So maybe best no’ to pay a visit.
Roberta backtracked down the corridor to the lifts, then up a couple of floors, along a squeaky corridor lined with questionable art, and left into another ward. The nurses on station were all sitting drinking tea and reading dirty novels.
She rapped on the desk and a thin birdy one looked up from Fifty Shades of Anti-Feminist Smut. ‘Aye?’
‘Kenny Milne.’ Roberta flashed her warrant card.’
A larger nurse put down The Story of O. ‘He’s sedated. Strictly no visitors. It’s disgraceful how much police brutality that poor man’s suffered. Violence solves nothing!’
‘Says the woman getting all hot and bothered reading about BDSM.’
Her nose came up. ‘It’s called a book club, thank you very much! Some people are interested in literature.’
‘Dirty nurses!’ Roberta wagged a finger at them, then turned, sauntering from the room, singing:
‘Whips and chains excite me,
They make my love life spicy,
We spank both hard and lightly,
And dream of Aphrodite,
Spreading jam on Keira Knightley...’
Roberta frowned at the form on her computer screen. Who the hell came up with this rubbish? Just because one little officer had been bashed on the head and hospitalised for the night, suddenly three tons of sodding paperwork needed filling out.
□ Did you do a risk assessment?
□ Did you appraise the chain of command before commencing operations?
□ Did everyone present sign the appropriate warrants before it/they were executed?
Presumably they were talking about the warrants there, no’ the people.
□ Did you enter all command decisions into your Decision Log?
And of course they were all yes/no tick boxes so you couldn’t even type ‘SOD OFF!’ into them.
Bloody Tufty and his delicate useless head.
Bet he did it on purpose, just to make more work for her.
See when she got her hands on him tomorrow—
Someone knocked on the door.
Pause. One. Two. Three. Four...
For God’s sake.
Roberta took a deep breath and bellowed it out, ‘WELL? DON’T JUST STAND THERE LIKE A NEEP, COME IN!’
The door opened and a rather sexy young hottie stepped into the CID office. Pert. Fresh. Browny-blonde hair all the way down to the perky swell of her gorgeous breasts. Naughty-librarian glasses, and I’ve-been-a-bad-girl-spank-me smile. Dressed in a PC’s black T-shirt and standard-issue itchy black trousers.
Come in, my precious, let me relieve you of those nasty itchy things.
The delicious perky wee constable blinked at her. ‘Sorry, did you say something?’
‘No’ out loud, I hope.’ Roberta slid her keyboard to one side. ‘Now, what can I do to you?’
She checked her notebook. ‘I was looking for Detective Constable Quirrel?’
‘Oh, were you now.’ Disappointing. ‘And what do you want our wee Tufty for? He’s no’ got you in the family way, has he? He’s a scamp that one.’
Was that a blush? It was.
Roberta settled back in her seat. ‘Of course it’s my fault really: kept meaning to have him fixed, but you know what they’re like at that age.’ A shrug. ‘We’d definitely have to make him wear the Cone of Shame, though. He’d have his stitches out otherwise.’
‘No! No. I mean... no, it was...’ She took a couple of breaths to compose herself. It made exciting things happen underneath her T-shirt. ‘He came past earlier with a Yorkshire terrier’s remains. Wanted to know if there was some way to get Pudding a proper burial...’ Frowning just made her sexier. ‘What? Why are you smiling at me?’
Roberta shrugged. ‘He asked you that?’
‘He said the old lady who owned Pudding couldn’t afford a funeral.’
OK, so Tufty was a pain in the backside, an idiot, and a total waste of skin, but organising a burial for Mrs Galloway’s poor wee dog? Right now Roberta could’ve kissed him. She held a hand out. ‘Detective Sergeant Roberta Steel. You’ll have heard rumours of my sexual prowess.’ A wink. ‘Tufty’s no’ here right now, but you can leave a message after the beep.’
‘Right. Well. Detective Sergeant Steel.’ The blush deepened a couple of shades. ‘When Constable Quirrel gets back, can you tell him that PC Mackintosh came past about Pudding? I’m the Wildlife Crime Officer.’
Roberta grinned at her. ‘And does the lovely PC Mackintosh have a first name?’
The blush went nuclear. ‘Kate.’
‘Don’t worry, Kate, I shall make sure Constable Quirrel gets your message first thing tomorrow.’
‘Thank you, Sergeant.’ Then for some bizarre reason she did a proper about-face turn and marched from the room, back straight, arms swinging as if she was back on the parade ground at Tulliallan.
Nice bum too.
Before she’d managed to close the door behind her, Roberta launched into, ‘Kate and Tufty, sitting in a tree, H.U.M.P.I.N.G.’
Ah young love...
The cursor blinked at her on the computer screen.
Should really get back to those forms.
Nah, sod that. It was half six on a balmy Tuesday in Aberdeen. Time to go home, crack out the barbecue, get Susan a bit squiffy on sauvignon blanc and take advantage of her.
There’d be time for crappy paperwork tomorrow.
Chapter Four
in which Roberta learns an Important Lesson
About Friendship and we meet a lawyer
I
Sunlight washed in through the French doors, making the kitchen work surface gleam like an oiled stripper.
Susan took a sheet of paper and pinned it to the fridge door amongst all the other kids’ pictures: frogs, princesses, unicorns, dragons, and monster trucks. All of which looked as if they’d been done during Picasso’s Off His Face period. The new one was some sort of dinosaur/unicorn hybrid wearing a pirate hat.
She still had a lovely arse — Susan, no’ the dinosaur — firm and round and spankable. The kind of bum you could really sink your teeth into. The rest of her wasn’t bad either. A curvier Doris Day in her heyday, wearing a sundress covered in little pink flowers. Shame about the Crocs, though.
The perpetrator of the fridge’s latest artistic travesty was sitting at the breakfast bar, shovelling cornflakes into her gob and swilling down the orange juice. Her wee sister, on the other hand, wheeched round and round the floor with a toy truck, making roaring noises.
The toast went chlack! and Susan fished it out. Dumped both slices on a plate. ‘Come on, Robbie, it wouldn’t kill you to speak to the man.’
Roberta took hold of the litter tray and gave it a shake, evening out the wooden pellets and making dark things rise from the depths. She scooped them out with a plastic bag. Held it up for the world to see. ‘Oh look, Mr Rumpole’s made a little Logan McRae! Isn’t that clever? Looks just like him.’
‘The girls need to see their father.’
The turd went in the bin, and her hands went under the tap. ‘Am I stopping them?’
‘I’m serious.’
‘And I’m late.’ She kissed Jasmine on the head—
‘Gerroffus, Mum.’