Huss returned to the station at Summertown feeling slightly irritated. She rubbed the small of her back. She’d pulled a muscle there helping her father on the farm and it was really starting to bother her. The first sign of ageing, she thought gloomily. She ran through her emails, checking allocations of the team that worked for her, following up on the arrangements for the Oxford Union debate.
No, we do not require street closures, she angrily wrote to Oxford Council, underlining as she went. This was emphatically not CID work and she felt a surge of resentment towards Templeman for having landed her with it. The problem was, nobody was really all that sure as to what to do with Schneider. They were trying to forestall a crime rather than clear one up.
Yet again, she went over the Hinds’s conundrum in her mind. Had he murdered a man, as seemed the case, or was it something connected to the anarchist group Eleuthera and/ or Al-Akhdaar, as Hinds’s scribbled note to her suggested? Was Georgie Adams connected with Eleuthera or was she just an innocent political protestor? Eleuthera were not a banned organization in the UK, so did it matter anyway?
Presumably Hinds’s hard drive would contain proof of a criminal Eleuthera connection to a plot to kill Schneider.
There was a slight cough and she looked up.
‘Hi, I was thinking about that memory stick. Could I have another look at it?’ Evan was wearing a tie-dye Grateful Dead T-shirt today and an apologetic expression.
‘Sure, Evan,’ said Huss, cheering up at the sight of him. ‘Do you think you might be in with a chance?’
It was typical of life, she thought, that now she would very soon have access to gigabytes of Marcus’s data, in the form of his hard drive, it seemed likely that Evan might be able to restore the content of the memory stick to a readable format.
‘Yeah, well, I was kind of rushed off my feet yesterday and there are a couple of things I could try. No promises, mind you.’ He looked suitably apologetic.
‘No pressure, someone’s giving me Hinds’s external hard drive tonight anyway, but if you wouldn’t mind having another go.’
‘That’d be fine, Melinda, just bring it down to me whenever.’ He stood there fiddling with the evil eye bracelet that he wore on his wrist. The stylized white eye on the blue glass bead stared at her glassily.
‘I’ve been feeling kind of guilty about giving you the brush-off on that, sorry.’
She smiled and watched him as he wandered off. She had a bit of a soft spot for Evan, as did one or two other women at the station. He was quite good-looking in a slightly effeminate way.
It was about nine o’clock that Huss got the news. She was in the canteen when DI Ed Worth, one of her favourite colleagues, came up to her looking worried.
‘Thank God, you’re still here, Melinda. There’s been an almighty fuck-up. I can’t find the duty officer and there’s been a serious incident called in, I’ve got two cars responding. Fire and ambulance are on the scene but could you get down there and hold the fort until Harry deigns to put in an appearance?’ Worth was temperamentally a bit of an old woman, thought Huss. Right now he looked so nervous he might throw up.
‘Templeman will do his nut,’ he added, miserably.
‘Sure,’ said Huss, on her feet and moving to go and get her coat. ‘I’m on my way.’
Worth visibly brightened up now Huss had taken charge. Not only was he secretly in love with her, a condition he’d managed to conceal for about three years, he had a great deal of respect for her judgement. He was not a man born for leadership and, to his credit, he knew it.
They strode through the practically deserted station, just the skeleton evening shift on duty.
‘What’s it all about?’ she asked as they pounded along the blue carpet that ran throughout the place.
‘There’s a body on fire,’ said Worth. ‘A jogger called it in. Thought at first it was something to do with Hallowe’en. Up by the university parks near Jericho, off Wilson Road.’
A horrible sense of dread started to rise within Huss. ‘Wilson Road?’
They had reached the big glass door to the car park. Ed Worth hit the button and the door swung slowly open. They walked towards Huss’s Polo. It was a cold night and their breath steamed in the air under the brilliant floodlights of the car park. The razor wire on top of the walls glinted menacingly.
‘One of the uniforms said it was that old tramp woman you see around there quite often. Really nasty, someone seems to have doused her with petrol and—’
Huss yanked open her car door, her face furious. ‘Tell them I’m on my way.’
Worth watched her drive away. In the five years he had known her, he had never seen her look so upset.
He wondered what was going on.