Kim asked once she’d placed the canteen drinks on the spare desk. She was hoping they’d revive her team from the early afternoon slump they appeared to have fallen into.
‘Filing,’ DS Penn said.
‘Shuffle files,’ Stacey answered.
‘Life pondering,’ Bryant replied, twiddling his thumbs.
Good to see her team so hard at work. There’d been an unusual lull for the last few days. A serious assault on Hollytree had been passed to Brierley Hill, as it was one of their informants. A sexual assault had been discontinued when the woman admitted she’d been drunk and had probably consented, and a fight over cannabis had been handed to the drugs team.
A part of her didn’t mind the lighter workload right now, she thought, glancing over at Penn as he formed piles of paperwork on his desk. The man had buried his mother last week and had insisted on returning to work the day after the funeral.
Much as she accepted that her team were high-functioning adults, she couldn’t help the frisson of concern that breathed on the back of her neck when she glanced in his direction. She had detected no change in his emotional state whatsoever. She understood that both he and his brother had been expecting it; their mother had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer months earlier. The woman had bravely hung on to life for much longer than the doctors had given her credit for. The brothers might have been able to prepare themselves, but there was something not quite right about Penn’s reaction to her death. She noted that there was no Tupperware bowl bridging the gap between his desk and Stacey’s work space. Clearly, Jasper had not yet found his way back to the kitchen. The fifteen-year-old boy with Down’s syndrome lived to cook and provided the whole team with tasty treats on a daily basis. The absence of the Tupperware dish saddened her.
Paradoxically, Stacey Wood, Penn’s colleague and the person sitting opposite, was a ball of contained excitement and nerves in preparation for her upcoming nuptials at the end of the month. Kim knew the detective constable was holding her excitement in check out of respect for her colleague’s loss.
She glanced to her right. And Bryant was once again Bryant. After making some tough decisions regarding an old case, he’d been forced into a grey area of justice that hadn’t sat well on his shoulders. He had gradually returned to his normal self and just a few days ago, he had beckoned them down to the car park to show off his new car. He had written off his old one crashing through a metal fence on their last major case.
Expectantly, the three of them had followed him down to his new, prized possession and had then stood in silence, stealing underwhelmed glances at each other.
‘Err… it’s an Astra Estate,’ Kim had stated, breaking the silence. ‘Exactly the same as the last one.’
Bryant had shaken his head. ‘Nah, this one is the 1.5 litre three-cylinder model with turbo—’
Kim had cut him off by laughing out loud. ‘You had a turbo? When you barely crack fifty on the motorway. Yeah, good call, Bryant, but it’s still an Astra Estate and it’s even the same colour.’
‘Aah, not quite, that one is gunmetal…’
Kim hadn’t heard the rest, as she’d turned and headed back into the station. Although a few years younger, it was essentially the same car. The only person who had been impressed had been himself.
Kim turned her attention to Stacey.
‘Anything in the shuffles?’
The shuffle was an annual initiative that had been implemented by Woody three years earlier. Each team in the Dudley borough passed on a few unsolved cases to another team so that fresh eyes could track the case from the beginning, to see if they could offer a new perspective on the investigation. Of the twenty-seven cases shuffled, nine had been solved by a different team, proving value in her boss’s initiative. However much she hated her team raking over the work of other detectives, she supported anything that caught bad folks.
‘Okay, Penn, keep filing; Stace, carry on shuffling and, to give your thumbs a rest, Bryant, you can take me to this meeting.’
She grabbed her jacket and headed for the door.
‘Hey, guv,’ Bryant said once they were out of earshot of the squad room, ‘you reckon Penn’s okay?’