One Bad Turn Read Free Page A

Turnbull and Robinson returned to setting up the incident room, a harmless enough duo, they could be relied upon to carry out tasks assigned to them. Both detectives had worked together so frequently they appeared to Coupland as a single unit, like the Chuckle Brothers, or Ant and Dec. ‘Has Alex’s maternity cover come through?’ Coupland enquired. ‘You mean you’ve not been keeping up with your emails while you were away, Sarge?’ Turnbull laughed, ‘Shame on you. Nice threads by the way.’ Coupland looked down at himself, remembered he had responded to the call straight from the airport. He was wearing light coloured chinos and a flowery shirt the girls had bought him teamed with a creased linen jacket. The man from Del Monte meets Hawaii Five O. At least he’d not made the mistake of wearing his flip flops on the plane; he had on brown loafers Lynn had bought for his last birthday that he’d never worn before and his tan was so deep he’d gone without socks. There was a time when a get up like this would have made him feel self-conscious but the good people of Antigua hadn’t batted an eyelid. Lynn had certainly been complimentary. That was one of the many differences between men and women, he mused, when a man found himself a wife he didn’t want her to change while a woman saw a husband as a work in progress, as though the clothes he wore and the way he cut his hair were just trial runs until she took over. Having said that, the tan combined with the holiday wardrobe he had cultivated over the last couple of weeks did make him feel like a million dollars. ‘You can joke,’ Coupland countered, puffing up his chest, ‘I might start dressing this way every day.’ A couple of the officers snorted. ‘You’ll be moving into a houseboat and getting an alligator as a pet next,’ Robinson panted as he leaned into a filing cabinet to nudge it along the wall a bit. ‘You’ll have to explain to the children,’ Coupland responded, glancing at the officers under forty who were looking at Robinson perplexed. Leaving the DC to explain the merits of Miami Vice to the Matrix generation Coupland made his way over to Turnbull. ‘Seriously, have we got enough cover for this?’ With Alex on maternity leave they were one man down but no one’d give a toss about that when they were looking at the unit’s clear up rates. A murder on his first day back. A logistical nightmare when they weren’t working at full strength. Coupland reminded himself it was no walk in the park for Sharon Mathers’ family either. Turnbull nodded. ‘He started last Friday. Transferred from The Met by all accounts, left under a cloud if rumours are anything to go by.’ In Coupland’s experience there was a grain of truth in all gossip, far more than in the official spin often meted out in an attempt to deter it. ‘Relocation to be near family,’ was just the bull people churned out to save face after a demotion. ‘So, he thinks he’s a big fish in a small pond, does he?’ Coupland grinned; he wasn’t averse to bringing some jumped up southerner down to size. ‘What’s he like then?’ Turnbull hesitated; a pained look came over him though it could have been trapped wind. ‘Looks a lot like that Luther fella on the telly,’ he managed. The room fell silent. Coupland could feel the collective discomfort around him. ‘He means I’m black,’ The gravelly voice came from behind Coupland forcing him to turn. ‘I can see that,’ he shrugged dismissively, ‘Ignore Turnbull, you’ll get used to his lack of detail after a while, just don’t ask him to put together an E-fit or you’ll find yourself trawling the city looking for stick men.’ The detective studied Coupland before holding out his hand. ‘DC Chris Ashcroft, Sarge, I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.’
    ‘DC?’ Coupland repeated, sliding a glance over at Turnbull who’d sloped off back to pushing furniture around, ‘You came back for family reasons