LITMIR.BIZ

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someone was arrested, and so it was quiet around him as he walked up the cobbled street that led to the station, holding the John Abbott file in his hand.

      He went through the car park to get to the entrance in the corner, which used to be the prisoner walk-out door. The public entrance was closed, but his swipe card still worked, and so he was soon in the nearly empty station.

      Most of the doors were closed along the corridor, the uniformed officers out in their cars. There was a light on in the Incident Room, but the filing room was in the other direction. Sheldon turned away and put a set of fire doors between him and whatever progress they were making in there.

      The filing room was for those cases that had finished but not yet reached a destruction date. The details of minor cases sometimes became important later on, when a series of them establish a pattern of behaviour.

      He had a reference number and so he found Lucy’s file quickly. It was just an envelope containing two statements, along with a copy of the custody record stapled to the front.

      Sheldon pulled open the envelope and leant against the wall to read the statements. They were routine, as he expected, with just enough information to prove the theft. The shopkeeper had been working the till in his shop when a young woman loitered near the alcohol section. When it looked like his back was turned, she put some whisky into her coat and tried to leave the shop, except that the shopkeeper had been watching her in the convex mirror on the wall above the till. He blocked the door before she got away.

      Lucy Crane hadn’t put up a fight. She had said she was sorry and asked to be let go, promised that she wouldn’t do it again.

      The shopkeeper hadn’t agreed to that. He worked hard for his money and so why shouldn’t she? He called the police.

      The second statement was from the arresting officer. He hadn’t expected any problems from Lucy, and so he let her stew in her cell for a while as he wrote up his statement. Sheldon knew how it worked, particularly on the night shift, that if he had processed Lucy quickly, he could have ended up with another troublesome incident as his shift drew to a close. No one would pull him out of an interview though, and so all he had to do was hide away as he shuffled papers and then interview her an hour before his shift was due to end. He had expected a guilty plea, and so it would be a fifteen-minute interview, a quarter of an hour with the sergeant as she was charged, and then a quick thirty minutes putting the final pieces of paperwork together.

      The statement was nothing more than a summary of the arrest, and her comment after arrest had been, ‘Fair enough.’

      It was an ordinary shoplifting case against a woman with only youth convictions to her name. It was an easy one. Either a charge, or perhaps a fixed penalty notice, or even a caution. Sheldon could see no reason why Dixon would interfere.

      Which made him suspicious.

      He put the file back and left the filing room. He was going to go to Dixon’s room to confront her, if she was still there, but he wanted to look into the John Abbott file first.

      There was an empty room across the corridor, with five desks, each with a monitor on, all connected to small servers on the desk. It was the room used by the burglary team, with trays teeming with paperwork and photographs of Oulton’s most prolific thieves plastered on the walls. There was a list of names on a whiteboard, with descriptions of their trainers underneath, so they knew whose door to smash down when a footprint mark turned up at a scene. It was the team Tracey Peters worked on, and he scowled as he thought of how she had spied on him.

      He put his anger to one side; he didn’t have time to be distracted, and logged in. Once he was in the system, he keyed in Abbott’s details, and there were five people with that name on the computer, although only one had an arrest from that year. When Sheldon clicked on the link, he was able to access the custody record and incident log.

      Abbott had been caught spraying the graffiti after an anonymous call, and he didn’t answer any questions when interviewed.

      Sheldon paused, his fingers drumming a beat on his lips. Why didn’t John Abbott answer the police questions? He clicked on the case result, and he saw that Abbott had pleaded guilty at the first court hearing. He had admitted the damage at court, but if he had confessed to the police, he wouldn’t have had to go to court. He had never been in trouble before, and so would have received a caution, and possibly an add-on of paying the cost of the clean-up, although the graffiti was on a building scheduled for demolition a week later. All of this on the advice of his solicitor, Amelia Diaz. It was almost as if he wanted to go to court. Sheldon pulled on his lip. That troubled him.

      The custody photograph of John Abbott showed a man in his mid-twenties, with his hair around his collar and unkempt, like someone who hadn’t realised that once Glastonbury comes to an end you are supposed to go back to the real world.

      Sheldon scribbled down the address John Abbott had given on his arrest and headed along the corridor once more.

      He was heading for Dixon’s office, wanting to speak to her about Lucy’s case. As he got closer though, he saw the light from the Incident Room spilling into the corridor. He slowed down, and as he passed the doorway, he couldn’t stop himself from looking in.

      Only Lowther and Tracey Peters were in there, along with DI Williams. Lowther was perched on a desk, looking down at Tracey. From the smile on her face, it seemed that she was enjoying the attention.

      Sheldon paused to listen. DI Williams was telling some anecdote about something he once said. The scrawls on the whiteboard and the papers already accumulating on desks gave Sheldon a tinge of envy that he was no longer part of it, but then Williams spotted him in the doorway.

      ‘What brings you back, Sheldon?’ Williams said, his grin gleaming beneath the unnatural darkness of his moustache.

      ‘I’m just checking in, wondering how you were getting on,’ Sheldon said. He felt some of his tension return as he was reminded of being taken away from the investigation.

      ‘I thought you were on leave, sir,’ Lowther said.

      ‘I’m just looking in on one of my other cases. A shoplifting. You wouldn’t be interested.’

      Williams snorted. ‘You’re right, I wouldn’t. Things find their own level, I suppose.’

      Sheldon ignored the jibe. He didn’t want to be ejected just yet.

      Except Williams didn’t seem to want to stop taunting him.

      ‘What I can’t understand,’ Williams continued, ‘is why Dixon was so keen for you to stay in charge. We had to force her into letting us in. Why would that be?’

      Sheldon turned away, grinding his teeth. He didn’t want to get into a shouting match with him. He walked along the corridor and tried to ignore what he thought were sniggers from the Incident Room.

      When he stopped outside Dixon’s room, he smoothed down his clothes and looked at the ceiling. He took a deep breath. If his suspicions were wrong, this could end his career.

      The knock on Dixon’s door was followed by a quiet, ‘Come in.’

      It seemed Dixon hadn’t been doing anything before Sheldon’s knock, as he’d heard no scurrying of papers and there was nothing open on her desk.

      He didn’t bother with the formalities. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Christina, Billy’s housekeeper, when I brought her in?’ he said, sitting down.

      She seemed to sink lower in her chair. Her mouth opened for a second before she spoke. ‘Christina?’

      ‘We thought she was a young woman called Christina, but you knew differently.’

      ‘I don’t keep track of your cases, Sheldon.’

      ‘But you did with Billy’s murder. You spoke to me about it, wanted to know how things were going, and when I brought in Christina, you knew her. I saw it in your face, when you met her in the corridor. You looked shocked.’

      ‘You must be mistaken.’

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