Page 4 of Deadly Cry

‘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.

Four

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.