Flawed by Jo Bannister

learn. I lent him to you because I hoped there might be things you could teach him. I'm regretting
that
already.
    ‘And the other thing is, he's not my spy. He doesn't come running to me to report everything you've said and done. Yes, I bought him a beer’ – this was an outright lie and Deacon knew it – ‘and he said you'd been to Dover. He said you had a new witness, someone involved in the drugs trade. He didn't give me the name and I'd no reason to associate Susan Weekes with drug-smuggling. Despite what you might have heard, Inspector Hyde, I'm not psychic. But everything she told me when I interviewed her was in the file. If you'd looked you'd have known it was the same story from the same woman. And you'd have seen that it fell apart when I leant on it.
    ‘Anyone can make a mistake, Inspector. But try not to make stupid ones.’
    Brodie always did the Saturday morning trawl of the Brighton antiques scene with Paddy. It was an outing they both enjoyed, and there weren't many weeks when their efforts went unrewarded. But since they had different ideas of what constituted a find, the crates in the back of the car were frequently packed with an egalitarian mix of Georgian leadcrystal, broken china horses patched with Araldite, Victorian linens, toy tractors, almost complete Worcester dinner services and plastic frogs that made a rude noise when squeezed. Paddy Farrell, now nearly seven, had inherited her father's kindness and her mother's determination but neither of them admitted responsibility for her sense of humour.
    With the boss and her car on the road, Daniel was left to his own devices. Brodie had made it clear that, barring emergencies, she didn't expect him to work weekends, but actually he had nothing better to do. He walked up Fisher Hill to pay a visit to Edith Timoney. He didn't yet know enough about antiques to risk buying much on his own, even with Brodie's list of watch-out-fors to guide him. But he could scrutinise the stock and report on it when he saw Brodie this evening. If there was anything promising he thought Miss Timoney would put it under the counter for him. Miss Timoney liked Daniel.
    Daniel liked Miss Timoney too. He liked her honesty. In these days when every plaster duck was a Faberge swan, Dimmock had antique shops, antique fayres and even an antiques emporium, but Miss Timoney's at the top of Fisher Hill was the only honest-to-God junk-shop left. The fact that, in an uncharacteristic moment of trying to move upmarket, she'd had the words
Ye Olde Junk Shoppe
written in a curly cod-medieval script over the top of the cobwebbed windows only endeared her to him more.
    The dirty windows might have been a clever business ploy – it was impossible to see through them, if you wanted to know what she had for sale you had to go inside, at which point she considered you fair game. But they also made itimpossible to see who else was in the shop, so opening the door was a little like opening Pandora's Box.
    Today what came out as Daniel was going in was Noah Selkirk.
    The thing about a black eye is, it's impossible for people to look at anything else. They try not to stare, then they worry that by ignoring the patently obvious they're actually drawing attention to it, then they avoid the issue entirely by being somewhere else. Usually; normal people.
    Daniel's eyes widened behind his thick glasses. ‘Good grief, Noah, where did you get the shiner?’
    The boy reddened and wouldn't look at him. He mumbled something about a swing.
    ‘Somebody took a swing at you?’ said Daniel, astonished.
    Unseen behind the dirty glass, a woman was following the boy onto the pavement. Not Miss Timoney; not by any means Miss Timoney. A woman in her late thirties with a mane of curly ash-blonde hair just about tamed in a rough chignon – which, as Daniel would have known had he known more about women, took much longer to achieve than a perfect one because the escaping tendrils didn't fall into that charming