Team Spirit (Special Crime Unit Book 1) (21 page)

Friday

Ideally, Anne White
would have spent her last day fitted with wing mirrors. There’d been rumours a
stunt might be pulled - and from past experience that was a certainty, not a
possibility - but she couldn’t be sure when. Her colleagues were quite capable
of keeping her in agonies until Barkeley’s tomorrow night. In an attempt to
force their hand she’d taken half a day’s leave, and would be on her way after
that whether they were ready or not.

Their
morning’s work seemed to have taken most of the team out of the office, chasing
halfway promising leads on the whereabouts of Debbie Clarke or her squatter
friends. Only Lucky, head down at her desk, and Helen, talking to a social
worker, were left. Eventually even the social worker disappeared, and the clock
crept nearer to one-thirty: zero hour.

Perhaps
the suspense, the emotion of leaving, heightened her sensibilities but the
self-contained industry of the others, the almost silent emptiness of the
office, now seemed oppressive, and the tedium of clearing her desk, making
notes on unfinished cases for handing on to other members of the team, made her
impatient. Her head snapped up at the ringing of the phone. It was Bob Price,
one of the uniformed sergeants.

‘Anne,’
he said. ‘Got a prisoner down here says he wants to talk to you.’

She
groaned. ‘Who?’

‘He
won’t say. No ID on him.’

‘Got
a lot on at the moment, sarge.’

‘I
dunno about that,’ Bob said, ‘but it’d make my life a lot easier if you could
come down and put a name to the face.’

She
thought for a moment. ‘What’s he in for?’

‘Flashing,’
Bob said. ‘He’s in the cells now. Can you imagine, exposing yourself to a shop
assistant in Ann Summers? Frightened the life out of her. Won’t tell us why,
just keeps asking for you. A right arsehole, if ever I saw one.’

‘OK,
I’ll come down,’ she sighed, hanging up and mentally kissing goodbye to the
last chance of getting her Special Crime affairs in order. She flicked through
her memory for likely candidates. A few possibilities, but this one’s MO was
taking it a bit far. She paused on her way out and took a long look round at
what might well be her last view of Special Crime as one of its staff.

Helen
and Lucky exchanged glances as the door closed behind her.

‘Cell six,’ Bob
said, unclipping his keys and selecting the appropriate one before handing them
to her. ‘You know the procedure. Check the Judas hole first, anything looks
iffy or you can’t see him, come and get me.’

‘Right.’
Anne nodded and set off down the corridor. It was cool down here after the heat
of the office, for which she was eternally grateful. In warm weather, the
uneasy truce between a police cell block’s two pervading smells of disinfectant
and vomit was frequently broken, with invariably the same winner. She
remembered well her first such experience as a young probationer, and her subsequent
undignified flight to the ladies’, pursued by the laughter of male colleagues.

But
she’d encountered far more stomach-churning situations in the years since, and
nowadays the most unpleasant things in cells tended to be their occupants.
Starting next week, she wouldn’t even have to put up with prisoners any more.

One
for the road, she thought with a wry smile, advancing down the rows of heavy
doors. Most were open, unoccupied, and the cell block was quiet, the calm
before the inevitable Friday night flood of brawlers and piss artists. Number
six, at the far end, was shut. She stood before it, composed her opening line,
and slid open the Judas hole.

A
nightmare vision filled the opening. What might have been a face was just two
pale, hairy half moons, separated by a hellish dark maw, which lunged at her
retinas like a bad trip. She yelled, slammed the hole shut and recoiled so fast
she lost her balance and fell backwards through the open door of the cell
opposite. ‘Bastards!’ she squeaked, sitting up. Through the door of number six
came the sound of helpless laughter.

She
scrambled to her feet and went back out into the corridor. Bob Price was
standing at the other end, hands in his pockets.

‘Told
you we had an arsehole in there,’ he said, and walked off.

