Back at the station, Huss wrote up her actions that she had performed at the crime scene of Elsa’s death prior to McKenzie’s arrival. Phrases flowed into her report:
As Acting Crime Scene Manager I created a common approach path… (see appended)… Inner and outer cordons were established… DI McKenzie to supply further details of personnel and actions undertaken together with Forensic Team…
Memories of Elsa’s fate riffled through her mind. The loud, thrumming noise of the generator brought in to power the lights, the charred bulk of her body. The blackness and fragmentary state of her clothing had made her remains look like a gigantic dead crow. The child’s rhyme ‘four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’ had run through her head. The terrible smell of burning lingering in her nostrils.
Overlaid on these memories, how had Eleuthera found out about her proposed visit to Elsa?
Other memories resurfaced.
Bending over her in the street outside Hinds’s flat, the sight of Georgie Adams at the window. Her beautiful face, pale through the glass above.
Who else had known about the visit? Hanlon.
Hanlon had known she was going to visit Elsa, but Huss, although she didn’t like her, would trust her with her life. And Hanlon was famously close-mouthed.
Darker thoughts.
Evan Collins. He had known. Evan Collins, their overqualified stoner slacker. The one that people said, ‘What is he doing here?’
The one that people said, ‘Oh, he’s so cute.’
Well, Evan Collins wasn’t the only computer expert in the building. He also wasn’t the only man who fancied her either.
Ed Worth was in the other office. He looked up when Huss entered and smiled. He found Melinda Huss incredibly attractive. Tonight she was wearing thick tights, an above-the-knee skirt and a low-cut sweater. Her stocky, buxom form managed somehow to combine chunky sexiness with assertive practicality.
I bet she goes like a train, he thought.
Huss came straight to the point. ‘Can I get access to Evan Collins’s personnel records?’
‘No,’ said Worth. He didn’t ask why she wanted to know, quite frankly he couldn’t care less. His mind whirred, seeking for a way to ingratiate himself with Huss. ‘But I can get his CV for you and that includes his social media data. That lies in a part of personnel that I happen to have the passcode for, rather than the main data.’ He reflected that, although they had changed the system now, it used to be that job applicants’ details were held in a kind of pending file and they never really got moved.
‘That’s brilliant, Ed.’ She smiled at him. I love your chin, he thought, dreamily, his long, strong fingers resting on the keyboard in front of him, feeling the raised indentation on the F key in front of him. Her fingernails were painted blood red.
He shook his head free of his Huss-inspired fantasies and applied himself to the keyboard.
‘Shall I send them to you?’ he asked. Huss shook her head.
‘I’d rather have a hard copy – I don’t want anything showing up on the system.’
Worth nodded. He could see the outline of her bra under the wool of her sweater. If only… he thought… If only. He applied himself to the keyboard in front of him and a minute or so later the printer in the corner whirred into action. Huss went over and retrieved the half-dozen pieces of paper, said her goodbyes to Worth and went back to her desk. Worth closed his eyes. If he concentrated he could just make out a faint memory of her scent lingering on the air of the office. I love you, Melinda Huss, he thought.
A while later she had her answer.
A selection of social media images and posts that someone had idly downloaded when his application to join Thames Valley had been made. Pictures that had then seemed innocuous but now had a very different connotation.
A photo of Collins with James Kettering, the dead man on the stairs.
Another image: Evan Collins and Georgie Adams toasting the camera with cans of cider in Whitehall, Lutyen’s Cenotaph visible in the background.
Say NO to War, Fight Fascism, said their placards.
Evan Collins, another placard, this one ironic given his current job. A cartoon pig, red in the face, huffing in outrage as a superimposed cut-out photo of Karl Marx in a crude collage-style stood in close proximity to its backside: FUCK THE PIGS!
Collins was a member of Eleuthera.