Hit and Run by Cath Staincliffe Page A

reading her emails when she was interrupted by Shap. ‘Boss, you got a minute, it’s about Ian …’
    Still smarting from her encounter with Hackett, Janine felt her temper rise. ‘He should be here – not you,’ she said crisply, ‘tell him to see me himself.’
    ‘But, boss, it’s just … he’s straight as a die, everyone …’
    ‘Shap, I’m not interested in excuses.’
    ‘I just think, given the situation …’
    ‘The situation,’ she said hotly, ‘is that he’s a police officer—’
    Shap interrupted. ‘And his brother died in a hit and run and they never got anyone for it.’
    ‘What?’ Janine stared at him. ‘Oh, God.’ She shook her head and groaned. ‘Where is he?’
    ‘Outside, we’re off to the Topcat now,’ Shap said.
    ‘He knows you’re here?’
    Shap gave a shake of his head.
    ‘He should have told me,’ Janine said. ‘Why the hell didn’t he tell me? None of this might have happened.’
    Shap kept quiet.
    ‘OK,’ she told him by way of dismissal. ‘Shap.’
    He’d reached the door.
    ‘You knew all along?’
    Shap nodded.
    ‘And did you talk to Ian about it, about maybe stepping down from the case?’
    Shap fingered his neck, a sign of discomfort. ‘I tried, he wasn’t having it.’
    ‘How hard did you try?’
    ‘I mentioned it.’ There was a defensive edge in his reply.
    Janine could imagine. A word or two would probably be as far as a heart to heart went with these blokes. Was the younger generation any different? As Shap left, she thought of her son Michael; he wasn’t at ease talking about anything that touched on emotional issues. He’d blush and mumble and generally squirm to be let off the hook. Some commentators now claimed the male brain was wired differently and others took that to mean there was no point in trying to change things. Janine didn’t agree; she understood some of the consequences of emotional illiteracy. The men she most often hunted down could no more express their feelings than they could read and write. Illiterate on all counts.
     
    Janine observed the post-mortem on Jeremy Gleason. Susan told her that the state of Gleason’s head injury indicated a frontal shot from a relatively close distance. The angle of the entry wound suggested that the gun had been fired from above. The bullet had passed through Gleason’s head and had been recovered from the floor of the tunnel. It would be sent to specialist services for identification.
    ‘It fits with the location,’ Janine said. ‘The steps. If someone had fired at him from there.’ She looked at his hands, the nails bitten down to the quick. Stupid not bad, his mother had said before she knew he was dead. Janine had got the same impression: Gleason had none of the guile or belligerence of Lee Stone.
    How had Gleason reacted after the road accident? He had a child himself; had that prompted him to argue with Stone about whether they deny the crime? Or had he gone along with the plan willingly? Perhaps he’d lost his nerve later, after the men had been questioned? If the guilt about Ann-Marie’s death had begun to prey on him, coupled with a fear that the police were onto them, he may have been thinking about confessing. Had Stone cottoned on and decided to save his own skin by silencing Gleason permanently? Or had an argument led to Stone pulling a gun on his friend? At the point where they had been seen leaving the flat – just before the police lost sight of them – there was no sign of coercion or aggression and certainly no weapons drawn.
    ‘Nothing else to write home about,’ Susan told her. ‘Pretty straightforward.’
    ‘Cause of death might be plain,’ Janine said, ‘whodunnit and why is anything but.’
    There was an outside chance that Gleason’s killing was linked to some other criminal activity that the police had yet to uncover. The drugs gangs in the city regularly settled disputes with a bullet. Except nothing ever remained settled. There’d be a drive-by or