Dawn was breaking as Karen Hardwick sat in her tiny kitchen, Oliver lying against her chest. The smell of his warm skin mingled with the scent of his freshly laundered Baby-gro. She took a sip of her tea. The letter from the university sat on the table. She cursed herself again for leaving it out in plain sight when her parents had come around the previous day. She hadn’t even folded it up, so she couldn’t accuse her mother of snooping when she’d read it and then passed it to her father.
They had been hurt that she’d not told them about the interview, and even more distressed when they realized that she must have told Gary’s parents where she was going. Karen had had no choice. Gary’s parents were her only links to Nottingham and so they had wanted to know why she was leaving Oliver in their care for the day and going into Nottingham dressed in her best suit. She’d downplayed the importance of the visit, but they hadn’t been fooled.
Her mother had been upset when she realized that if Karen did accept the studentship, not only would she definitely not be coming back to stay in her grandmother’s old flat, she would also be moving even further away from them than she was now.
And then there was the complex range of emotions that the previous day had awakened in her.
Revisiting Middlesbury CID had been hard. The team had moved on; she understood that, but she feared that her return had reopened old wounds. Colleagues that she hadn’t seen since the funeral had approached her, although none seemed quite sure what to say. The table in the corner of the canteen where she and Gary had eaten lunch had been taken over by a group of uniformed constables, none of whom she recognized, although of course they all knew who she was; she could tell by the way their conversation became stilted as she walked past. Would that ever change? Would she always be ‘poor Karen Hardwick’ the woman whose fiancé was killed on duty; who heard every detail of his sudden death as she spoke to him on his mobile phone?
And what about the people she would be working with every day? Even aside from the influx of seconded officers working on their current case, the core team had changed. Pymm and Ruskin appeared really nice, but it seemed strange without Tony Sutton. Warren Jones had become less awkward as the day had worn on, but still the station was filled with memories of her and Gary; his ghost seemed to haunt the office the same way that it haunted the flat.
Yet despite everything, she’d felt the pull of the job again. She’d known little about the case beyond what she’d seen in the papers or on the TV, but she soon found herself being sucked into the drama of the investigation. Live video feeds from the interview suites meant that she had experienced the thrill of watching DCI Jones picking apart Silvija Wilson’s story, and her eventual, partial capitulation.
She’d forgotten the surge of adrenalin you experienced when the pieces fell into place; she’d been with Pymm and Richardson when they realized from the photos that ‘Annie’ had been living with the two sisters.
That was what she loved about policing. Could she give that up?
She needed advice, and she could only think of one person she trusted enough to give it to her. She looked at the clock. It was too early to call now, but as soon as it was a decent hour, she’d pick up the phone.
Across town, Warren was glad to be in the office, where he didn’t feel quite so useless. He’d got up early and made both his and Susan’s breakfasts and packed lunches for the day, loaded the dishwasher and the washing machine, and tidied the dining room. But he still couldn’t do anything to help his poor wife, whose retching in the downstairs toilet could clearly be heard over the sound of the kitchen radio. He didn’t envy Susan her morning sickness, but like expectant fathers everywhere he felt guilty that it was a burden borne solely by her.
‘The good news is that we received authorization for a real-time interception of what we assume is the unknown northern man’s mobile, along with the past twelve months’ worth of call logs,’ he started the briefing. ‘Cell-tower location data is being processed as we speak. The bad news is that the phone has been turned off since shortly after it received a call from Silvija Wilson’s business phone on the day of the murder, so we can’t use it to track the phone in real-time.’
Although disappointing, few in the room had expected locating Northern Man to be that easy.
‘In better news, the phone called Wilson’s business phone every couple of weeks, which would fit with the pattern of visits that Joey McGhee claims to have observed. She rarely called him. Furthermore, the phone also called Stevie Cullen’s phone.’
The mood in the room shifted immediately.
‘This now links Wilson, Cullen and Northern Man together. We will need to figure out just what that relationship is. And in even better news, we know where Annie was going on the train.’
‘She, or rather Silvija Wilson, bought a one-way ticket to Manchester Piccadilly,’ said Rachel Pymm.
‘Do you know what route she took?’ asked Martinez.
‘There are two choices from there. Down to London Kings Cross, take the underground to London Euston, then direct to Manchester Piccadilly.’
‘That’s assuming that she even went all the way,’ said Martinez. ‘She could have got cold feet and disappeared into London and ditched her connection.’
‘Don’t forget all the other stops on the way,’ said Grimshaw. ‘She could have jumped the barriers at any of those stations and done a runner.’
Pymm clicked her mouse, shifting the display on the main screen. ‘That’s eleven stations on the way to Kings Cross, and five more from Euston to Manchester Piccadilly.’
‘What about the other route?’ asked Warren.
‘That one’s not much better,’ said Pymm. ‘Five stops to Stevenage, another stop between there and Doncaster, then three more stops to Manchester Piccadilly.’
‘Well until we know what route she took, we’ll hold off informing British Transport Police. They’re not going to be impressed if we ask them to trawl the CCTV footage of all the stations and it turns out she didn’t even go through them. Anything back from Mags’ team on the CCTV at Middlesbury station?’ asked Warren.
‘I just sent them the departure times for those trains; that should narrow down the possibilities.’
‘Keep us posted.’
Back to waiting.