He looked up from his phone, and there was that advert for the ‘RUMPLINGTONBROTHERS’ CIRCUSOFDELIGHTS!’, inWestburn Park. The poster was a cluttered mélange of puppet animals and real clowns and acrobats, with a big top in the background and a red-clad ringmaster in the middle, posing as if he were the most important man in the world.
And tonight was the last night...
‘...you’ll never find anyone more loyal...’
‘Charlie never misses an Orphan Outing.’
‘...depends which performance you want to see. I booked ours weeks ago for the eight o’clock.’
Worth a go, wasn’t it?
Logan scrolled through his contacts and called Chief Superintendent Pine.
She answered with a sigh.‘If this is more bad news:don’t, OK? Just heard McCulloch, Porter, and Pearce are down with the bloody plague. There’ll be no one left at this rate!’
‘I’ve been thinking about—’
‘And the sodding press are all over us like a sticky sneeze. Did you hear the drubbing we got on the lunchtime news? You’d think someone had kidnapped the Dalai Lama, way they’re going on about it.’
‘Boss, there’s a possibility—’
‘And do you know what happened when I got on to head office for more backup? To help us find Natasha Agapova?’A bitter laugh.‘Aye, right. Remember all those officers I’ve been promised from other divisions? Not any more. They can’t spareanyone– most of them are off on the sick anyway.’Pine puffed out another long unhappy breath.‘If you’ve got your heart set on a nationwide crime spree, now’s the perfect time.’
Well, there was one easy win:
‘So, cancel the protest march.’
A groan.‘You know I can’t do that.’
‘We didn’t have enough staff to start with, but now? It’s a public-order disaster waiting to happen. Imagine the headlines if something kicks off and we’ve got rioting on Union Street.’
‘Instead we’ll have “Fascist Cops Crush Right To Protest!” Any other civil liberties you’d like to abolish while we’re at it?’
Landfill and Mixed-Recyclingscrawked into the air, a squabbling tornado of feathers and malevolence.
‘No, but Iwouldlike to run an undercover op this evening. I know it’s short notice for all the oversight, managerial, and risk-assessment stuff, but I think half a dozen plainclothes officers should do it.Eightwould be better, but six would do.’
The seagulls battered away at each other, then Mixed-Recycling wheeled off to divebomb a woman eating a Cornish pasty outside the dry cleaner’s.
Chief Superintendent Pine’s voice went all thin and suspicious.‘An undercover operation to achievewhat?’
The woman flailed her arms, but Landfill swooped in to attack from the other side, and that was her pastyless, left with nothing to do but shake her fists and swear at the avian larcenists.
Logan looked back at the poster. ‘I was thinking a fun night out at the circus...’
50
Brenda was still wrestling Steel’s unruly mop into shape, with a hairdryer and set of curling tongs, when Logan stepped back into the salon.
The Crenellated Horror herself was fast asleep in the barber’s chair, and by the look of things, she was in for a bit of a shock when she woke up. Which would be nice.
Tufty stuck his head out through the door at the back and gave Logan a wave. ‘Sarge? Got something.’ Then disappeared again.
Logan followed the vanishing twit into a cramped space with boxes and boxes and boxes of shampoo and conditioner and colourant and every other kind of hairy malarkey stacked up against the walls, two or three deep in places.
No sign of Emma.
A small desk was wedged in beneath a couple of shelves laden with lever-arch files. And that’s where Tufty was sitting, fiddling about with a denture-beige desktop PC. ‘I went through every appointment for three-and-a-bit years.’
