‘Sorry,’ says Mitch. ‘I thought you stole my gear.’
‘We didn’t,’ says Joyce.
‘And to all of you, seriously,’ says Mitch. ‘You don’t really think Dom would steal from me? Even for a hundred grand, that makes no sense. Why would he think he could get away with it?’
‘Well,’ says Joyce, who has been fairly quiet up to now. Mitch had almost forgotten she was there. ‘You said you’d trust him with your life. He probably knows that, doesn’t he? So who better to steal from?’
She says it with such kindness that Mitch recognizes instantly that she might just be right.
Early morning and the Portakabin is cold, so Donna is still wearing her puffa jacket. Chris has both hands around a cup of vending-machine tea.
‘The more I ask around about Dom Holt and Mitch Maxwell, the worse it gets,’ says Chris. ‘Kuldesh had no idea who he was dealing with.’
‘Dom Holt wouldn’t steal his own heroin though, would he?’ says Donna.
‘Perhaps he had a falling-out with his boss?’ suggests Chris.
He screws up a ball of paper and throws it in a high arc towards a bin in the corner of the room. It hits the rim and bounces out.
‘Yeah, bosses are the worst,’ says Donna. ‘Anyway, we could take a look at him without alerting SIO Regan and her merry men? Anyone we could talk to?’
‘Jason Ritchie?’
‘Ron’s son?’ says Donna. ‘He moves in interesting circles.’
Chris is now blowing on his hands. ‘We could see what he knows. I’ll talk to Ron.’
A blast of January air cannons into the Portakabin as SIO Jill Regan opens the door.
‘You forgot to knock,’ says Chris.
‘Is that how you dress on duty?’ Jill asks Donna.
‘Some idiot put us in a Portakabin,’ replies Donna, doing up her zip still further. ‘Ma’am.’
Jill takes a seat. ‘In the habit of calling superior officers idiots, are you, constable?’
‘She is,’ says Chris. ‘I’ve got used to it. How can we help you?’
‘Something struck me as strange,’ says Jill.
‘You work for the National Crime Agency,’ says Chris. ‘That must happen a lot?’
‘Where’s his phone?’ says Jill. ‘That’s what’s bothering me.’
‘Whose phone?’ asks Donna.
‘Kuldesh Sharma’s,’ says Jill. ‘Where’s his phone, I wonder?’
‘Not our case,’ says Chris.
‘Yeah,’ says Jill. ‘That’s what I thought too. Out chasing horses, aren’t you?’
‘Doing our best,’ says Chris. ‘They’re very fast.’
‘Only … Donna was making a request for phone records yesterday,’ says Jill. She rubs her hands together. ‘Cold in here, isn’t it?’
‘Routine enquiry,’ says Donna.
‘So I looked back,’ says Jill Regan. ‘And you requested some other phone records previously? I haven’t seen the results of that request anywhere?’
‘We’re police officers,’ says Chris. ‘We request a lot of phone records. I don’t suppose you’ve got a spare heater up in the Incident Room?’
‘If you have his phone,’ says Jill, ‘you’ll be off the force, you know that?’
‘Lucky we don’t, then,’ says Donna.
Donna, Chris and Jill stare at each other for a while. Chris tries to do a gentle spin on his chair, and one of the wheels falls off. In Donna’s view he styles it out fairly well.
‘Stay away from this case,’ says Jill.
‘Of course,’ says Chris. ‘It’s in the safe hands of the National Crime Agency. If you need us, we’ll be leaning on a gate, chewing on some straw.’
Jill gets up. ‘If you happen to stumble across that phone?’
‘Then we know where you are,’ says Chris.
‘Colleague to colleague,’ says Jill, ‘don’t get mixed up in this.’
‘Noted,’ says Chris. ‘Make sure you shut the door on the way out.’
Jill exits, leaving the door wide open.
As Chris gets up to close it, he makes sure she has gone. ‘Anything from Elizabeth’s phone?’
Donna checks her watch. ‘Should get something any time now.’
As it is a Thursday, the gang are in the Jigsaw Room. There is a half-demolished Victoria sponge on the jigsaw table.
From time to time they like to invite experts to speak to them, and today Nina Mishra and her boss, Jonjo, have come to give them a lesson in how the antiques business works. You never know what might be helpful. Ibrahim, as always in these situations, has done some light reading in advance, and suspects there is now little he doesn’t know.
‘If we start with the basics,’ says Jonjo. ‘An antique is anything over one hundred years old. Everything else is vintage, or collectible.’
‘That chimes with what I have read,’ agrees Ibrahim. ‘He’s right.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ says Joyce. ‘We’re collectible, Elizabeth.’
‘And with anything over a hundred years old, every object has a story to tell,’ says Jonjo. ‘Who made it and where?’
‘Who bought it, and for how much, and when?’ says Nina.
‘Has it been cared for, played with, dropped, repaired, repainted, left in sunlight,’ says Jonjo.
‘Gerry bought a gravy boat from a car-boot sale once,’ says Joyce. ‘He was convinced it was hundreds of years old, but then we saw the same exact one in British Home Stores.’
‘BHS seventies stuff is actually very fashionable now,’ says Nina.
‘Oh, he’d love to have known that,’ says Joyce. ‘I called him all sorts of names at the time.’
