Chapter Thirty-two
A good day to be a crook in Oxford. Looked like Hume had pulled in every copper in the Thames Valley.
Rose had said as much to the rumpled DCI.
‘Bad day to be a fucking serial killer,’ he’d growled back.
Rose had never seen the nick so busy, so buzzing with purpose. Uniform swarmed downstairs, crowded the corridors. There was a strident racket of phones and printers. Bulletins came in every half-hour from the SOCO guys at Luka’s place. Team by team, officer by officer, Hume laid out his trap.
The force was targeting a district of Oxford four miles west of All Souls. A high-impact, rapid-response, low-noise strike on the suspect: that was the plan. Plainclothes were out in force, unmarked surveillance vans covering all approaches to the area. Munro’s FR unit were on standby.
‘A fucking rat couldn’t sneak through the cordon we’ve set up,’ Hume had said with bleak satisfaction.
‘He’s going to be twitchy, guv,’ Phillips had warned.
‘Nah. That sort don’t get twitchy. Too busy wanking over the Book of fucking Deuteronomy or whatever it is he does. Rubbing himself down with chicken blood.’ Hume had looked at Phillips, then at Rose. ‘Everything we can do, we’ve done,’ he’d said. ‘It’s all in place.’
‘We’ll nail him,’ Phillips had agreed.
Rose had nodded, vaguely, unconvinced. She’d envied them their confidence – and it worried her, too. A rat couldn’t sneak through, Hume had said. But the thing was, a rat wouldn’t try. Rats are smarter than you think.
And even if Luka did fall for it, it still might be too late for Matt Brask. David and Katerina had both been killed before they’d been moved to where they’d been found, to their point of the cross. Rose didn’t care whether they took Luka alive or if one of Munro’s boys shot him down in the street; she didn’t give a damn.
But if they lost Matt … she didn’t know what she’d do.
A copper wasn’t supposed to let things get personal. Turn it on, turn it off.
Well, maybe she couldn’t turn it off this time.
Now she sat at her desk, rereading the logs the tech team had compiled from their CCTV sweep. Hume, Phillips and Angler had gone on ahead, out west, to the temporary command centre north of Hutchcomb’s Copse. She’d said she’d join them later – just wanted to check a couple of things.
Rose was glad that Hume and Phillips were on board. And she was thrilled at how quickly Thames Valley had kicked into gear for this. Thing is, when you move that fast you’re likely to miss something. Some detail. And today a detail could mean the difference between Matt living and Matt having his chest lanced by a quiverful of arrows.
The tech guys had earned their overtime on this. Rose knew they had. When she had gone down to the tech suite with Hume’s orders they’d been confident. ‘We’ll find him,’ the team leader had nodded briskly. ‘Don’t worry. We’ve got good visuals, we’ve got his car details. If he’s been out there, any time, anywhere, we’ll have him on camera.’
Rose had been sceptical.
‘These are pretty rural areas,’ she’d said doubtfully. ‘Nothing much but fields, trees and the odd barn. How much CCTV coverage can there be?’
The look the lead tech had given her had been almost pitying. She’d felt two inches tall – no, she’d felt five years old, a naive little girl.
‘CCTV is everywhere,’ the tech told her.
And yet Luka still hadn’t been found.
The tech suite was deserted now. Everyone had been seconded to surveillance, Rose guessed. They’d be rigging up their gear at Hume and Phillips’s temporary HQ out west.
While she loaded up the video files she managed to get Leng, the tech lead, on his mobile. Interrupted him setting up shop in the command centre.
‘He just wasn’t there,’ Leng said, against a faint, humming backdrop of chaotic activity. ‘Simple as that. The car’s registered as on the road; it’s a knackered old blue Renault, and the cameras near his house and work picked him up a few times – we ran a couple of searches to check we weren’t on the wrong track altogether. We’ve got him filling up with petrol, even got him doing thirty-six in a built-up – but nothing in the target sites.’
Not only had they failed to spot Luka out west, Leng told Rose, but as far as the log showed, Luka hadn’t driven anywhere near any of the crime scenes on the dates of the previous murders.
‘Was anyone spotted near the other scenes around the time of the murders?’ Rose asked. She knew she was grasping at straws but it killed her to have so many loose ends when any one of them could make a difference. ‘Any vehicles near the scenes more than you’d expect? Or hanging around at odd hours?’
‘Dozens,’ Leng said bluntly. ‘I’ll mail you the list. But it’s a long one.’
