THE CID OFFICE on the ground floor of the new police station in Highbridge was practically dead when Kate pushed through the double doors at just on ten o’clock in the morning after wasting half an hour on the telephone cancelling her stolen credit cards.
‘An incident room’s been opened on the top floor,’ Dick Stacey, the grim-faced office manager, snapped as she walked into the room. ‘Briefing in five minutes.’
He hardly raised his eyes from his desk as he spoke and there was no warmth in his tone, no sign of sympathy in his expression.
Tight-lipped, she headed for the stairs and the hubbub of conversation that penetrated even the thick glass of the door on the landing, feeling a bit like a convicted criminal about to walk into court to be sentenced.
The man in the rumpled suit overhauled her halfway up with a shouted, ‘Kate!’ Detective Constable Hayden Lewis was the oddball of the department, his public school background and old-world courtesy setting him apart from the rest of his more streetwise colleagues, who regarded him with tolerant amusement. Yet he had looked after Kate ever since her arrival and, while he had not so far managed to pluck up the courage to tell her so, his affection for her was common knowledge. The stars in his hazel eyes now clouded over, however, as he studied her from under the mop of unruly flaxen hair that tumbled over his ears and forehead like an uncut hedge.
‘You shouldn’t be here, you know,’ he admonished gently, ‘not after what you’ve been through.’
Her bottom lip trembled and he grabbed her in a sympathetic bear hug, ignoring her tears flooding into the collar of his threadbare shirt.
‘I can’t believe it,’ she choked, ‘I just can’t believe it.’
He prised himself free, suddenly looking awkward. ‘Listen, Kate,’ he went on, ‘it might be better if you kept out of the briefing – you know, took a back seat for a while.’
She dried her eyes, moving to one side as two uniformed officers approached, obviously heading for the incident room. ‘But surely I’m a key witness?’ she said, meeting a searching gaze from one of the policemen as he opened the landing door. ‘I – I saw the whole thing.’
Lewis looked uncomfortable. ‘Kate, there’s like – er – rumours going round; you know the sort of thing. Might be best if you spoke to the DCI before going in there.’
‘What sort of rumours?’ Suddenly there was anger in Kate’s blue eyes. ‘Rumours about me – is that what you’re saying?’
Lewis hesitated. ‘People are very upset, Kate. You have to understand that Andy Seldon in particular was a popular bloke.’
The tears were coming again as Kate fought to control her emotions. ‘He was popular with me too, Hayden,’ she whispered. ‘And I nearly died with him on that job.’
He patted her arm. ‘I know that, old girl, but there are those on the department who – well – are questioning exactly what happened and why, er—’
‘Why I survived? Is that what you’re trying to say?’
But Lewis didn’t get the chance to respond.
‘Ah, Kate,’ DCI Callow purred from behind her. ‘In early, I see.’
Lewis made a grimace and, nodding towards Callow with a quick ‘Morning ma’am,’ he headed on up the stairs and disappeared through the landing door.
‘I was going to the briefing,’ Kate said, her voice now cold and brittle.
The DCI shook her head. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, Kate. Not after all you’ve been through. You told me enough about the hit for the incident room team to be briefed and Detective Superintendent Davey, who has just been appointed Senior Investigating Officer, wants to see you anyway as soon as he’s finished at the briefing.’ She gave a cobra-like smile. ‘Why don’t you make yourself a cup of coffee downstairs while you’re waiting?’
The office manager was elsewhere when Kate returned to the general office, but the kettle on its tray by the window was already boiling, suggesting he couldn’t be far away. She poured herself a black coffee with trembling hands and slumped into the swivel chair at her desk, taking occasional gulps as her mind turned itself inside out.
What was happening to her was like a nightmare. First the horrific murder of Andy Seldon and Alf Cross, then the finger of suspicion pointed at her for absolutely no valid reason at all as far as she could see. And on top of it all, another serious problem arising with her own twin sister, Linda, which had the potential to jeopardize her very career.