She
mustered what she hoped was some semblance of composure and went to unlock
number six. Ranged along the bench were Kim Oliver, Marie Kirtland, Nina
Tyminski, several uniforms from early turn and, triumphantly clutching an
iPhone with a voice memo app, Sandra Jones. To one side were Jeff Wetherby and
Zoltan. Both their trousers were in place but it had to have been one of them.
At the sight of her they burst into renewed fits of giggling. ‘Bastards!’ she
spluttered again.

In
reply, Sandra played the voice memo back, and she heard herself scream, clear
as a bell.

Blushing
furiously, she pointed an accusing finger. ‘I take it this was your idea?’

Sandra
shook her head and indicated Zoltan, who took a step back, cradling his
fingers. ‘All my own work,’ he admitted. ‘With help.’ Beside him Jeff grinned
and tried to cover his face with one hand.

Torn
between anger at Zoltan and being a good sport, Anne stood pouting for a long
moment. Finally she wagged an ominous finger at her lover and erstwhile DI.

‘I’ll
see you later,’ she said.

The Assistant
Commissioner had been keen to administer a bollocking to Sophia for, in his
words, wasting time and resources chasing wild geese in and out of homeless
shelters instead of waiting for the DNA result, and for full effect he had
chosen to do so in person as opposed to over the phone. At their meeting,
Sophia had refrained from asking him why dragging her all the way to Brixton
just so he could see what she looked like standing on his office carpet was
not
a waste of time and resources,
partly because the less she said the less likely he would be not to take the
investigation away from them, and partly by a desire to curtail the ear-bending
so that she could get back to Croydon by half past one if at all possible. It was
one-fifteen when she finally made it. Anne was still in the office, but looking
eager to get away. She made apologetic noises about the unfinished nature of
her paperwork. Sophia waved them away with a rare smile, and rang down to the
CAD room to ask them to put out a PA announcement, a presentation to be made to
DC Anne White in the Special Crime office, all welcome.

‘You
don’t mind hanging around a few minutes longer, I hope?’

‘Course
not, guv,’ Anne said uncertainly.

Ten
minutes later the room was filled with a noisy crowd. Most of the team were
present, as far as Sophia could make out, as well as twenty or so other people
from uniform, CID and the civilian staff. She fancied they were harbouring some
joke; certainly a lot of them were avoiding eye contact. Chuckling to herself,
she put the matter aside. In due course she’d hear on the jungle drums about
whatever stunt had been pulled to mark Anne’s departure.

Sentiment
not being her strong point, she called everyone to attention and gave a brief,
unembellished but, she hoped, sincere address expressing the team’s regard and
appreciation for Anne’s work over the past six months, their best wishes for
her future. Anne blushed crimson throughout this and the subsequent applause.
Finally Sophia slid open the bottom drawer of her desk and, to cheers and
whistles, took out a large Ann Summers carrier bag.

‘Don’t
need to ask who did the shopping, do I?’ Anne said, trying to suppress her
embarrassment.

Sophia
blinked. She hadn’t expected the bag, but then she supposed you were asking for
it by letting Sandra Jones spend the money from the whip round and leave the
stuff in your drawer.

‘Don’t
worry,’ Sandra called out from a safe distance, ‘it’s not
all
from there.’

‘Should
hope not,’ someone said. ‘She’ll be knackered.’

The
first item Anne unwrapped was an alluring lacy confection in appropriate navy
blue, for which she gushed thanks but refused firmly a chorus of male pleas to
model it for them. The other presents were more conventional: a Harrods gift
card (‘I’m going straight up to town to spend this’), Glenfiddich, chocolates
and an exercise DVD (‘Which you’ll need,’ Marie said, ‘sitting on your arse
behind a desk instead of pounding pavements’). The card, supplied and inscribed
in best blue ink by Chief Superintendent Coleridge, was suitably vast, and
crammed with several dozen messages ranging from the banal to the heartfelt,
from the humorous to the downright obscene.

‘Thank
you all,’ she managed to say, surrounded by wrapping paper, wishing she’d
prepared better for the dreaded moment someone yelled out, ‘Speech!’ ‘I’m going
to miss working here - but not half as much as I’ll miss a sergeant’s pay if I
ever have to come back.’ Jeers greeted this remark.

