Page 2 of First Blood
15thDecember2014
The 7a.m. winter darkness felt like the middle of the night as Detective Inspector Kim Stone dismounted the Kawasaki Ninja, removed her helmet and surveyed the concrete and brick building.
West Midlands Police, as the second largest force in England and Wales, was responsible for policing an area with almost two million, nine hundred thousand inhabitants and covered the cities of Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton and her own patch in the Black Country. The area was divided into ten Local Policing Units. Dudley was the LPU under which Halesowen Police Station sat.
The three-storey structure offered a mixture of darkened windows and bright shining lights. The top floor remained the darkest. Just like every other station the brass resided at the top and most likely were not yet out of bed. It was similar throughout the borough. And she should know, she’d worked at most of them. A case here, a case there, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. Her most recent placement at West Bromwich had been shorter than most. She’d been seconded to work an armed robbery of a small greengrocer two streets away from The Hawthorns, the home of West Bromwich Albion Football Club, when the DI in charge had been struck down with a sudden case of peritonitis. The case had been two days old and witness statements had been confusing and lacking in detail.
With a team of one sergeant and three constables she had worked through the statements one by one and eventually established that not one witness had actually seen the perpetrator flee the scene, except for the son of the owner who had been on his way in to assist his father, and had offered them the only description they had. Male, approximately six feet tall, faded jeans, blue jacket and black balaclava.
In the absence of CCTV Kim had attended the scene and inspected the premises. The shop was on the end of a row of five shops with a narrow one-way street leading to a car park at the rear. A gate led from the car park back into the store. The owner’s son, Ricky, had accompanied her as she’d toured the premises and unlocked a small, damp, decommissioned outside toilet at the rear of the shop.
The toilet had been removed and the space filled with old racking, paint tins and a couple of chairs. She had taken a quick look around and turned to Ricky.
‘So, you saw the man and he was…’
‘About six feet tall, jeans, blue jacket and black balaclava.’
Kim rubbed her chin and nodded. ‘Anything like that black balaclava there?’ she asked, pointing to the corner of the space where the woollen item had been thrown, and forgotten.
His face had immediately contorted with guilt and the case had been solved. Opportunistic criminals had not honed their methods, learned their craft over time. They made mistakes, they forgot things. They were clumsy and nervous. And this nineteen-year-old had been refused the eight hundred quid to go partying in Ibiza with his mates, he’d admitted back at the station.
That evening DCI Worthington had insisted the whole team meet him at The Dog for a celebratory drink. She had attended but had not taken a drink. She never touched alcohol. Two hours later she’d been told she was off the team and to await her next placement.
The rest of the team had been surprised.
She had not.
And now she was about to meet her second DCI in as many weeks.
She used her fingers to ruffle her short black hair, flattened by the helmet. A quick look in the bike mirror confirmed that the fringe was resting untidily on her eyebrows without obscuring her dark brown eyes.
Let’s see how long this one lasts, she thought, stepping through the automatic doors of her newest work placement.
The first thing she noticed was the Christmas tree; a battered artificial affair with limbs missing and the remaining ones arranged haphazardly as though someone had become bored by the task. A few mismatched baubles and a one-line zigzag of tinsel arranged to cover the maximum area did not a festive vision make.
Not that she had any interest. Her own home had not turned up for school on the day they were giving out Christmas and that was just how she liked it. The season of goodwill and present giving did not appeal to her natural disposition.
‘DI Stone,’ she said, showing her ID to the desk sergeant.
‘Jack Whittle, Custody Sergeant,’ he said, offering his hand across the desk.
She ignored it.
And so, it began. New station, new people, new ground rules.
And unnecessary touching of other people was one of them.
‘DCI Woodward is expecting me,’ she said as the custody sergeant’s arm retracted to his side of the desk.
‘I’ll buzz you through,’ he said, nodding towards the key-coded automatic doors.
Kim remained where she was and said nothing. It was a three-storey building that she’d never been in before.
‘Top floor east corner,’ he offered, coolly, catching on quick.
Maybe Jack was going to be all right after all, tolerable for the duration of her stay. However short that was going to be.
She made her way along corridors and up staircases that were pretty much generic in all of the OCUs she’d worked, and one office of beaten-up mismatched furniture was no different to the next.