In an effort to control her rising panic, she forced Linda from her mind and concentrated instead on the cold-blooded crime that had just been committed – desperately trying to override her emotions and look at things in the clinical deductive way she had been taught.
Why on earth would Terry Duval waste two policemen? It didn’t make sense. OK, so as Roz Callow had already pointed out, he did have the motive, drove a Land Rover Defender and had the knowledge and previous where explosives were concerned, which certainly put him in the frame. Furthermore, he had quite a history of violence.
A former quarry blaster, he had suffered a severe beating at the hands of a group of young farmers after forming a sexual relationship with a local sixteen year old boy and had retaliated by using his technical skills to booby-trap each of the cars of his assailants with an incendiary device. One lad had nearly died and two others had suffered multiple injuries, earning him six years in Broadmoor. The spate of farm fires had started within months of his release and his MO was certainly all over them: a timed incendiary device magnetically attached to a tractor or car parked in a barn or other outbuilding in the early hours of the morning, then triggered electronically from somewhere close by – and on two occasions a Land Rover Defender seen driving away from the scene immediately afterwards.
It all fitted nicely together, but what still didn’t fit in her mind was why Duval had targeted the police Transit. He must have known that murdering the surveillance team would not halt the operation – only bring down even greater heat on him – so there had to be more to the appalling crime than was immediately obvious, but what, that was the point?
Reaching across to Andy Seldon’s desk, which backed on to her own, she picked up the buff folder labelled ‘Operation Firetrap’, remembering with a faint bitter smile Alf Cross’s disparaging comments about the whole exercise.
Terry Duval’s photograph stared back at her from the copy of his criminal record file; the square, robot-like face, sparse black hair and half-closed eyes indelibly etched on her memory from detailed pre-surveillance scrutiny.
She knew without having to re-check his file that he was a 42-year-old loner, who had lived with his mother in her cottage on the Levels until her death a year ago – ironically as a result of an accident with a farm tractor shortly after he had been released from Broadmoor. No wonder, given his history, that he had a thing about farms. He was currently unemployed and receiving the usual social security benefits. As far as she knew, he had no surviving relatives and nowhere to go except his cottage, yet he had managed to disappear somewhere and she suspected that finding him was not going to be that easy, especially as he still had his wheels.
Then she started and stared at the file again, the photograph of the Land Rover he was known to be using jumping out at her. She studied it more closely. A green hard-top Defender? She thought back to the incident. Surely the vehicle she had clocked at the crime scene had been grey? Could be mistaken, of course – after all, it had been dark at the time – but something else did not seem quite right either. In her exhausted state, she couldn’t at first make out what it was, but then suddenly it dawned on her. The Land Rover she had glimpsed at the murder scene had been fitted with a snorkel, whereas the one in the photograph before her had no snorkel at all. Now that was interesting. Either Duval had two Land Rovers or maybe – just maybe – the Land Rover she had spotted on the drove was not his at all, which suggested he might not have been the killer in the first place.
With a frown, she dumped the file back on the desk, just as Stacey shuffled back into the office carrying a carton of computer printer paper.
He threw her a swift searching glance. ‘Told you the briefing’s upstairs,’ he snapped.
‘I’ve been excluded, Dick,’ she retorted. ‘Any idea why?’
He shrugged and bent over the office printer, turning his back on her – probably to hide his embarrassment. ‘Nothing to do with me,’ he said. ‘I’m only a bloody civvy.’ He hesitated and cast her another sidelong glance. ‘If I were you though, I’d watch my back,’ he added and shuffled from the room again, leaving her staring after him with even greater unease.
Detective Superintendent Steve Davey was one of the new breed of senior police officers and a far cry from the rough, chain-smoking, heavy drinking ‘guv’nors’ of the past. Unlike most of the old guard who had cut their teeth on service in the military, he had not so much as sniffed an army barrack block – only private school and university. As a result, instead of a campaign medal, he had gained a first-class honours degree in psychology, enabling him to join the force on the fast-track graduate entry scheme and make superintendent in just ten years.
