Cold Pursuit Read Online Free PDF

outstanding?’ Fran inquired, eyes wide open. ‘I’m afraid I don’t do American Express.’
    ‘So what brings such a senior officer in the flesh?’ In his pink and white baby-face, his eyes, dark as his carefully tousled hair, narrowed perceptibly. He might have been in his late thirties, or well-preserved forties.
    Uninvited, she sat. Perhaps he was grateful – their difference in height was less obvious, and not every male ego liked being seven or eight inches shorter than his interlocutor. ‘The excellent research your people have been doing on the sex assault cases.’
    ‘Doing your job for you, eh?’ He sat too, spreading his pudgy hands over an incipient paunch, as if he were a provincial Citizen Kane.
    ‘Absolutely.’ She kept her face straight. ‘That sort of coverage really reaches the public consciousness in a way we couldn’t hope to do.’
    He was too bright to smirk. ‘But?’ he demanded.
    ‘But that sort of power carries responsibilities, Mr Venn. All that stuff last night about people keeping their teenagers at home, not letting their children go to school – tell me, do you know something we don’t, or are you making a story where there isn’t one?’
    ‘We only report the story as it comes to us, Chief Superintendent. If we hear mothers crying because their daughters have been raped—’
    ‘My God, it’s come to that, has it?’ she asked seriously. ‘Where’s the victim been taken?’
    ‘You know what I mean,’ he said pettishly.
    ‘What’s your background, Mr Venn?’ She continued calmly, ‘You see, I’ve never met a TV journalist who invented stories to raise his profile. The red tops, yes. But I can’t see how spreading needless alarm throughout Kent is going to do anyone any good. It certainly won’t help us stop these crimes, and may make our job of finding the perpetrator more difficult.’
    Damn it, he pounced. ‘You think it’s just one man, do you?’
    ‘Whatever I may think is currently immaterial. What my colleagues and I need is evidence we can – and will – work on. I’m not a woman for theories, Mr Venn. I like facts.’
    He produced a sudden impish smile, not wholly attractive. ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Gradgrind!’
    Touché! She would have loved to ask if his Hardyesque name was genuine, but preferred to seize the moment. ‘I’m afraid the majority of your viewers wouldn’t recognise your allusion – even if it went national. But only TVInvicta carried last night’s story: the national network wouldn’t touch it. Why do you think that was, Mr Venn?’ she asked, her voice still eminently reasonable.
    He shrugged. ‘They had another story! It’s not every day you get a cabinet minister caught with his trousers down. They spent a lot of time on that.’
    ‘So they did. It’s a good job really – we wouldn’t want the good burghers of Bridgewater, Bolton and Birmingham getting the impression that we’ve got Jack the Ripper cavorting round Kent, would we? To be serious, Mr Venn, what you did last night was dangerous. You created a whole fabric of non-information and made one of our most capable officers look a fool because she could say nothing new or useful. Come on, if you were a concerned parent would you believe that a distressed scarecrow, badly lit and with a poor mike, could trace your child’s assailant?’
    ‘I’m not responsible for some woman’s bad hair day.’
    ‘Of course not. But when Detective Chief Inspector Tanner offered your colleagues the use of a perfectly good room, they insisted on the outside location. And lit her so that she looked like a Hallowe’en pumpkin and fastened her mike the far side of a wind farm. I presume,’ she prompted him, ‘that that was an editorial decision, not just some artistic whim on the part of a cub reporter?’
    ‘I rely absolutely on the discretion of the reporter,’ he said.
    ‘Just as I rely absolutely on the ability of my DCI. How nice our views of our junior