Deadly Cry (DI Kim Stone #13) - Angela Marsons Page 0,1
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.
Two
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?…’