Urgent footsteps approaching caused Kim to turn.
Bryant and Dawson appeared in the doorway. She couldn’t work out who had the least colour. A few seconds of silence fell between them. One of their team was missing and they had to get her back.
She beckoned them in. ‘My team,’ she said. Or what’s left of it, she almost added.
She made the bare minimum of introductions as everyone nodded in different directions.
Bryant held out Stacey’s damaged phone.
She nodded towards Penn, who held out his hand.
‘Can I just get a minute?’ she asked Travis.
He nodded towards his office.
Bryant and Dawson followed.
She closed the door.
‘Guys, what the fuck has happened here?’
She knew the guilt was increasing the volume of her words.
‘Everything was fine this morning, guv,’ Bryant said. ‘She was looking into the histories of our hate crime victims while we were at Lloyd House.’
‘And you didn’t keep a check on her?’ she asked, knowing she was being unreasonable, and Bryant’s expression reflected it.
‘Protect her, don’t protect her…’ he said.
She opened her mouth to respond when her phone rang.
‘Go, share the case details with the guys,’ she said, turning away from the door.
‘Sir,’ she said.
‘Where the hell are you, Stone?’ Woody asked. ‘I have half the borough CID team at Halesowen waiting to be briefed.’
‘I’m running it from Kidderminster, with Travis’s team,’ she said.
‘No, Stone, you’re not.’
‘Sir, you wanted a joint investigation, well now you’ve really got one. I’ve worked with these people, I trust them. I know what they can do.’
‘Stone…’
‘Sir, please. Let me have access to Stacey’s login and I can run it from here.’
She could hear the tension in his voice. ‘Stone, are you disobeying a direct instruction?’
This was his opportunity to push the shit downhill. By disobeying a direct instruction, she would be held totally accountable for the events from this point forward.
‘If you’re issuing one, sir,’ she said, honestly.
This was it. If he confirmed it, she was on her own. This single moment was about the trust that existed between them.
‘Stone, we’ll talk about your insubordination later.’
‘Happy to do so, sir,’ she said. Right after she got Stacey back.
‘Okay, let me know what you need.’
‘I will. And thank you.’
She sighed heavily and turned back to the door, which had been left open by her colleagues.
Had they heard her entire conversation?
She saw the slow, knowing smile on Travis’s face.
Yes, they’d heard.
EIGHTY-FOUR
‘Are you in, Penn?’ Kim asked.
Temporary access codes had been emailed to her, and she had typed them into the remote login.
He nodded.
‘Listen, guv,’ Bryant said. ‘We have this name supplied by our racist lead, Gary Flint. It’s Floda. Don’t know who it is or what it means but this guy knows more than he’s letting on.’
Penn’s head snapped around. ‘Floda?’
Dawson nodded.
‘Adolf backwards,’ Kim said, aloud. She turned to Dawson. ‘And this name came up in connection with your current hate crimes investigation?’
Penn frowned. ‘I’ve just seen that name on your girl’s phone. Give me a minute.’
Kim looked from one to the other in confusion. It wasn’t a name that cropped up often. ‘Did you two pass that name to Stacey?’
Bryant shook his head. ‘We only just got it.’
She looked at the sea of confusion around her.
They were all thinking the exact same thing.
What the fuck was going on?
EIGHTY-FIVE
‘Gibbs, Johnson, condense the Cowley case onto board one. Dawson, note bullet points from your hate crimes case on board two and mark up the last board as Stacey,’ Kim instructed.
‘Who is Justin Reynolds?’ Penn asked, suddenly.
Kim could see he was still looking at Stacey’s broken phone.
‘Justin Reynolds?’ she clarified. The name was familiar, but not immediately recognisable.
‘Teenager from Sedgley,’ Dawson said, stepping forward. ‘Stacey and I attended the scene the other day and I asked Stacey this morning to do a bit of background searching on him.’
‘Why?’ Kim asked.
‘Slim chance he might be involved in the incident with Aisha Gupta,’ he said. ‘The girl who was pushed to the—’
‘I know who she is,’ Kim snapped. Her information retention rate was pretty good, and Bryant had not made the mistake of leaving her out of the loop twice.
Penn frowned. ‘You sure you asked her this morning?’ he asked Dawson.
‘Of course,’ he answered, tightly.
‘Well, your girl was paying a lot of attention to his Facebook page way before you asked her to.’
Dawson’s eyebrows almost met in the middle. ‘But how… I mean… his name hadn’t come up before yesterday?’
Penn shrugged his shoulders.
‘Guys?’ she said, looking to Bryant and Dawson. ‘What the hell has been going on?’
They both shook their heads. ‘She never mentioned him.’
‘So, why the interest? Did you two discuss him in front of her?’
‘Don’t think so,’ Dawson said. ‘There was nothing to discuss. We did our statements, clearly suicide. There was nothing there,’ Dawson said, defensively, even though he’d done nothing wrong.
‘Bryant, put in a welfare call to Mrs Reynolds. We need to rule this out, straight away.’
He nodded and stepped away.
‘Wow, your girl some kind of racist?’ Penn asked.
‘Absolutely not,’ Kim snapped. ‘Her parents are from Nigeria.’
‘Well, she set up a dummy Facebook account and posted all kinds of vile…’
‘Let me see that,’ Kim said, standing behind him.
He scrolled through a whole stream of offensive posts. Blacks, Asians, gays, Jews, the works. This Facebook profile hated everyone. Kim felt her mouth begin to dry up.
She knew these posts were not from her colleague.
‘Guv,’ Bryant said, ending his call. ‘Mrs Reynolds wants to know when she can get Justin’s laptop back.’
Kim staggered backwards and rested her behind on someone’s desk.
Real fear for her colleague surged through her. Stacey had clearly been conducting her own investigation prompting her to set up the profile of a cruel, hateful person online. She had hidden her curiosity behind the wall of anonymous security. Only it hadn’t stayed that way as demonstrated by the blood on her phone.
Kim knew without doubt that Stacey’s life was in danger.
And that they were running out of time.
EIGHTY-SIX
‘What the hell did you do that for?’ Gary asked for the third time.
He swallowed deeply and stretched his neck. It was bad enough being forced to live with his sister. He hadn’t liked her when they were kids, and he liked her even less now.
‘He was going to kill you,’ she said.