Eoin Miller 02 - Old Gold by Jay Stringer

silly. We both know I’m too young and too female to get the promotion this time around.”
    I nodded. “But filling in like this will be earning you the points you need for next time, when you’re older and less female.” I counted that as a score to me.
    3–1.
    “And really, what you’re asking me to do with Perry is do the right thing by you. You want credit if it goes well, and you want it buried if it goes bad, right?”
    There it was again, and this time there was no missing it, the look passing between us. A warning. I realized it was best to take it and not to push.
    “Well, it’s been fun,” she said, reaching for her phone. “I’ve got appointments. See you soon, Eoin.”
    Just like that she was dismissing me from her office, and I was getting up to leave. How is it that we let women have that power? Maybe it’s a mother thing, I don’t know, or maybe they have some hidden abilities. All I know is that most women can make any man feel like a naughty child with one turn of phrase.
    That’s worth a hat trick, right there.
    4–3 to Laura Miller
.

I felt sheepish.
    I decided the best way to get back at her was to visit our marital home and kick the crap out of something she’d liked. That wasn’t my first order of business, though. The main point of the trip was to go to pick up my savings. I wasn’t raised to trust banks. I was taught to have a roll of cash nearby and a packed suitcase just in case. Even during my marriage, I’d had a bag packed and hidden away.
    As I pulled my car onto the drive and looked at my house, my breath caught in my throat.
    The door was open.
    And Bobby was sitting on the step, waving at me.
    “They broke in, Eoin.”
    “Who? Who broke in?”
    “I don’t know who it was. They were gone when I got here.”
    “When was this?”
    “Last night, when I came looking for you.”
    “Wait, hang on, go over it for me.”
    I was in the house now, checking the hallway. I don’t know what I was expecting to see.
    “I was looking for you last night—”
    “What time was this?”
    “No, it wasn’t that late, would have been about nine, maybe half past. So I was walking past, and I saw the door open, just a little, not wide open like it is now.”
    The kitchen had been trashed; the fittings had been torn off the wall, and the floor was littered with smashed plates. The fridge was unplugged and pulled away from the wall. The sink was full of food and milk, the contents of the fridge all removed from their wrappings and tipped out. My collection of herbs and spices was scattered across the floor, the jars stomped on and smashed. The back door, which opened off the kitchen, was also wide open.
    Someone had done a very thorough job of looking for something. The advantage they had over me was that they knew what they were looking for. Nobody knew about my savings, not even Laura, so it had to be about Mary.
    “So what did you do?” I was in shock over the mess. At least I had Bobby to tell me a few details.
    “Well, I was scared, to be honest,” Bobby said. “I didn’t know who’d done it or if they were still here. So I stood in the doorway for probably ten minutes.”
    “That happens a lot in this situation,” I said. Over the years in the force I’d noticed that people who weren’t used to seeing real crime always seemed shocked when they came face-to-face with it.
    “So then I came in and started looking round,” he said. “I saw what they’d done to the kitchen and went upstairs to take a look.”
    “So whoever it was had left by then, by half nine?”
    “No. I thought they had, but they must have still been in the house. See, remember I said I looked in the kitchen first?”
    I nodded.
    “Well, the back door was closed. When I came back down from upstairs, the back door was open. So they hadstill been in the house when I first came in. I bet they stood and watched me standing in the doorway for ten minutes, staring off into space like a moron.”
    I