‘Oh, Bryant, make them turn it off,’ Kim moaned, covering her eyes with her hands. Just ten minutes she’d wanted. She’d told Bryant to pull up in front of the café so that he could buy her a much-needed latte after their Diversity Awareness refresher at Brierley Hill.
Treating people differently because of colour, age, race or gender was not something she needed a morning of death by PowerPoint presentation to understand. She had no bias towards or against anyone and was generally rude to everyone.
‘Bryant, I’m begging,’ she said to the detective sergeant, glancing back at the television. It seemed that wherever she went, there was no escaping the impending visit of the celebrity Z-lister, Tyra Brooks, famous for sleeping with a prominent, married footballer and then writing a kiss-and-tell book about it.
Every local news programme or bulletin mentioned her book tour and signing at the imaginatively named The Book Store, in the shopping centre in Halesowen, at the end of the week.
Even here, at a half-filled, back-street café in Brierley Hill, the small television was repeating the girl’s history, interspersed with clips of Superintendent Lena Wiley from West Mercia urging peace and order across the nine scheduled events in the Midlands.
‘New Age celeb, guv,’ Bryant said, trying to get the attention of the café owner, who had his back turned and was watching the news himself. ‘It’s all wags, shags and reality TV these days. I remember when you had to be skilled at something to be—’
‘Okay, let’s get out of here,’ she said, finishing her drink. She didn’t disagree with her colleague, but she wasn’t wearing the right shoes for a trip down memory lane.
Bryant looked dolefully at the rest of his sandwich before following her out the door.
‘What the?…’ Kim said as she collided with a uniformed security guard from one of the stores. Another was running across the road, radio in hand.
She knew many of the stores were members of a Retail Watch Scheme where they shared information and intelligence on local criminals. Sightings of known shoplifters and troublemakers were communicated between the small network so that each could be on the lookout for trouble in their individual stores.
She turned to follow.
‘Guv…’
‘Police business, Bryant,’ she said, quickening her step.
In her experience, store security would only leave their own premises if someone on the network had called for urgent assistance, normally for a shoplifter getting violent, some other kind of public order offence or something involving children.
Kim followed the security officers into the Shop N Save store nestled between a bank and a Blue Cross charity shop. She navigated the long, narrow aisles filled with bargains and low-priced items, ranging from home furnishings to toys to food products.
A row of tills was located right at the back of the store. She could hear no shouting or any other indication of a scuffle as she approached a small huddle of people.
‘Move aside,’ Kim said to the security guys as Bryant showed his identification.
The bodies moved to reveal a little girl, aged four or five, clutching a small, grey bear that had been taken from a toy rack beside the tills.
‘What’s going on?’ Kim asked, moving to the centre of the crowd.
‘Can’t find her mummy,’ said the store assistant who was kneeling beside the chair on which the little girl was sitting.
The child looked up and viewed her through red-rimmed, frightened eyes. Tear tracks stained her cheeks, but Kim still breathed a sigh of relief. Better to have the child than the parent.
‘How long?’ she asked. Normally parents and children were reunited in a matter of minutes.
‘Almost a quarter of an hour.’
‘Got a description?’ she asked.
‘Jeans and blue jacket,’ she answered as the child hugged the bear closer to her tear-stained cheeks. An occasional sob broke free from the small body.
Another store assistant appeared with a bag of sweets.
The child shook her head and tried to hide her face in the side of the bear. Kim stepped back and motioned for Bryant to do the same. Too many people crowding the little girl.
‘Jimmy’s gone to check the CCTV now,’ one of the shop assistants said, looking behind Kim.
Her face appeared to relax. Kim turned to see two uniformed officers approaching as Bryant answered his phone.
The male officer offered her a quizzical look: what was CID doing attending a lone-child incident?
‘Just passing,’ she explained as a second pair of officers turned up.
Bryant ended his call.
‘Woody wants you back at the station now.’
Kim realised that her boss rarely rang her personally any more to summon her back and rang her steadying colleague instead. Perhaps he’d realised that there was a certain fluidity to her interpretation of ‘right now’, whereas Bryant attached a higher degree of urgency to the request.