An attractive, immaculately groomed 36-year-old, with a shock of strikingly unusual white hair, lazy blue eyes and a designer tan to go with his designer smile, he might easily have stepped out of the pages of a romantic Mills & Boon novel; exuding the confidence and charisma that would ultimately guarantee him a ticket to the top echelons of the service. This outward charm, however, concealed a shrewd analytical mind and a ruthless sense of purpose that had earned him the nickname ‘Jaws’, and Kate was instinctively wary of him when he breezed into the room an hour later, inviting her to join him and Roz Callow in the DCI’s office ‘for a debrief’.
Her caution proved well-founded too. Following the opening formalities, including just the right amount of arm-patting concern over all that she had been through, he cut to the chase with the aplomb of the true professional. His questions followed much the same line as those of Roz Callow – who sat on the edge of the windowsill behind Kate throughout the whole of the so-called debrief, studying her with undisguised hostility – but they were put in a much more subtle way and probed a lot deeper into the incident and Kate’s involvement in it. For all his smiles and empathetic nods, there was a hard glint at the back of Davey’s lazy blue eyes and Kate was left feeling drained and for some reason laden with guilt at the end of it all.
When she pointed out that the Land Rover she had seen at the crime scene did not match the vehicle Duval was known to drive and suggested that the killer might therefore not be Duval after all, Davey’s benevolent mask slipped even more. It was apparent that he had already made up his mind about the identity of the culprit and didn’t want anything to interfere with his preconceptions or prolong what he saw as an open and shut inquiry. As a result, he immediately cut her short, dismissing her suspicions out of hand and leaving Callow to reduce her to shocked silence by blatantly questioning the motives behind her defence of a ‘wanted criminal’.
Davey’s parting words, as he stood up to go did not help her dismembered spirits either. ‘You seem to have been through an awful lot, Kate,’ he said, treating her to another of his patronizing smiles, ‘so I think it would be a good idea if you took a few days off now to recover.’
She swallowed hard and shook her head. ‘I’m fine, thank you, sir,’ she said, ‘and I want to see this inquiry through.’
He shook his head firmly. ‘Sorry, that’s out of the question.’
‘But – but I’m a key witness.’
‘That’s exactly why you should not be part of the inquiry.’
She clenched her hands in her lap, her body tense. ‘Are you suspending me, sir?’
He frowned. ‘Don’t be silly, Kate. Why would I want to do that?’
She threw a swift accusing glance at Callow, noting with a sense of rising frustration the satisfied smirk on the hard, sallow face. ‘Sir, I have to stay with this inquiry,’ she persisted, doing her best to keep her emotions in check, but unable to prevent the tears welling in her eyes and creating tiny rivulets down her cheeks. ‘I need to do my bit.’
There was a tic of irritation at the corner of Davey’s mouth now. ‘I think I’ve made the position clear enough, Kate,’ he admonished. ‘The answer is no. You’ll just have to accept that.’
Callow brushed against Kate as she followed her boss out the door. ‘Try your hand at knitting,’ she murmured close to her ear. ‘Very therapeutic, I’m told.’
Kate sat there for several minutes after Davey and Callow had left, staring unseeing into the building’s rear yard where both uniformed and plainclothes officers constantly moved to and fro between the back door and the jumble of untidily parked vehicles. The set-up of the incident room would be in full swing by now – with desks hauled into place, banks of computers and photocopying machines plugged in and tested, cork and whiteboards erected for the eventual accommodation of briefing notes and SOCO photographs, and the ubiquitous coffee machines positioned in convenient corners. All the trappings of a major police inquiry, which she should have been part of, but from which she had been coldly and calculatingly excluded. Bastards!
Just twenty-six years old, she had thought her career in the force was on a roll until now. Selected under the police graduate entry scheme after leaving university with a first-class honours degree in modern languages, she had established an excellent reputation for herself and had been ‘starred’ by the hierarchy at HQ Personnel for future high rank. Even before finishing her two years’ obligatory police probation, she had been attached to CID and within months appointed a temporary detective constable. She had been made substantive in the post a year later, managing to gain a top grade on the junior detective training course, and it had been intimated that she was likely to achieve detective sergeant rank within a further year if she kept her nose clean.
