Free Bad Sons (Booker & Cash Book 1) by Oliver Tidy Page A

investigation. I hoped to have made that clear to you already.’
    ‘Because I’m part of it?’
    ‘That and because you’re not a trained investigating police officer. I don’t need private interest stumbling about blindly, getting in the way and making my job any harder. Do I make myself clear?’
    I was more than a little piqued by her superior rebuke. ‘I understand what you’re saying but firstly, I don’t think there is a law against concerned citizens searching out the truth when a crime has been committed, and secondly, from what I’ve seen so far of the official investigation into my relatives’ disappearances I’d be a fool to hold my breath for a satisfactory explanation, let alone a quick one, especially when as far as I can tell the tree the police seem to be barking up isn’t even in the same orchard as the one they should be.’
    She took that better than I expected – just a sigh and a disappointed shake of the head.
    ‘You didn’t answer me about what you’re doing here.’
    ‘I should have thought that was pretty obvious, even to an English teacher. I’m barking up trees.’
    ‘Found anything interesting?’
    I noticed she was looking at my feet. ‘Were those trainers expensive?’
    I said they weren’t. Then I let her know I failed to see how that was pertinent to her investigation.
    ‘Because my shoes were,’ she said, ‘and I can see something lying at the front of the grille in that sewer pipe that I’d like a better look at.’
    I climbed up to join her on the top of the outfall. It was constructed of lengths of timber fixed with an inch gap between them. At each end they were bolted to the concrete walls. She had a torch and she shone it down between the timbers into the murky darkness. The beam picked out something red stuck up against the grille just like she’d said. It was probably nothing; a red plastic bag, perhaps, or a punctured plastic football. There was only one way to find out.
    To get to it would take a drop down into the outfall channel and a wade through the knee-high stream of water, which ran out to join the sea. While the water looked to be flowing only gently, beneath it would likely be a treacherous layer of sludge, silt and sediment the water had carried down with it through the marsh irrigation channels.
    I took off my trainers and socks. They might not have been expensive but they were the only ones I had. I put out my hand for the torch. Detective Cash hesitated. She looked like she was having second thoughts about involving me.
    ‘What?’
    ‘That could be evidence and you’re involved in our investigation. Whether you or I think you should be is not my decision.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘So, if I let you go in there, I’m taking a risk that you could contaminate it.’
    ‘You’ve got two choices then: you can find me something to pick it up with so I don’t have to touch it or you can get in there yourself. I suppose it ultimately depends on how involved you personally think I am in my relatives’ disappearances.’
    She sighed a little dramatically. ‘I don’t think you are involved. All right? But I’m not the one making the decisions. And if it got back to him that I’d allowed you within a hundred yards of something that could be evidence in the case, let alone asked you to retrieve it, I’d be in big trouble.’
    ‘I won’t tell if you won’t.’
    She looked at me with a hard intensity for a long moment and I waited. If she was going to bottle it I was going in there anyway and sod the consequences. If there was something in there that could be relevant to my aunt’s death I wasn’t going to risk losing it to the next tide and the sea.
    Maybe she saw something of this in my face. She looked around like she was expecting Sprake to spring out from his hiding place. ‘Wait there. I’ve got some evidence bags in the car. Let me get you one of those and you bloody well make sure you don’t let anything of you come into contact with