Free Grief Encounters by Stuart Pawson

told me except that the woman was called Johnson, her three-year-old daughter was with her and her husband was on his way to Heckley General, where she’d been taken. I rang Maggie Madison and asked her to go there and handle that end. There’s a law against using the phone whilst driving, but what the heck, everybody does it and it makes you feel clever and important.
    The sun had set but there was no cloud cover and the sky was still light when I arrived. It was a tidy, detached house on the edge of the estate. One of our panda cars had made the initial response to the call, and they were waiting for me. A neighbour had explained what Mr Johnson did for a living and told them that it looked as though his Subaru Impreza had been stolen. I glanced through the open door and saw the damage inside. It looked senseless, but it wasn’t. They’d done it to instil terror in the poor woman, make her compliant. They wanted the keys to the car, not a conversation. A quick glance around supported my initial conclusions: none of the other rooms had been turned over and it wasn’t the sort of house that would have a Turner hanging on the kitchen wall or a few emeralds in a drawer. Their most expensive possession was the car, and it had gone.
    Motive: theft of motor vehicle. I was sure of it. It happens all the time. I rang Maggie at the hospital and she had to come outside to use her phone.
    ‘Ask Mr Johnson if there should be a Subaru standing on the drive, Maggie.’
    ‘He’s here,’ Maggie replied, ‘outside the hospital. His daughter is with him so he’s had to bring her out. Hang on, I’ll ask him.’
    There was a long silence, then: ‘Are you there, boss?’
    ‘I’m listening.’
    ‘Affirmative the car. Looks like they stole it.’
    ‘It’s a vehicle theft, then. How’s Mrs Johnson?’
    ‘She’s in a bad way, in intensive care.’
    ‘Right. I’ll protect the scene, then, just in case. Can you ask Mr Johnson if his car is fitted with a Tracker, please?’ Just in case meant just in case she dies. If she did, I’d launch a murder enquiry and the purse strings would be loosened. We’d test for footprints, DNA, fibres and anything else we could think of. Much of the testing for DNA would be speculative, because you can’t see the stuff. Swabs would be taken in likely places and all the tests run on them. Most, nearly all, would be a waste of time, but sometimes you get lucky. For a simple car theft the SOCO would fit the case into his workload and come along when he had the chance. He’d dust around for fingerprints and that would be it. Except…
    ‘Boss…’
    ‘I’m here.’
    ‘Negative, no Tracker fitted.’
    ‘Thanks. That means we’ll have to find it the hard way. Ask him the number.’
    I telephoned HQ and had an APB put out for the Subaru and asked for all units to look for it. It could have been stolen to order, in which case it would be spirited far away, as fast as possible, or it could have been taken to use on a job. If the villains were planning a job, we were in with a chance. That was the except .
    I found a fish and chip shop open and had a special and chips, washed down with Tango. I ate them from the paper, sitting on a wall outside the chippy as it grew dark around me. As soon as reinforcements arrived to preserve the crime scene I went home. It had been a long day.
     
    Through the night they stabilised Mrs Johnson’s breathing and took her off the critical list. They increased her medication but decided to keep her for another day as a precaution. Half an hour after starting work, the six-to-two shift found the Subaru parked innocently in a street of domestics just outside the double-yellow zone, barely a mile from the Westwoods. It was in the end parking place, ready for a quick getaway. I learnt all this as I hobbled into the station at seven, the night before’s jogging making itself felt.
    ‘It’s all yours, then, Jeff,’ I told Jeff Caton, up in the office, trying to hide