Detective Constable Jerry Pardoe had paused by the front desk of Tooting Police Station to chat to PC Susan Lawrence when his iPhone rang. It was Detective Sergeant Bristow.
‘Where are you, Pardoe? Have you taken yourself off home yet?’
‘I’m on the verge, sarge.’
‘That’s all right, then. I’m going to need you to do a spot of overtime. There’s been a stabbing outside that karate club on Streatham Road, the one over Tesco. There’s two squad cars and an ambulance on the way there now. Mallett can go with you.’
‘Oh, shit. What is it, fatal?’
‘Don’t know yet. Two blokes having a barney over some bird, apparently.’
‘Hope she was worth it. Okay. You can tell Mallett that I’ll meet him out the back, in the car park.’
He turned to PC Lawrence and pulled a face. He had fancied her ever since she had been posted to Tooting, three weeks ago. She had high cheekbones and feline eyes and short-cropped light brown hair, and her white uniform blouse only emphasised her very large breasts. He had said to his friend Tony at the garage that she had the face of a TV weather girl and the figure of a Playboy model. He had been just about to ask her if she fancied a Thai at the KaoSam restaurant in the High Street when she finished her shift, but now it looked as if he was going to be spending the rest of the evening trying to get some sense out of bloodstained teenagers out of their brains on dizz.
‘Oh well, duty calls,’ he told her. ‘You don’t happen to be free tomorrow night, do you?’
‘Tomorrow? No. It’s my partner’s day off. We’re going ice-skating.’
‘Won’t catch me doing that, I’m afraid. Last time I tried I spent most of the time sliding around on my arse.’
‘I’m not that good, either. But my partner – she’s brilliant.’
‘Oh. Been together long, have you, you and your – ah, partner?’
‘Nearly a year now.’
‘Oh. Well, have a good time.’
Jerry went out of the back door of the police station and across the car park to his silver Ford Mondeo. Just my bleeding luck, he thought, as he sat behind the wheel. The tastiest-looking bit of crumpet that’s turned up at Tooting nick ever since I’ve been here and it turns out that she’s the L bit of LGBTQ.
DC Bobby Mallett came hurrying out, trying to zip up his windcheater while holding onto a half-eaten cheese-and-tomato roll. He was short and tubby, with prickly black hair and bulging brown eyes and a blob of a nose. Everybody at the station called him ’Edge’og.
He climbed into the passenger seat and twisted around to find his seatbelt.
‘I hope you’re not going to be dropping crumbs all over the shop,’ said Jerry, as he started the engine. ‘I just spent a tenner having this motor valeted.’
‘Bloody kids stabbing each other,’ said DC Mallett. ‘What’s that, about the fourth one this week? They don’t get it, do they, all carrying knives and machetes around and threatening each other? They don’t seem to understand that when you’ve snuffed it that’s it. You don’t wake up the next morning and say, cor, that was horrible, that was, being splashed like that.’
‘That kid yesterday afternoon, that one who was stabbed outside Chicks, he snuffed it last night.’
‘Yes, I heard. What was he, only about fifteen?’
‘Fifteen last week,’ said Jerry. ‘And the kid who stabbed him’s only seventeen.’ He put on his drill rap voice. “He was trapping round my ends and it was peak. No way man was going to stand for that.”
‘What a pillock.’
‘It’s your Generation Z, ’Edge,’ said Jerry, as he turned down Links Road towards Streatham. ‘They might be tech savvy but when it comes to anything else they don’t know their arse from their elbow.’
It took them less than five minutes to reach the crime scene. Two squad cars were already parked outside Tesco’s supermarket, with their blue lights flashing, and an ambulance was parked outside the Polski Sklep grocery store. A small crowd had gathered but they were already being held back by police tape. Jerry pulled up behind the ambulance and he and Mallett climbed out. It was a chilly evening, and their breath smoked, so that they looked like old-fashioned coppers in a black-and-white 1950s crime film.
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