Page 59 of Child's Play
‘Absolutely, sir, on my way, cos I’d really like to speak to you too.’
Thirty-Eight
Penn jumped off the bus two stops early. He knew he could have got a squad car to drop him off at the train station to pick up his car, but it felt like a piss-take to him when he had perfectly good legs and money in his pocket.
It was hard to believe he’d only parked up that morning to get the train into court. It was one of those days where three appeared to be rolling into one.
And it wasn’t over yet, he thought, but didn’t actually mind. Being forced to work shorter shifts for the last couple of weeks seemed to have siphoned the energy out of him. Travis wanted this thing sorted as soon as possible and hadn’t read the same memo as his boss.
Luckily, they all felt the same way and neither Doug nor Lynne had wanted to clock off until they’d made some progress.
He’d tasked Doug to do some digging on Irina Nuryef to see if there was anything to the cheating rumour as a possible motivation for her changing her story. He prayed not. And Lynne had been tasked with interrogating the forensic evidence to see if anything had been missed. Again, he prayed not. And he himself had chosen to return to the petrol station to look for holes in Ricky Drake’s story.
He’d stepped off the bus early to pick up the trail exactly as Drake had explained it in his statement.
The man had left the pub at ten thirty, and it was dark. Right now, it was dusky but it was close enough.
Penn stood for a minute right outside the pub and looked along the road.
On his side of the road were a few terraced houses, a closed-down wine bar, a patch of wasteland about halfway up, and the chippy Drake had been heading for was about a hundred and twenty metres ahead right before the road hit a small traffic island.
Right now, he was at the furthest point away from the chippy and could see it clearly. He wasn’t sure he’d have lit a smoke only being this far away and he wasn’t even close to the petrol station on the other side of the road.
He continued moving along the pavement, retracing Drake’s steps as he’d explained them. Thirty metres down and Penn could see into the well-lit petrol station. He could just make out the figure of Mr Kapoor, partly because he knew the man well.
He continued to move forward. For a few seconds, his trajectory meant that a petrol pump obscured his view of the cash desk and then it came into sight again. He stood at the point Drake had claimed to be when lighting his cigarette. Right by the lamp-post in front of the wasteland.
Penn frowned. No, that couldn’t be right. He looked for other lamp-posts but the space between them put any others completely out of reach.
Penn felt a seed of anxiety plant itself in his stomach as he moved back and forth in front of the petrol station, walking the whole length three more times and pausing to check with every step.
Drake had identified Nuryef clearly from this position. He had glanced and then looked closely and had recognised the accused.
From where he stood Penn could see Mr Kapoor clearly in the well-lit shop. He could see that he was conversing with someone, could even see him handing change over the counter.
But because of a chocolate display rack that stretched the length of the shop, Penn couldn’t see another soul.
Ricky Drake’s witness account had been a total and utter lie.
Thirty-Nine
‘Can’t do it, sir,’ Kim said, as she walked into Woody’s office.
‘Too damn right you can’t, Stone, but I feel we may be talking about two completely different things. So, what the hell possessed you?’
‘Err…’ she offered, playing for time. She liked to be sure which issue they were talking about before she admitted to anything.
‘You allowed Travis to keep a member of your team when you have two bodies to…’
Ah that one.
‘Technically, sir, we only had one body at the time of my conversation with Travis. The second body was reported—’
‘Don’t play games with me. Who the hell gave you the authority to agree to an unofficial secondment? That should have been channelled to me.’
‘With all due respect, Penn is a member of my team who was lost to me this week anyway sat in court twiddling his thumbs. And to be fair it looks like the case has turned into one hell of a clusterf—’
‘Yes, but it’s their cluster… mess and not up to us to bail them out of it.’
