Kim nodded for her to continue.
‘For the first fifteen years of the lease, Cowley farm was a thriving, successful business supplying mainly beef to local supermarkets. The foot-and-mouth outbreak decimated their stock, and they haven’t recovered since. They’ve tried different things to gain an income from the property. A farm shop from one of the barns was closed down by Environmental Health, and one of the lower fields that brought a small income from camping flooded three years ago.’
Kim saw the interest on the faces of her colleagues.
It was now a possibility that the Cowleys were a desperate family.
‘Thank you, Lynda,’ Kim said.
Now she’d succeeded in getting one of them to speak to her, she considered shutting up and then changed her mind. Travis was raging now anyway.
‘What about the landowners, the Preece family?’ she said to no one in particular.
Bandana boy turned towards her.
‘Robson Preece is the fourth Preece heir to expand the land fortune owned by the family for the last two hundred years. He’s in his mid-seventies now but the family fortune has almost quadrupled under his control.’
‘What type of land?’ Kim asked.
‘Anything. There’s barely a square mile of Staffordshire, Worcestershire and the Midlands that the family hasn’t owned at some stage over the last two centuries. The portfolio includes plots big enough for a decent-sized supermarket up to vast estates of farmland.’
‘And what do they do with it?’ Kim asked.
He shook his head. ‘Nothing. They buy it, hold it and sell it. The family has profited heavily from the housebuilding boom in the last twenty years.’
‘Okay, thank you, Penn,’ Travis said, sharply.
Kim considered asking him to continue, but that would have been deeply unprofessional and it helped the team not at all to see blatant division in the line of authority.
But the briefing had finally become interesting.
‘Lynda, anything on the attempted abduction from yesterday?’
‘I’ve spoken to the woman, Mrs Umgabe, and let me tell you they picked the wrong one there,’ she offered with a wide-eyed smile. ‘She said a van pulled up beside her and two men jumped out, one grabbed her arm and, to quote her accurately, “I maced the bastard”.’
Kim smiled along with everyone else. Except Travis.
‘Circulated the description of two average-sized white males and started checking local CCTV.’
‘Share the load with Lewis,’ he said, nodding towards the youngest, quietest member of the team. ‘And stay on top of the hospital.’
Lynda wheeled her chair across as Travis headed back into his office.
Just for a minute it had felt like she was doing her job, but it had been short-lived. Kim began to wonder if Travis’s hatred towards her trumped the need to solve this investigation.
As he closed the office door behind him, she questioned if he would cling to his animosity, whatever the cost.
TWENTY-FIVE
Stacey breathed a sigh of relief when they left. Yesterday she had welcomed their interaction. Today she did not.
She had the distinct feeling that Bryant was giving her busywork, but unlike Dawson she didn’t resent the work instructions coming from the older sergeant. To her it was the natural order of things. Despite both her male colleagues holding the same rank, there was a seniority in Bryant. She wasn’t sure if that was because the boss chose to spend most of her time with him or because of his age and experience. But the man had her respect.
Although, she had to admit that seeing the barely concealed petulance on the face of Dawson had brightened her morning.
Oh well, she thought, firing up the electoral roll website. She’d find out about the people at the addresses Bryant had requested. She’d do some digging into their backgrounds. The email to forensics had left her inbox before the two of them had left the building.
Yes, she would complete the tasks she’d been given, she thought, with a feeling of delicious mystery. Because today she had a purpose.
She lowered her head and focussed.
Once she’d completed these requests, she could begin the secret project of her own.
TWENTY-SIX
Kim pulled off the car park into a line of traffic. All animation in the face of her passenger had been replaced by red hot rage.
‘Let it out, Tom,’ she offered, calmly.
He ignored her.
‘You’ll feel much better,’ she insisted, finally reaching the traffic island.
‘Shut up, Stone,’ he growled.
‘Tom, are you really prepared to let—’
‘No, Stone, seriously, shut up,’ he said, winding down his window.
She could hear sirens in the distance.
Travis switched on his radio and listened carefully.
He turned to her. ‘Hit-and-run just up ahead.’
She wound down her window and listened. The sirens were behind them. ‘They’re never gonna get through,’ she observed.
‘Agreed,’ he said.
She indicated left and beeped her horn twice before pulling the Golf onto the pavement and then onto a car sales forecourt. Travis was out before she had switched off the engine.
She scrambled out of the driver’s side and threw the car keys at a stunned car salesman.
‘Move it if you need to,’ she shouted, setting off after Travis.
She ran through the slowing crowds of pedestrians who were stopping to wonder what was happening.
She crossed the dual carriageway through stationary traffic and headed for the next exit from the island. The road was smaller, with two-way traffic.
She sprinted towards the clutch of heads gathered behind a supermarket delivery van. As she approached, she searched for Travis’s head above the rest.
‘Move,’ she shouted as she headed to the centre of the huddle.
She could hear the sirens but they weren’t getting any closer.
She assessed the scene quickly.
Travis was on his hands and knees, performing CPR on a black male with scratches across his cheek.
But that wasn’t where Kim’s gaze rested. She stopped dead at the sight before her. For a second, no sound penetrated her ears and no movement caught her eye.
To Travis’s left lay a woman who stared up into the endless sky. Her broken body lay at impossible angles, reminding Kim of one of those chalk figures daubed on the ground. The top of her skull had been cracked open by the impact, and brain matter seeped from the open wound along the edge of the pavement and into a storm drain. Clumps of blonde hair were being lifted and moved by the breeze.
Travis had been forced to make an immediate choice and had chosen to try to save the person who at least had a chance.
She would have made the same call. There was nothing they could do for her now.
Kim swallowed deeply and the action around her unpaused.
She turned right into a man recording with a smartphone. She raised her hand and brought it down on top of the phone. It plummeted to the ground and smashed.
‘Now fuck off before you get nicked,’ she growled. That footage was not going on Facebook.