‘Gone
half one,’ Sandra called out dramatically, and it was the signal for the
ceremony to end, for urging Anne to make herself scarce before someone found
her some more work to do. And so Acting Sergeant Anne White, arms full of
gifts, walked on a tide of farewells out of the office, and out of the team.

‘Special
Crime,’ Sophia’s voice rang out behind her, suddenly businesslike, ‘stay put.
It’s not quite the weekend yet.’

The
last Anne heard before the door closed behind her were the groans as they
shuffled back to their desks.

Life for an
Anne-less Special Crime Unit lost no time in going on as usual. Jasmin Winter,
who had missed both the prank and the presentation because of a previously
scheduled appointment, returned looking glum and dove into an impressive pile
of paperwork before anyone could engage her in conversation. Zoltan Schneider
received a call from DI Beaumont, who informed him that Darren Pegley had just
appeared at Camberwell Green Magistrates’ Court, charged with rape and several
offences under the Misuse of Drugs Act, and had been remanded to Wandsworth
pending court dates to be determined. Acting on a tip from an informer, Helen
Wallace went to a house in Thornton Heath and brought a 26-year-old man of
Turkish Cypriot descent and his two mobile phones in for investigation in
connection with a number of anonymous calls placed the previous Sunday to a Mr
Muhammad Siddiqi, in the course of which, Siddiqi had alleged, a threat had
been made to petrol bomb his mosque. At five-thirty precisely, Zoltan ordered a
highly reluctant Jasmin to stop what she was doing and go home immediately. And
shortly after that, the forensic laboratory in Oxfordshire rang Sophia to let
her know that the previously unidentified DNA of the blood sample from the
Paragon Road squat had been matched with the cheek swab taken recently at
Charing Cross police station from one Philip Rex Meredith, last known at that
address.

Anne flexed her
back against the softness of the bed and allowed herself to dwell momentarily
on the fact that the man inside her was not Zoltan. Sensing something, he
paused and looked into her eyes. But she closed them and, encircling him, drew
him closer, bearing down as she drove towards orgasm. She felt him join her in
a tight coil of pleasure; then they separated and lay recovering and reflecting
beneath the covers.

As
always seems the way, she’d found the perfect dress almost as soon as she’d set
foot inside Harrods. The gift voucher accounted for, the rest of the shopping
expedition was an anti-climax, and she caught herself wandering up and down
Oxford Street thinking despondently that all the shops nowadays were the same
as in Croydon, only bigger. Her failure to tie up her Special Crime affairs was
still nagging at her, and she decided to shelve a visit to a museum in favour
of one task she could still perform.

A
courtesy call; that, she insisted to herself on the way to Camberwell, was all
it was. Communicating thanks to a helpful witness. But when she reached Meadow
Music a strange face was behind the counter. Roy Gillam had taken the day off.
He might be at home; his flat was in Greenwich. She thanked the youth and drove
there.

Pleasantly
surprised, Gillam set aside the accounts he’d been trying to balance and
invited her to share a bottle of wine, it being Friday after all. Flirting
seemed as easy across his kitchen table as sitting side by side in the shop,
ploughing through receipts. The table was small, the brushing of legs a
frequent, ultimately deliberate occurrence. Easy, too, to make hand contact
under, then over, the table. Not long after, they stood up. They wasted very
little more time before moving to the bedroom.

Anne
often wondered about this aspect of her nature. It wasn’t the first time since
she’d been going out with Zoltan that she’d stretched the definition of
flirting beyond its limits. Zoltan, she suspected, knew nothing of these
dalliances, and would not wish to know. He had her heart; he should not
begrudge her lending out, from time to time, her libido. Oddly, the only thing
that concerned her now was the million to one chance that next time he sat in
her car, he’d notice the extra mileage.

In
the warm aftermath of sex she dismissed the notion and snuggled up to Roy,
gratified that she couldn’t tell what was in his thoughts. In bed, she found
the copper’s habit of trying to read people’s minds a liability. She stopped
herself by kissing him. She felt him go hard, and herself wet, and they made
love again.