“What’s going on?” Rhys-Morgan asked his sergeant as sirens continued to sound in the distance.
The two men had been standing in the street outside the pet shop for a few minutes, trying to ascertain the cause of the earlier catastrophic demise of Tommie’s ginger nut. Judging by the alarms and sirens, something big was going down. Not for the first time that evening, Rhys-Morgan rued his decision to stakeout the pet shop.
The larger man fiddled with his radio. “I can’t work it out, Guv. There’s a lot of chatter on the radio but it’s quite confusing. Some kind of explosion, I think.”
“Well, I guessed that much,” Ifan snapped. “But was it another bomb?”
D.S. Jenkins frowned at the rancour of his boss. It was not his ginger nut that had been so cruelly snatched from his grasp. He was midway through returning the radio to his ear when Rhys-Morgan put a restraining hand on his arm, signalling with his other hand to wait.
“Wha..?” Jenkins began.
Rhys-Morgan raised his hand further, lifting his index as he did so to call for quiet and cocking his head slightly.
Jenkins stopped and listened too. Across town, he could still hear the sound of distant car alarms and the occasional siren from an emergency vehicle. Another noise was building, however, and Tommie had been a policeman too long to ignore the feeling of unease that was building along with it.
It sounded like someone over-revving a van. Tommie opened his mouth to say as much when a squeal of tyres to his right made him spin back round. Sure enough, a small van had just come skidding round the corner, bathing the two policemen in the bright beam of its headlights. Instinctively, Tommie put up his hands to shield his eyes.
“Look out!” cried Rhys-Morgan, pushing Jenkins hard out of the path of the speeding vehicle and sending him sprawling into a pair of wheelie bins outside the Cancer Research charity shop.
Two wheels of the van mounted the pavement and Ifan had only a brief moment to regain his own balance before diving back into the road. As it was, he narrowly missed being run over. The van bumped back down on to the road, swerved a couple of times as the driver tried to regain control and sped off into the night as quickly as it had arrived.
The two policemen slowly rose to their feet.
“Are you OK, Guv?” asked Tommie.
Rhys-Morgan nodded, staring after the two retreating red lights as then rounded a bend out of sight. “Call it in, Tommie. I want that bastard brought it.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Guv.” Tommie held out his radio for the Detective Inspector to inspect. It had taken the full force of Tommie’s fall and a bit too much of its insides were now its outsides. “Did you get the number?”
“No,” Rhys-Morgan replied, rubbing his cheek. “I was too busy using the road to grind my face off. You?”
Tommie shook his head. “It all happened to fast. Do you think he was coming here and then saw us?”
Rhys-Morgan looked at the dark and deserted pet shop and then up at the dark window above the charity shop. “I doubt it. At that speed, I don’t think this was the destination - there was no way it was going to stop. It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t see us at all. I think we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“But you think it’s got something to do with the explosion?” Tommie asked.
“Well, let’s just say that it would be one hell of a coincidence otherwise,” Ifan replied. “And I’m not a big fan of coincidence.” (He had once got Mrs Rhys-Morgan a bottle of Calvin Klein Coincidence for her birthday and found the scent quite cloying.)
The Detective Inspector was still staring up at the window of their stakeout room. He thought that you were supposed to feel euphoria or something after a brush with death. He just felt angry.
“Tommie?” he asked.
“Yes, Guv?”
“Did you turn the camera on?”
Tommie nodded. Stakeout tea was important but D.S. Jenkins was a man of experience and you always turned the camera on first lest you missed something important whilst dunking your biscuits. “Yes, Guv.”
He turned and followed the other man’s gaze. “Do you think it would have caught the van?”
Rhys-Morgan shrugged. “Only one way to find out. Let’s check the footage and head back to the station. I think it’s fair to say that this stakeout is over.”
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