She hung up, grabbed a machine coffee and cued up a few minutes of footage from near the north Oxford site, without much hope, knowing that six guys had burned up hours of overtime scrutinizing these files – she wasn’t going to find anything new.
It was footage from the dashboard cam of a patrol car doing the rounds about closing time, the night before Katerina’s body was found. Probably Ganley and Conners. Rose whizzed forwards, watching the dark streets rush by in double-time. The odd drunk student weaving along the pavement. Pizza-delivery scooters, city taxis. The patrol car was heading out of town. Keeping out of trouble, Rose thought drily. How’d that turn out for you, lads?
On an unlit B-road beyond Summertown, the car passed a white van coming in the other direction. A Citroën Berlingo, newish. The camera clocked it at 29 mph.
Only one sort of van driver does 29 mph at quarter to midnight on an open road, Rose knew: one who’s too pissed to drive legally but sober enough to know he really doesn’t want to get pulled over.
Of course, there were other reasons he might not want to get pulled over. Something dodgy about the van, say.
Or something dodgy in the van.
She rewound the footage. Froze it at the point where the van passed by. No decent visual on the driver: half a white face in the shadow of a low-pulled baseball cap. She made a note of the van’s registration.
It wasn’t much of a lead. Could just’ve been some bloke half a pint over the limit, after all. Or even a decent, law-abiding motorist.
Rose allowed herself a smile at that.
She called up the spreadsheet Leng had sent over and opened it to find thirteen close-spaced pages of vehicle details. She Ctrl+F’ed the van’s registration number.
It was there.
The hair on her neck prickled.
She called through a PNC check on the van.
Registered, the operator told her, with Oxford University Contract Services.
She felt her heart rate quicken, but checked herself. It could be nothing. Twenty-two thousand students kept those guys busy. Throw half a brick anywhere in Oxford and you’ll hit someone who works for the university.
Leng answered his mobile on her third attempt.
‘We’re at full tilt here, ma’am,’ the tech lead said with a hint of impatience.
‘This is – might be – important. I’ll clear it with the DCI, okay? I need you to run another sweep through the plate-recognition log.’
‘Another? We were very thorough, ma’am. That car wasn’t out there.’
‘Not that car. Another one.’ She read off the van’s reg. ‘I don’t need a full report, I just need to know when and where it was last seen. Can you do that?’
‘We can try. But DCI Hume –’
‘Thanks, Leng. I’ll be waiting for your call.’
Rang off. Dug out a number for University Contract Services.
A surly-sounding man answered her call. They’d already had police all over the ruddy place, he told her, resentfully. Causing bother. Upsetting the students. Luka hadn’t been in for a couple of days – he’d already told three different coppers that.
Rose tried to keep her tone civil. Fairly civil.
‘This is a murder investigation, sir. I’m sorry that the Thames Valley Police isn’t prepared to cut corners for your convenience. Now the quicker you give me the answers we need, the quicker we can let you get back to your very important work.’ She took a breath. Easy. ‘What vehicles did Luka have access to out of hours? University vehicles?’
After a sullen pause the man said: ‘Well, most of ’em. He’d only a standard licence, of course – if you can call it a licence, what they get given out there in Poland or wherever – but he could drive any of the transits, Hiluxes, fridge vans, whatever.’
‘At all hours?’
‘He was kitchens. Kitchens work funny times.’
Something he’d said had snagged in Rose’s mind. She rewound.
‘Fridge vans?’
‘Refrigerated vans.’ He said it slowly, like Rose was an idiot. ‘For fetching veg and meat from the suppliers. Now, if you’ve no more questions –’
No more questions, and no time for this. Rose hung up.
Katerina’s core temperature had been way down, hadn’t it? She’d been severely chilled.
Refrigerated.
Her phone buzzed in her hand. Voicemail. Leng had called back with the data from the logs while she’d been talking. Fast work.
‘There’s a recent spot, Inspector.’ The tech lead sounded harassed. Hume must’ve been running them ragged out there. ‘A petrol station in the east of the city – here’s the postcode. Hope it helps.’
Rose ran a quick check.
Yes – yes, it helped.
It pulled everything into focus, narrowed the weird geography of this case to a single point.
It meant that for the first time Rose was one step ahead.
It meant that she could save Brask’s life.
The petrol station was on the same street as the Church of the Queen of Peace. Where Luka went to Mass. Where Katerina went. Where Brask went.
And ten cross-town miles from where Hume, Phillips and the best part of the Thames Valley Police were waiting for their man.