She turned to the shop assistant closest to her. ‘Move some of these folks away. The poor kid must be—’
‘Guv…’ he urged, proving her point.
She stepped away from the crowd of shop assistants, security officers and police. There were more than enough people to deal with a displaced parent.
She nodded her agreement to her conscientious colleague and headed for the door.
This was a minor incident that really had nothing to do with her at all.
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.
‘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?’
‘If he says he is, we’ve got to respect that,’ she said as they reached the bottom of the stairs, running into Jack, the desk sergeant, with an armful of sweet packets from the vending machine.
‘Bloody hell, Jack, low blood sugar?’ Kim asked.
‘Got a little visitor with PC Monaghan. Girl got separated from her mum earlier at—’
‘Still not reunited?’ Kim asked, meeting the concerned gaze of her colleague.
Jack shook his head.
Kim paused. She was tempted to go back there and see if the little girl was okay, but she forced herself out of the building.
It really didn’t have anything to do with her.
Stacey regarded her colleague for a minute before speaking.
‘Hey, Penn, listen if you want—’
‘I’m fine, Stace,’ he said without looking up from the neat piles of paperwork he was forming on his desk.
It was the same response she’d received every time she’d asked.
From what she knew, he had few friends, probably due to moving forces a couple of times coupled with using up the majority of his free time looking after Jasper, though one of his old colleagues, Lynne, from West Mercia, had attended his mother’s funeral. She just hoped he’d opened up to her about his grief more than he had to any of them.
‘How’s Jasper?’ she asked, looking longingly at the empty space where the cookies or muffins normally sat.
‘Fine.’
‘I could pop round and—’
‘So, what you got in the shuffles?’ he asked, cutting her off in more ways than one.
Stacey already knew her colleague kept his emotions close; his terse replies told her he was getting annoyed but didn’t want to snap at her.
She took the hint.
‘Okay, listen up; I’ve got an armed robbery from Wolverhampton, happened two years ago. The team suspected it was gang-related due to a known gang member being spotted in the area half an hour before the incident. It was their typical MO, but the team couldn’t find any eyewitnesses.’
Penn shook his head. ‘Don’t waste your time on that one. Wolvo knows their gang culture better than you, so if their informants gave them nothing you’ve got no chance.’
She’d already read the file and come to the same conclusion herself. If Wolvo officers with their local knowledge couldn’t get anyone to point the finger, she was stuffed before she’d even started. No one had been physically hurt, and the service station was still in business, so there was no burning desire in her stomach to get involved. She closed the file and put it to one side.
‘Okay, next one. Almost two years ago, an eighteen-year-old lad was jumped outside a chip shop by three unknown assailants. Cuts and bruises but no broken bones, and the offenders were never caught.’ She flicked back to the front of the file. ‘And this one is from Dudley.’
‘What was the final action logged?’
Stacey leafed to the end of the file and read the last few activity entries.
‘A visit and phone call from the mother asking for an update.’
Penn shook his head. ‘You’d be wasting your—’
‘You can’t write them all off cos they might be hard work. If they were easy, they’d be solved already,’ Stacey protested. There was a simmering heat in her stomach for this one. The boy had been hurt quite badly.
‘Agreed, but the lad is now twenty. Two years to a teenager is half a lifetime. If it’s his parents doing the chasing instead of him, he’s likely moved on and he’s your best source of information.’
Stacey could see his point. Reopening any cold investigation in the hope of unearthing information that would solve the case, she would not only be reliant on the victim’s memory but also their commitment and enthusiasm.
She put the file aside and reached for another from two years ago. ‘Okay, this one is a sexual assault. Similar to another sexual assault case which brought a conviction, but Brierley Hill couldn’t get enough for the CPS to charge the second victim.’
‘Yep, that one,’ Penn said, finally lifting his head.
‘I haven’t told you anything about it yet,’ she replied, pleased to see his face instead of the top of his head.
He shrugged. ‘It’s rape and no rapist should go unpunished.’
She had to agree, and her initial perusal of the files confirmed it was the case she wanted to solve first. But on closer inspection, she could see that the case for the second victim had never even been put to the Crown Prosecution Service. She read the details again.
