‘No demands,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important, Paula.’
She nodded, conscript and unwillingly complicit. ‘And if it all comes on top, I am blaming you.’
Tony laughed. ‘Of course you are. After all, if she tries to sack me, I can always evict her.’
Friday teatime on the Al was an experience guaranteed to fray the nerves of the most patient driver. It had been a long time since anyone had accused Sam Evans of patience and Carol Jordan was no better. Like most passengers, she was convinced she could get them there faster than the person behind the wheel. As they approached the Washington services, the traffic slowed to a halt. Lorries, vans and cars formed a frustrated clot of traffic, made worse by the opportunists who kept trying to peel off into another lane that seemed to be moving more quickly. Silver, white and black in the gathering gloom of the late afternoon, they formed a monochrome blot on the landscape. ‘This makes the decision for us,’ Carol said, waving at the wall of vehicles around them.
‘Sorry?’ Sam sounded as if she’d dragged him back reluctantly from a faraway place.
‘Whether to hit him at work or at home. It’s taken so long to get here, there’s no point in considering anything other than home.’ She flipped through the map sheets she’d printed out before they left. ‘We should have brought my car, it’s got GPS,’ she muttered as she tried to make sense of where they were in relation to where they wanted to be.
It took them the best part of an hour to find Rhys Butler’s address, a red-brick two-up, two-down in the middle of a terrace in one of a dozen identical streets leading down to the Town Moor. The house had an air of depressed dilapidation, as if it were only held up by the sheer willpower of its neighbours on either side. There were no lights visible and no car parked outside. Carol checked her watch. ‘He’s probably on his way home now. Let’s give it half an hour.’
They found a pub a few streets away. Busy and friendly, the atmosphere made up for the length of time since it had last had a makeover. It was packed with three distinct groups–young young men drinking pints of lager and wearing short-sleeved shirts with the tails hanging over their jeans and chinos; older men in sweatshirts and jeans, beanie hats crammed in their back pockets, hands rough from manual labour, drinking pints of bitter and Newcastle Brown Ale; and young women in outfits that would have looked optimistically skimpy in midsummer, their make-up inexpertly applied, necking Bacardi Breezers and vodka shots like they hoped to hell there would be no tomorrow. Everyone who noticed Carol and Sam stared, but not in a hostile way. It felt more like the look a naturalist would give a previously uncatalogued oryx–a bit exotic, but nothing to get too excited about, we’ve seen the likes of this before.
Carol pointed Sam at a table in the far corner and returned with a large vodka and tonic for herself and a mineral water for Sam. He looked at it in disgust. ‘You’re driving,’ she said.
‘So? I could still have had a lager shandy,’ Sam complained.
‘You don’t deserve it.’ Carol took a drink and gave him the hard stare. ‘I had time to think while we were driving up here. You’ve been up to your old tricks, haven’t you?’
His look of injured innocence was so on the money she nearly gave him the benefit of the doubt. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You didn’t dig this up this morning. You got too much too fast. You sneaked a peek when you were searching Robbie’s flat, didn’t you?’ She was guessing, but the shift of his eyes to the side told her she was right.
‘Does it matter?’ he said, stroppy as he could be with his boss. Which wasn’t really very belligerent at all. ‘I didn’t try and keep it to myself. I brought it to you once there was something to go at.’
‘Fair enough. But why wait? Why keep it to yourself at all? The only reason I can see is that you wanted more than just the credit for finding the lead. You wanted to show Stacey up at the same time. Because this was her part of the inquiry. So, her miss. Is that what it was about?’ Carol spoke so softly he had to lean forward to hear her. She thought she saw a blush colour his coffee skin but it could have been the warmth of the pub.
Sam looked away, apparently fascinated by the navel piercing of a woman at the next table. ‘I knew she was over-stretched. I wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything.’
‘That’s bollocks, Sam. We’ve had inquiries with IT elements five times the size of this, and Stacey’s coped. Stacey would have caught this. Maybe a day or two later than you, but she would have caught it. You wanted to be the hero and at Stacey’s expense. We’ve been over this ground before.’ Carol shook her head. ‘I don’t want to lose you, Sam. You’re bright and you’re a grafter. But what I need more is to be able to trust everyone in the team to work together. I once saw a cheesy greetings card that said true love wasn’t about gazing into each other’s eyes. It was about standing shoulder to shoulder, facing in the same direction. Well, that’s what being in MIT is supposed to be like too. This is truly your final warning. If I catch you at this kind of thing again, you’ll be reassigned.’ She downed the rest of her drink in one without taking her eyes off him. ‘And now I’ll have a vodka and tonic, please.’
Carol watched him go. The anger was clear in his movements. She hoped there was something beyond the anger, something that would make him pause and consider his future. She wished there was a way of reaching out to him, to explain why she was being so tough on him. But she also knew that he would read it wrong, coming from her.
When he came back with her drink, he’d buried the anger. There was nothing in his demeanour to suggest he was anything other than the dutiful subordinate. ‘I was out of order,’ he said, not looking her in the eye. ‘At school, I was a runner, not a footballer. I never got the hang of it. Know what I mean?’
‘Oddly enough, I do.’ She sipped her drink. The single measure was so weak, it hardly seemed worth the bother. ‘What do you think? Time for another look?’
Ten minutes later, they were back outside Rhys Butler’s house. It was fully dark by now. And still no sign of life. ‘You think we should take a walk round the back?’ Sam said.
‘Why not?’ They walked down the street, almost to the corner. A break in the houses led them into the alley that ran the length of the back yards. Sam counted the houses as they went, stopping at last outside the back of Butler’s home. He tried the handle of the door in the wall and shook his head. Carol put her fingers behind her ear. ‘Did you hear that, Constable?’
Sam smiled. ‘Would that be the scream or the sound of breaking glass?’
‘Probably the scream,’ Carol said, stepping back to let Sam have a clear run at it. To hell with equality when the alternative meant you could escape the aching shoulder. He rammed the door, simultaneously turning the handle. The soft wood around the lock splintered and the door fell open.
The back yard seemed even darker than the alley because of the shadows cast by its high walls. No light came
