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‘Just one last thing, Mr Baldwin. Is there any way you can give us a list of the people that Eric and Paul really pissed off?’
He shook his head in the negative.
‘Why’s that?’ she asked.
‘Because quite honestly, the list would be far too long.’
FIFTY-THREE
The trip to the canteen had done little to lighten Stacey’s mood.
She was trying to force herself to be interested in the things she’d enjoyed before, and food had been a good one. Her failure to find anything appealing was no reflection on Betty’s efforts but more the fact that her body wasn’t yet returning to normal.
She dropped the requested jacket potato with beans on Alison’s desk as she passed.
‘Cheers, big ears. What you got?’
Stacey shook her head as she retook her seat. ‘I’m not hungry, so don’t even try forcing something on me.’
‘I’m your friend not your keeper,’ Alison said as Stacey turned back to her computer. ‘But as your friend I’m saying you could at least give yourself a short break from the screen.’
Penn was having a fifteen-minute walk around the outside of the building to get away from the desk. He’d cancelled his date with Lynne, who had completely understood.
‘Yeah, I will,’ Stacey said, still miffed at the conversation she’d overheard in the canteen between two male officers chowing down on cottage pie.
She logged into the daily reports and found the incident they’d been discussing.
She knew there’d been a sexual assault reported yesterday when the boss had been interviewing the two men downstairs, but what she’d just heard had piqued her interest. The two officers had flippantly been saying that the sarge was on her way to tell the victim there was little more they could do given that her best description of her attacker was that he was a fat bastard.
‘Wouldn’t really get to court anyway,’ the shorter officer had said while chewing a mouthful of mashed potato. ‘Seeing as he barely touched her.’
‘Yeah, makes no sense. He traps her in the alleyway, pushes her to the ground and then just stops cos he thinks he’s killed her. When she came to, he was gone. Really?’ his mate had asked disbelievingly. ‘Nah, it’s a case of buyer’s remorse there. She fancied it and changed her mind and had to explain the head injury to her fella.’
Unfortunately for the man who’d made that little speech, her stumble behind him had brought his fork into contact with his nostril.
Her mumbled apology had been lost beneath his loud exclamation of pain and shock.
She read through the details of the assault until she reached the description of the attacker. Although not overly detailed, it did say a little more than ‘fat bastard’.
And those extra few details were what interested her.
Stacey pulled up her files and sent a document to print. As it whirred slowly out the top of the machine, she grabbed her jacket and satchel.
‘What’s up?’ Alison asked, wiping bean juice from her mouth.
‘Gotta go out. If the boss comes back, just tell her you don’t know where I am.’
‘Not a lie, seeing as you haven’t told me.’
‘Exactly. Won’t be long,’ she said, rushing out the door.
As she headed down the stairs, Stacey felt the butterflies fluttering in her stomach.
But these weren’t the dark, cloying, carnivorous, life-sapping moths that had been with her for weeks.
These were the good ones.
FIFTY-FOUR