Lesley Skipton had been raped on her way home after a party in the park at Himley Hall, organised by Dudley Council. The event had finished at 1 a.m. The twenty-two-year-old had been rendered unconscious from a strike to the back of the head. When she’d come to, a male had been on top of her, sexually assaulting her from behind with a foreign object. Her face had been pushed into the ground, and he had not spoken a word to her.
Stacey took a moment to appreciate just how terrified the girl must have been.
The Brierley Hill team had suspected a local builder whom they’d been investigating for a sexual assault a few days earlier, but they had been unable to find any physical evidence against him.
The first assault had made it to court: Sean Fellows had been convicted of the rape of Gemma Hornley. Lesley Skipton was still waiting for justice.
On paper, there was no question that Sean Fellows had also attacked Lesley. The investigating team had thought so and so did Stacey.
The only question remaining in her mind was: could she prove it and give Lesley Skipton the justice she deserved?
Bryant pulled up at the front door of the Copthorne Hotel at two minutes to four.
‘You know, Bryant, for once you could have taken your time,’ she moaned, freeing herself from the seatbelt. His notoriously steady driving style frustrated the life out of her when travelling to a crime scene or to interview a key witness. Every second counted. But she wouldn’t have minded being a bit late for this.
‘Have fun and be nice to the other kiddies,’ he said, smirking.
She slammed the car door on his words and headed towards the entrance.
The hotel had been built at the edge of The Waterfront complex in the eighties. Then, it had been all shiny and new, with its indoor pool and conference facilities.
But after three decades, its fatigue was beginning to show. The foyer seemed dimmer than it once had, the magnolia paint chipped and darkened with age that no level of cleaning could prevent.
A middle-aged woman at the concierge desk glanced up expectantly.
Kim held up her ID. ‘EPT meeting.’
The woman pointed towards a set of double glass and wood doors. Kim nodded. She’d used the conference facilities many times before.
The Hackett Suite was the smallest of the nine meeting rooms, and the door was wide open when she reached it.
A few people stood around the room, self-consciously holding small white cups from the stack beside the silver tea urn. A couple of people smiled or nodded in her direction as her eyes rested on the hastily written place cards folded in front of chairs at the table. Beside the name cards were briefing packs.
She decided to forgo the coffee, already tasting the cheap bitterness that couldn’t be saved by any amount of milk or sugar.
She took a seat at the card marked ‘WM Police’. They hadn’t known who was coming so had been unable to state her name.
She counted six cards excluding her own. She took a moment to match the people standing to their designated seats.
Nikita Jackson, a severe woman with a crew cut, was obvious as the representative from West Midlands Ambulance Service. She had gravitated to an overweight man Kim knew to be Clive Young from the Fire Service. Both were called in for any event where crowds were expected and injury or incident was a possibility. They would decide the level of manpower that would be committed to the event.
Bill Platt, the events manager for Dudley Council, was busying himself pouring a refill from the hot-water urn. He paused every few seconds to push his glasses back on to the bridge of his nose.
She’d never met the two other people in the room. The man leaning against the wall, scrolling through something on his mobile phone, she guessed was Christopher Manley, founder of TSS, otherwise known as Total Security Systems. The private company provided remote CCTV services, commercial and residential key-holding services, manned guarding and event support. Three years ago, they had won the contract to provide event security to Dudley Council. She had assumed the owner of the company would be older, but he looked to be late-thirties.
One more name: by the process of elimination, she guessed the woman with a shock of natural blonde curls falling all over her face was Kate Sewell, agent of Tyra Brooks, the celebrity.
That left one person; they had been seated opposite her at the rectangular conference table.
And every head turned towards the door as West Mercia Superintendent Lena Wiley entered the room.
Kim wasn’t surprised to see that the woman’s commanding demeanour was no less evident in person than it had been on the small screen she’d been watching in the café an hour earlier.
Similar to herself in height, Lena Wiley possessed a presence that demanded attention. While not overweight, there was a solidity to her physicality that offered a reassurance. It wasn’t masculine, but it was assured, confident.
Kim knew little about the woman except for a couple of rumours she’d heard. Apparently, there was a s. . .
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