Read Riot Act for Free Online Page B

wasn’t anything I could say. I’ve never owned a car, just an elderly Suzuki RGV 250 motorbike. Still, I could understand his distress. If anything happened to the bike it would be like losing a limb.
     
    Suddenly, O’Bryan jerked round to the back of the car, and was staring at the boot lid. The lock had been punched out of it, and the lid itself was partly ajar. He yanked it open fully, looked inside with an anger that turned his already pale features ashen.
     
    “I don’t believe it,” he muttered.
     
    “What?”
     
    “They’ve taken—” he broke off, scrabbling through the debris in the boot with the air of somebody who knows he isn’t going to find what he’s searching for. Finally, he slumped, defeated.
     
    “What is it, Mr O’Bryan?” I asked again, gently. “What’s been taken?”
     
    “What?” He focused on me, distracted. “Oh, my case notes,” he said weakly. “Private stuff, you know, important documents.”
     
    “Would you like me to call the police?”
     
    “No.” He gave a sigh that was almost a snort. “I don’t suppose it would do much good, would it?”
     
    I thought of the kids I’d seen disappearing from the scene of the crime. None of them looked in double figures, let alone old enough to prosecute. “Not if you’re going to spend all your professional time trying to get them off with a caution, no,” I agreed.
     
    O’Bryan’s face dropped suddenly, and I felt ashamed of my unworthy dig.
     
    We went back into the house and I fed him a cup of tea with plenty of sugar in it to help deal with the shock. He recovered enough to borrow the phone to ring his garage to come and cart the remains away. Once that was done, he called himself a taxi, and departed. A sad, harassed little figure, with the weight of the world sitting heavy on his rounded shoulders.
     
    ***
     
    After he’d gone, I rang my mother. Quite a momentous occasion in itself, if truth be told. There was a time when I would have cheerfully chewed off my own hand rather than use it to pick up the receiver and phone home. My, how things change.
     
    I suppose, to be fair, I was never any great shakes as a daughter, even before the disgrace of my court martial, and the endless horrors of my trial.
     
    I lost my father’s interest very early on by dint of surviving my birth when my twin brother failed to do so. My father had fiercely wanted a son to follow him into the medical profession, but the complications that followed my arrival meant that, after me, there were no more children.
     
    I think my mother secretly hoped that I’d turn into one of those girlie girls. It wasn’t her fault that I firmly resisted any attempts to mould me into an ideal daughter. You can take a girl to ballet lessons as much as you like, but you can’t necessarily make her into a ballerina.
     
    It was an accidental discovery on a team-building outward bound course in my late teens that led to my choice of a military career. I found I was physically tougher than I’d realised, and had the natural ability to shoot straight with a consistency that amazed the instructors.
     
    Finally, I’d found something that earned me approval and respect. I’d gone home in triumphant defiance and dropped the news that I was joining up onto my parents with a fearful sense of excitement.
     
    If I was expecting an emotional explosion of atomic proportions I was sadly disappointed.
     
    Now, my mother answered the telephone herself, which saved me having to make polite, if brief, conversation with my father.
     
    “Hi,” I said. “It’s me.”
     
    For a moment there was a silence brought on by surprise. Although I’d made an effort since the winter before to get back on speaking terms with my parents, we were still at the stage where contact from either party brought about a profound discomfiture, just in case either of us said the wrong thing.
     
    “Oh, Charlotte, how lovely to hear from you,” she cried, her voice jerky and