Not bad for a comprehensive schoolgirl from Ilford, whose dysfunctional family and brutal stepfather had provided the impetus for self-improvement as a means of escape. Now, however, everything seemed to be falling apart and, despite all her hard work, she felt that she was in no better position than poor Linda, who had taken the much easier self-indulgent path to destruction.
She had nearly died back there on the Levels – only a weak bladder had saved her – and yet despite all that, she was being treated like some kind of pariah; almost as if she were being held directly responsible for her colleagues’ deaths. It just didn’t make sense – or did it? Her eyes widened and she moistened her lips with her tongue. Maybe they were right and she was responsible? If she had actually done something instead of just crouching there in the bushes watching the Land Rover approach the Transit, she could have prevented the murders. Maybe Andy and Alf would still be alive now if she had acted sooner.
‘Scared, were you?’ Roz Callow’s hateful voice was in her head again and she shuddered. Was that it? Is that why she had done nothing – because she was scared? She shook her head violently as if defending herself before an invisible jury. No, that wasn’t it at all! She’d had no reason to be scared before the explosion. She couldn’t have known what was going to happen – and anyway, Andy had told her to stay down. As for running from the scene afterwards, yes, she fully accepted she had been scared then – who wouldn’t have been when faced with a killer twice their size, with no possibility of backup and no means of defending themselves?
She ran her fingers through her hair, trembling fitfully. Why the hell was she seeking to justify her conduct to herself? It was all nonsense, a suggestion the DCI had implanted in her brain when she had interviewed her at the scene. Good grief, she was almost starting to believe it herself. What was wrong with her? She had to get away from this place before she flipped completely.
Dumping her radio on to the desk (she couldn’t hang on to that if she was no longer working) she stumbled through the back door of the building, blinking in the fragile strands of sunlight probing the walled yard where she had parked her MX5. She was so wrapped up in her misery that she failed to notice the stocky man in the pork pie hat and rumpled grey overcoat who had just clambered out from behind the wheel of his old Honda Civic. But she soon became aware of him when he shouted after her, ‘Oi! And where do you think you’re off to, Hamblin?’
She half-turned, meeting the gaze of hard brown eyes. Detective Inspector Ted Roscoe was DCI Callow’s number two. A bruiser of a man, who rarely smiled, but tended to glare at people from under his thick, bushy brows, the balding ex-boxer with the fearsome Stalin moustache always reminded Kate of a bad-tempered bulldog and, while he was highly respected by his team for his years of experience and straight-talkíng no-nonsense approach to everything, he had earned a bad reputation for himself as a womanizer. Furthermore, as one of the old guard, he had shown himself to be totally out of sync with the ethos of the modern police service. His contempt for fast-track university entrants, whom he often referred to as ‘educated pricks’, was legendary and although Kate had always got on reasonably well with him (probably because she was young and female), she could not forget that he had taken an instant dislike to Andy Seldon, making his life a misery when Seldon refused to back him up following the DI’s assault on a local drug-pusher. She wondered how he felt now that Andy had paid the ultimate price – probably relieved that the DS was out of the picture as far as his forthcoming crown court case was concerned.
‘You’d better ask the guv’nor,’ she threw back over her shoulder and, continuing to her car, hitched up her short skirt to slip behind the wheel As she did so, she couldn’t help giving way to a burst of shaky incredulous laughter when she glimpsed his eyes appraising her long legs. Bloody hell, it was unbelievable. Two dead officers, a major manhunt underway and all Roscoe could think about was checking out her thighs. Now sobbing hysterically, she slammed the gear into first, burning rubber as she skated across the yard and out through the entrance – ignoring the ‘No Exit’ sign and narrowly missing a police traffic motor cyclist turning in.
She could see the traffic man in her rear-view mirror staring after her and half-expected him to gun his powerful machine in pursuit – almost disappointed, in her semi-surreal state, that he didn’t – but, as things turned out, it might have saved her further trauma if he had.