Free Team Spirit (Special Crime Unit Book 1) by Ian Mayfield Page A

reported or haven’t been
linked.’ He stopped and frowned. ‘Lucky?’
    ‘Sir?’
She was halfway to the corner of Helen’s desk where she worked.
    ‘That
meant now.’
    She
stood and stared at him for an instant. She said, ‘My biro’s run out.’
    Zoltan
nodded acquiescence and stood. He gave the impression he could wait all day if
necessary.
     
    What had seemed the
comparatively simple task of locating Luke Benton and informing him of what had
happened to his family had proved, owing to the destruction by fire and water
of much of the material evidence, to be anything but. There was no other close
family, and house-to-house enquiries in Chapel View had failed to yield
confirmation that Luke even existed, never mind where he was. It had fallen to
a finally filthy Sandra Jones and Anne White to sift through the blackened
remnants that had survived the blaze, contact what relatives and friends the
search turned up, and confirm that Luke was in Greece, though not the resort
nor which hotel he was actually staying at. Having bathed and changed, they’d
then had to call every airline that flew there before they were able to track
him down to Rhodes, and fax to the UK consulate there a request to put him on a
flight home.
    A
sign of the times, as Sophia remarked, irritated at having to expend so much
energy, time and manpower on a routine task - effort which should have gone
towards finding the arsonists. The Bentons had lived in Chapel View for five
years yet no-one, not even their next door neighbours, seemed to have paid them
any more attention than it took to nod when passing in the street.
    Sophia
considered it her duty to take care of Luke Benton personally, and so it had
been she and Sandra who’d met him at Stansted and driven him to Croydon
University Hospital to confront the travesty of human dignity that was his
younger brother. His college friend Nick, a muscular, quietly-spoken black man,
had cut short his own trip to accompany him home, and now sat beside him in the
living room of his parents’ house in Thornton Heath.
    ‘It’s
been a tough few hours for you, Luke, I realise that,’ Sophia said. ‘Maybe
you’d like to try and get some sleep before you answer any questions.’
    ‘I
couldn’t sleep.’
    Sophia
frowned at Luke. He was a tall youth, light-skinned, with the shadow of a
goatee whose successful growth was compromised by his being too young. He
slumped in an armchair, bare-chested under a white cricket sweater, red beach
pants stained and crumpled from wear and travel. He hadn’t rested since being
plucked from a nightclub dancefloor at midnight by a policeman who, Nick had told
them, he was sure was going to plant something on him. Then the breaking of the
news, the escort to the airport and the ten-hour wait for a flight. Finally the
return home, to find the nightmare was true, that his mother was dead and that
even if he survived, his brother would be disfigured beyond recognition,
condemned to a life of helpless pain while Luke, unscathed, tried to get on
with his. It was a situation Sophia, with all her experience of the horrors
that went with the Job, had never had to face. As a young PC, and then
sergeant, she’d sometimes handled something similar as the result of a house
fire or a road accident; but never when the next of kin was this particular
age, too old to be fostered or taken into care, too young, really, for the awful
responsibility that had been thrown upon him; and certainly never when the
whole family had been subjected to an attack of such barbarity and when only by
chance, perhaps, was Luke not now lying alongside them in the burns unit or on
a mortuary slab.
    ‘Fair
enough,’ she said. ‘Let me know if you’re finding it a bit much, and we’ll
stop. We can always come back to it after you’ve had some rest.’
    Nick
beckoned her to one side. ‘Can’t it wait anyway?’
    ‘I
think we should get this out of the way as soon as possible,’ Sophia said.