Free Off Minor by John Harvey

through his partly wound-down window.
    “Nearly ran smack into me, you know that. Right into the effing pram.”
    “Sweetheart …”
    “If I’d not had me eyes about me, you’d have gone right sodding over it, baby an’ all. Then what would you be doing?”
    “Darling …”
    “Up in bloody court on bleeding manslaughter.”
    “Look …”
    “You effing look!”
    Shaking his head, as if to suggest to the crowd deserting the mime show for this new drama that he wasn’t wasting any more of his breath, the driver wound up his window and engaged gear. The woman promptly stepped away from her pram and planted a kick low on the door, hard enough to dent the panel.
    The driver rapidly wound his window back down. “Watch it!”
    “You effing watch it! Who you telling to watch it? You’re the one, came down here, sixty miles an hour. Selfish bastard!” And she kicked the door a second time.
    “Right!” The driver wrenched open the van door and climbed out.
    The crowd fell quiet.
    “Excuse me,” Patel said, stepping forward. “Excuse me,” setting himself between them, “madam, sir.”
    “Fuck off, you!” shouted the woman. “Who asked you to butt your nose in?”
    “Yeh,” said the driver, giving Patel a push in the back, “one thing we don’t need, advice from the likes of you.”
    “All I am trying to do …” Patel tried.
    “Look,” the driver said, moving round him. “Piss off!”
    “I …” said Patel, reaching into his pocket for his identification.
    “Piss off!” said the woman, and, with a quick backward arch of her head, she spat into Patel’s face.
    “I am a police officer,” Patel finished, blinking away phlegm and saliva.
    “Yeh,” said the woman. “And I’m the Queen of Sheba.” Patel let his fingers slide from his warrant card and reached for a tissue instead. The driver got back into his van and the woman reversed her pram around him. Within moments, they were on their respective ways and most of the crowd had gone back to watching the mime or were wandering off to continue window shopping. Only Lynn Kellogg stayed where she was, in the doorway of Wallis’s, doubtful if Patel had spotted her and wondering whether the tactful thing would be to slip away unnoticed.
    It didn’t take her long to decide; he was still in the same position when she touched him lightly on the arm and smiled. “Wonderful, isn’t it?” Patel nodded, tried to smile back. “Try to help and that’s what happens.”
    He screwed up the tissue and pushed it down into his pocket. “It doesn’t matter.”
    “Got time for a coffee or something?”
    Patel looked at his watch. “Not really, but …”
    They walked through the ground floor of a small shop dedicated to the sale of pot-pourri, expensive wrapping paper and cardboard cutouts of benign-looking cats, upstairs into a small café largely patronized by women from Southwell or Burton Joyce wearing floral print dresses and good camel coats.
    “Why didn’t you carry through with it?” Lynn asked, stirring sugar into her cup.
    “Warrant card, you mean?”
    Lynn nodded.
    “Didn’t seem a great deal of point. Excuse me interrupting your little confrontation but I am a police officer. Not given their first reaction.” Patel tried the coffee and decided it tasted of very little. “Whatever I had showed them, if I had said I was in CID, a detective, I don’t think they would easily have believed me.”
    Lynn allowed herself a wry smile. “Any consolation, Diptak, I doubt they’d have believed me either.”

    The walk-through sweet store was full of small children tugging at their parents’ hands: “I want! I want! I want!” Lynn chose a small scoop of old-fashioned striped bull’s-eyes, some black liquorice with soft white centers, barley sugars, chocolate limes and a few strawberry fizzes filled with pink sherbet. She could always hand them round to the rest of the office; no law said she had to eat them all herself.
    “How much for