Jane shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about that, but—’

‘Didn’t think so!’

She closed the door smartly and relocked it.

‘I thought the way she treated you was obnoxious,’ Jane remarked as they walked towards the stairwell.

‘She probably thinks it was a black person who tried to break into her flat. She’s not going to trust a black policeman to catch him, I guess. You just have to ignore it.’

‘But you shouldn’t have to ignore it.’

‘It depends on the situation – dealing with a witness and making an arrest are very different. If you want to keep a witness on side, you need to be nice to them whether you like it or not. When you’re nicking someone you control them – whether they like it or not.’ He grinned.

‘Well, at least we found out where Emma works and I can go to the Co-op this afternoon.’

He pointed to the damage on the old woman’s door.

‘Bit strange this flat and most of the others have boot and jemmy marks on them . . . but there’s not a mark on number sixty-eight.’

Jane hadn’t noticed. ‘Maybe it did and it’s a replacement door.’

‘From the lack of detail in the report the duty sergeant didn’t seem that enthusiastic about what Emma Wilson had to say. This whole thing about her hearing men in a cafe talking about a robbery is beginning to sound like a load of crap to me.’

‘It could be – but the only way I’m going to find out is by speaking to her face to face today, or Murphy will be on my back again,’ said Jane with a sigh.

Chapter Fourteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Cam dropped Jane off by her car and left with Teflon to get the PCs’ statements. She was looking in her A-Z when she saw a woman pushing a pram along the pavement and asked her if she knew whereabouts in the High Road the Co-op department store was. The woman said it was at the north end, near Tottenham Hotspur’s football ground, which was about a mile away. Unsure what the parking restrictions in the High Road would be, and as it was a reasonably nice day and not too cold, she decided to walk.

The High Road Co-op was a three-storey art deco-style Edwardian department store with a white rendered facade and a prominent square corner tower with Tuscan-style pillars. On the base of the tower there was a square panel with the Co-op logo of intertwined letters: ‘LCS’ for the London Co-operative Society and ‘1930’, signifying the year it opened.