Page 15 of Ticket Out

His guv’nor wore a very nice light summer suit, and the car he slid into was the same type of jaguar driven by the man who tried to assault Gabriella Farnsworth the day before, except Whetford’s was maroon.

He was on the take.

James had worked it out with a slow dawning of awareness over the last ten months, since he’d joined the Met.

He’d come in from Cardiff, not totally green when it came to corruption, but hopeful that the Met was more clean than dirty.

Maybe it was, but Whetford wasn’t.

There was no other ‘matter’.

James had looked into what his boss was working on. Found it was nothing.

Just as there hadn’t been a string of other ‘matters’ Whetford had used as an excuse for not being actively involved in the cases that landed on James’s desk.

James didn’t know who Whetford was getting his money from, or what he did day to day to earn it, but it wasn’t policing. Or not much, anyway.

No wonder he’d been so eager to have a newly minted detective sergeant from Wales. It was handy to have someone who hadn’t come up through the ranks in the Met itself. Who didn’t know how things worked.

But James was a quick study. He’d started collecting evidence on his boss from the first day it had dawned on him he didn’t have a lazy superior, but a corrupt one. There was no doubt in his mind that if Whetford was ever caught, he’d point the finger at his new sergeant, the outsider, faster than you could say Jack Robinson.

At least this current case didn’t overlap with any of the criminals Whetford spent his time protecting, or James wouldn’t have control of it.

And even Whetford needed a few wins, a few closed cases, to stop the slow and half-blind eye of the Met’s anti-corruption arm from looking his way.

Whetford would not actively give him any help, but he wouldn’t obstruct him, either.

That was the best he could hope for.

As James ran down the steps and headed for his Wolseley, it pained him how low the bar had been set.

chaptereight

There wasanother car parked in the loading zone outside the gallery. A powder blue Ford Prefect.

Gabriella approached it with sinking dread and stopped a car’s length away, giving it a good look before she approached.

There was no one inside.

She expelled a breath, feeling a little queasy in her stomach. She took out a notepad to write down the time, in case it was still here when she came back, and had just started to put pen to paper when the door to the gallery burst open.

“I say, don’t write a ticket. They’re just here unloading some paintings for me.” The man who called out was smartly dressed in a suit, his hair thinning slightly on top, his mouth curving down in temper.

Gabriella lifted her pencil. “This vehicle is delivering goods to your business?”

“Yes, yes! The driver’s just stacking them in the back. I came out to get the last few from the boot.” Impatience and condescension saturated his tone. He was tall and had the thin, aquiline features she associated with the upper class.

Gabriella had begun to get a real feel for reading people over the last month she’d worked as a traffic warden, and she reckoned this one would have liked to hit her.

Instead, he opened the boot of the car and took out two wrapped canvases.

“You don’t need to hover,” he said as he slammed the boot shut. “There’s no rules been broken here.”

Gabriella gave a nod and moved along, wondering at the vitriol. He seemed strangely panicked at her presence and desperate to move her along.

She continued down the street, issuing a few FPNs to cars parked on double yellows, and then worked her way up the other side of the lane.

She was approaching a white van when she noticed the car outside the gallery was still parked in the loading zone.

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