Free In Too Deep (Knight & Culverhouse Book 5) by Adam Croft

in?’
    Archie shook his head.
    ‘Did you hear any noises?’
    There was a pause. Then he shook his head again.
    Debbie thanked Archie, then got him to swap places with his younger sister. She smiled as she saw Archie walking back into the living room with Lola, holding her hand.
    When Archie was gone, Debbie started asking Lola some similar questions. Again, Lola said that her mum had put her to bed earlier that night and that she’d fallen asleep soon after.
    ‘Do you remember waking up?’ Debbie asked her.
    ‘Yes,’ Lola said, quietly.
    ‘Can you tell me about it?’
    Lola nodded.
    ‘It’s okay. Go on.’ Debbie smiled encouragingly.
    Lola blinked a few times before speaking. ‘I heard the doorbell. I thought it might be Daddy.’
    ‘I see. So what did you do?’
    ‘I got out of bed and went to the stairs to look.’
    Debbie steeled herself. ‘Okay. And what did you see?’
    ‘Mummy was lying on the floor,’ Lola said, matter-of-factly.
    ‘And did you see anything else?’
    She nodded. ‘A person standing near her.’
    ‘Can you tell me what the person looked like?’ Debbie asked.
    Lola shook her head. ‘He was wearing black. On his head and his legs and his... on everywhere,’ she said, gesturing towards her torso.
    ‘Okay. Did you see him doing anything?’
    Lola shook her head again. ‘Just standing. And then he ran off.’
    ‘Did you see which way he ran?’
    Again, a shake of the head.
    ‘Then what happened?’
    Lola started blinking again, quite rapidly. ‘I went downstairs and I could see Mummy was hurt, so I went next door.’
    ‘That’s very sensible,’ Debbie said. ‘What did you do when you got there?’
    ‘I knocked on the door and then Mr Aldridge came down and Mrs Aldridge took me inside.’
    ‘Did you go back to your house at all?’ Debbie asked.
    Again, Lola shook her head.
    ‘Thank you, Lola, you’ve been very helpful.’ Debbie smiled; she never ceased to be amazed at the bravery and innocence of children.
    If only all adults were the same, she thought.

18
    A lthough Wendy was happy to have been asked to accompany Culverhouse to the offices of The Inquirer, she did have more pressing matters to attend to. Besides which, she asked herself, did it really need two officers to travel down to London? The team was short-staffed as it was, and while the addition of Ryan Mackenzie might help in the long-run, the time it would take for her to get up to speed with how things worked at Mildenheath CID would effectively make them even more short-staffed in the short-term.
    As far as Wendy was concerned, this would be the perfect task to give to Ryan, having her accompany Culverhouse instead. She could shadow him and watch how things were done, even if they weren’t usually the best ways of doing things. But Culverhouse was a stubborn old bugger. If he’d decided he didn’t like Mackenzie, that was it. He’d do all he could to undermine her and show her who was really in charge.
    While Wendy wouldn’t have traded places with her in a million years, she quite liked Ryan. She reminded her a lot of herself when she first started out: keen to make a strong impression, and aware that she needed to stand up for herself in this male-dominated environment. But she’d since learnt that there were certain ways to do that — ways that worked and didn’t get people’s backs up. She was sure Ryan would pick that up soon enough — after all, she seemed like a smart girl — but then again, Culverhouse had been knocking around a lot longer, and he still had no idea how to work through a day without getting people’s backs up.
    The offices of The Inquirer weren’t half as plush as Wendy had expected. She half thought she might end up walking through a big revolving glass door on Fleet Street, men in suits barging past her on their mobile phones as stories flew in across the news desk, while pictures of the paper’s previous front pages stared down at her from every inch of available