4-1
571 Words
4
Still tired after his unplanned and unwanted late-night visit to the festival, Stone nudged open the door and walked into his office. Burke was already there, with the coffee machine percolating merrily behind him; Stone wasn’t surprised, somehow Burke nearly always beat him to the office. Stone supposed it was because his partner was single, and had no-one to delay him of a morning, whereas his wife invariably held him up with some last-minute issue that couldn’t wait until another time, and which only he could deal with.
“Is that the witness statements from the festival?” Stone asked with a gesture at the stack of paper on his desk.
“If you can call them that.” Burke poured a mug of coffee for his superior and carried it over.
Stone accepted the mug gratefully and dropped into his chair to start going over the statements; it didn’t take him long. Apart from those he had spoken to at the time, none of the festival crew members, or the others who had been at the site at the time of the robbery, had seen anything; not one of them was able to add anything to what Stone already knew.
Frustrated, he tossed the last statement back onto the desk, where it joined the untidy pile of similarly useless statements. He sipped slowly at his coffee to give himself time to think and then he turned to his partner. “Any CCTV or traffic cameras in the area that might help us?” he asked, wishing they had more to go on than a brief, almost useless, physical description of the two robbers and the belief, expressed by Rose Leigh, that they had a slight accent. The description they had of the car was as helpful as that of the armed pair, leaving them to hope that forensics could come up with something that might lead them to the men they were after.
Burke shook his head. “I’d just finished checking that when you arrived. The nearest camera is three quarters of a mile away; it covers a traffic junction that’s apparently pretty bad for accidents. I’ve requested the footage, but even if we find the car on it we won’t be able to use it in court, it’s too far away to be able to say for definite it’s the same vehicle.”
Stone dismissed that problem with a wave of his hand. Just then he wasn’t bothered about evidence for court, he was more interested in identifying the car and the two armed robbers; proving it was them could wait until they knew who it was. “David Leigh and the others should be in later to give formal statements; with a bit of luck they’ll have remembered something useful. In the meantime, I want to know about any Vauxhalls reported stolen recently, especially if they’re an Astra and they’re blue. We might get lucky and hit on the right vehicle.”
Burke scribbled quick notes on the pad he kept handy by his phone. “How about putting out an alert for a possible abandoned vehicle,” he suggested. “They might have dumped the car somewhere. A patrol might spot it.”
“Let’s get the description out to the local news as well.” Stone suspected that if the car had been dumped, it would have been done in an out of the way place, where it was more likely to be found randomly by a member of the public than by a police patrol. “Just the car, not what we have on the pair, it’s too vague at the moment, and I don’t want to spook them.”
“Okay, anything else?”
“Not unless you can think of something.”
**
- Writer
