Rhys-Morgan stared moodily out of the window, a cup of steaming Assam tea grasped tightly in both hands. He had thought that an old-fashioned stakeout would be nostalgic and fun. The problem with nostalgia was that you cannot necessarily control it, and Ifan was just left thinking of all the stakeouts he had volunteered for when it was clear that his marriage was falling apart. Ironically, it was only thanks to the extra overtime that he had been able to maintain their membership at the golf club where his wife had met Clive.
Thanks to Clive, he’d lost his wife, his house and he could not even show his face at the bloody golf club. He was rubbish at golf but that was hardly the point. The Detective Chief Superintendent liked golf and so Ifan needed to like golf if he was ever going to grease the wheels of promotion. He should be Detective Chief Inspector by now at least, if it was not for Clive.
Ifan sighed. The bloody men’s room attendant. He had not been attentive enough himself, he knew. It was easier to blame Clive, though.
“Everything OK, Guv?” asked Tommie, who was busy dunking a ginger nut into his own mug of English Breakfast tea.
“Hmm?” Ifan snapped out of his depressing deliberations and turned to see the big sergeant’s face wearing an expression of genuine concern. “Sorry, Tommie. I was miles away.”
“Trying to get inside the head of the enemy, Guv?” Tommie asked.
“Something like that, Tommie. Something like that.”
Rhys-Morgan took a big slurp of tea and looked back out of the window. There were not any pubs or curry houses near the pet shop so the street was less active than his sex life. Were stakeouts always this boring?
He looked back at his sergeant, who now held a tea-soaked ginger nut gingerly above his mug and was slowly moving his face towards it, lest the slightest move should cause its structural integrity to fail. Rhys-Morgan could see it bending under the strain and found himself holding his breath as mankind’s struggle against nature was encapsulated for a moment by one man and his McVitie’s biscuit.
Just at the moment that Tommie was about to make the final lunge for his prize, the whole building shook to a loud bang in the distance. With a faint plop, his ginger nut halved its size. As Tommie sat there aghast, mouth still open, staring at the empty space where biscuit heaven had hovered but a moment ago, two dozen car alarms sounded across the city.
He looked up. The two policemen looked at each other wordlessly for a moment, then scrambled as one man for the door.
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