“Aye, son,” Ben agreed. He blew into his hand and sniffed it, then fished a packet of Polos out of his pocket. “I suppose it does, at that.”
Ben stood patiently on the other side of the glass, waiting for Moira Corson to look up from the form she was in the process of filling out. He had no idea what the form was, but given the level of concentration she was displaying towards it, he could only assume it was somehow connected to lasting peace in the Middle East.
He cleared his throat for a second time, and gave another tap on the glass.
“I can see you, Detective Inspector. I know you’re there,” Moira said, not looking up. “But unless this is a work-related enquiry, I have nothing to say. Some of us still take our jobs seriously. I know that’s hard to believe in this day and age, but there we are.”
“Eh, aye. Well, maybe it is work-related,” Ben said.
Moira sighed, placed a finger on the paperwork to mark her place, then looked up. “Is it?”
Ben smiled, shrugged, and shook his head all at once. “Well, I mean, no, not exactly, but—”
“Then please move along, Detective Inspector,” Moira said, lowering her head again. “I need to get this paperwork completed in the next seven minutes.”
Ben frowned. “Seven minutes? Why, what’ll happen if you don’t?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“That’s what I said. Nothing,” Moira confirmed. “But that’s when I’m due my afternoon break.”
Without looking, she reached under the desk, then placed a pristine copy of Love It! magazine on the counter between them and slid it through the gap at the bottom of the glass. “Maybe you could go stick the kettle on.”
Ben grinned as he picked up the magazine. He rolled it up, then tapped it against the counter. “Aye,” he said, practically skipping towards the door that would take him back to the rest of the station. “I’m sure I can manage that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Dinky pulled open the door on the third knock, shot a positively filthy look upwards, and spat out the first few words of a sentence demanding to know what the caller thought they were playing at.
It was at this point that he realised he was not looking at a face, as he had expected, and had instead fixed his glare on the chest of a substantially larger than anticipated man.
He took a step back to give him a better angle, rallied quickly, and launched into his tirade with renewed enthusiasm.
“What the hell’s with all the knocking? Didn’t you see the sign?” the little man demanded. “No cold callers. And what have you done to my dog?”
“We’ve done nothing to your dog,” Logan assured him.
“Then how come it’s just standing there and not trying to chew your nuts off? You must’ve done something to him!”
Logan wasn’t sure what the correct term was for describing someone of Dinky’s stature. There had been a training course that had touched on it at some point, he was sure. But then, there had been training courses that had touched on a lot of things over the years, most of which he’d forgotten or ignored.
This had been one of the important ones, though. The polis had been coming under heavy fire for alleged institutional racism, and mandatory training had been brought in as a matter of urgency.
It had been possibly the most patronising hour of Logan’s career, and he was pretty sure the content of the training itself was the most racist thing about it. Logan had asked the higher-ups if they genuinely believed that a forty-five minute training session—fifteen minutes at the end were spent filling out the feedback forms—was going to combat institutional racial bias.
“Fingers crossed!” they’d said. And without a hint of irony, either.
The session had been eighty percent about how to appropriately engage with people of other races and cultures, ten percent about those of other sexual and gender identities, and then a bit at the end that covered—and Logan remembered the quote verbatim—‘any other oddities we might meet out there.’
They had touched on little people then—not literally, it wasn’t that inappropriate a workshop—but all Logan could remember was that ‘midgets’ was unacceptable.
Still, as he’d voiced during the training session, shortly before being threatened with eviction, he’d found that the most effective way of dealing with anyone from any sort of minority group was to ‘treat them like a fucking human being,’ and not get bogged down by any of the other stuff.