THE LAST WE SAW OF THEM

‘Excuse me,’ he shouted from behind us as we walked through M and S. ‘Excuse me.’
We turned round and moved so he could run between us and say, ‘Thank you.’
‘I thought he was coming for us,’ she said.
‘Yeh,’ I said. ‘I thought he’d say, “is this your tenner?”’
The man ran toward the exit.
‘Must be a shoplifter or an incident,’ I said.
‘Let’s follow him.’
He swerved past a shopper then pushed through the door leading out to the Broadmead precinct. He slowed down, stopped, we were outside as three men walked up to where he stood.
One of the men was dressed the same as the first and he held each of the other two men by an arm. It looked like he’d just got hold of them the way they turned to him then back to the first man who now took one of them from his colleague. He took a carrier bag from, who I now saw was, the older of the men apprehended. He opened it, put his hand in. Said something to the man who said something back. He let the man go, joined his colleague with the younger man who said, ‘What?’ in the way young men do when they’ve been caught doing what they’d shouldn’t.
‘Why’d they let the man go?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe the other one said, “Here hold this,” and gave him the bag when he knew they were after him.’
I tried filming as the younger man was walked off by the two, I assumed, store detectives each holding one of his arms.
They went into Boots and that was the last we saw of them.