little, it was dawning on him that the advantages of being allowed to sleep in his own bed outweighed the disadvantages of being cooped up in a vomit-stained police cell.
‘That depends.’ Lucy indicated the broken door. ‘What about this?’
‘Suppose I can fix it.’
‘Definitely?’
‘Yeah.’
‘When?’
‘Soon as I get round to it.’
‘Not good enough, Rob. I’m back on duty tomorrow afternoon. I’ll make this my first port of call. Will it be fixed by then?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Sure? Stare me in the eye and say it.’
‘Yeah,’ he said again, though he looked too haggard to be totally convincing.
‘Okay …’ Lucy pondered. ‘Before I leave here, I want a solemn promise from you two jokers that, for the rest of tonight … no, let’s not cheapen it … for the rest of this year, I won’t get a call-back to this address.’
‘Promise,’ Dora said quietly.
Rob nodded again.
‘You have to get some help, you understand?’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
Lucy knew they wouldn’t. It might be all quiet now, but in a few days’ time tempers would flare again over something completely ridiculous. The Hallams were too stuck in this rut, too damaged by events, too drunk on misery and hopelessness to effect any kind of change in their own fortunes. For anyone to keep proceeding down a dark, dank tunnel there had to be at least a flicker of light at the end. But in truth, Lucy didn’t really care a great deal. She couldn’t afford to. At times she was so tired out by these mini disasters in the lives of others that all she wanted to do was shut them down any way she could, even if it was only temporarily.
‘Alright …’ She put her radio to her lips. ‘1485 to Three, receiving?’
‘Go ahead, Lucy,’ Comms crackled back.
‘Yeah, I’m finished at Clapgate Lane. No offences revealed. All parties advised, over.’
‘Roger, thanks for that.’
‘That was so cool,’ Peabody said, as they climbed back into the panda.
‘Cool?’
‘The way you defused that situation.’
‘It defused itself.’ She put the car in gear. ‘They were too knackered to keep fighting.’
‘Yeah, but we could’ve locked them both up. Plenty of reason. Instead, you calmed it down, had a few words, put them right, spared them a difficult time …’
‘And saved us a raft of paperwork.’ Lucy drove them away from the kerb. ‘That was my main motivation.’
Peabody chuckled. ‘Can’t fool me. You just didn’t want to bring any more crap down on them … you’re getting soft-hearted in your old age.’
He was a rangy, raw-boned lad, red-haired and freckled, and to an outsider his tone might have seemed a tad impertinent given that Lucy was a ten-year veteran of the job and he’d only been in it a few months, but a few months on the beat in a town like Crowley counted for a lot. Even a few days spent side-by-side on the frontline could bond coppers together like no other job outside the military.
‘Well …’ Lucy swung them towards the south end of the estate. ‘It’s not like they haven’t had a lot to deal with.’
‘What happened to the kiddie, anyway?’
‘Run over.’
‘Christ!’
‘On the way home from school. Horseplay with his mates … ends up stepping off the pavement in front of a bus.’
‘Sounds messy …’
‘It was.’
‘You were there?’
‘First responder. But there was nothing anyone could do. After that, I had to deliver the death message.’ She sighed. ‘Not among my favourite memories.’
Before Peabody could say more, the air was shattered by a burst of static from the radio.
‘November Three to all units, urgent message … female reported under attack in the telephone kiosk at the top end of Darthill Road. Anyone to attend, over!’
‘1485 and 9993 en route from Hatchwood Green!’ Peabody shouted as Lucy spun the car in a U-turn and blazed back across the housing estate, activating the blues and twos as she did.
They were three miles from Darthill Road, which ran from top to bottom of a steep hill; on its south side it was lined by houses but on its north it gave way to arid spoil-land. As such, there was only one real approach to it, but other patrols had been closer and by the time Lucy and Peabody arrived at the phone-box, Sergeant Robertson in the Area Car had got there ahead of them. A Traffic unit was also in attendance, alongside an ambulance, which rather fortuitously, had already been in the area. From the radio messages bouncing back and forth, it sounded as if the assailant had fled on foot.
Lucy and Peabody jumped out and dashed forward.
The girl, who was clearly young but too bloodied around the face to be recognisable, sat crying on the kerb, two female paramedics kneeling as they tended her cuts and bruises. Robertson was on his phone to CID, but a quick conflab with the Traffic guys, who were already deploying incident tape, revealed that the attacker had dragged his would-be victim a few yards onto the rough ground, before she’d fought him to a standstill. He’d then had to punch her repeatedly to subdue her, after which, thinking he’d knocked her out, he’d started going through her handbag – only for her to suddenly jump up again and leg it. Having already lost her mobile to the bastard, she’d scrambled into the phone-box and called 999. The assailant was kicking the hell out of its door when she managed to get through. That was when he finally did a runner.
Lucy raced back to the car and leapt in, Peabody hurriedly following.
‘Get onto Comms,’ she told him, flinging the vehicle around in a rapid three-point turn. ‘Tell them we need India 99.’ That call sign wasn’t officially used any more in GMP, but some police terminology never changed. ‘We want the eye in the sky.’
‘So where are we going?’ Peabody asked.
‘The other side of the Aggies.’
‘You think he’ll have got over there already?’
‘He’ll have heard our sirens, Malcolm … if that doesn’t put wings on his heels, nothing will.’
‘This time of night he’ll break his bloody neck.’
‘Most
