‘Morning, Andy.’
Dwyer peered over his computer screen. ‘Annie. Was just about to give you a call.’
Dwyer was located in an open-plan office almost identical to her own but one floor lower in the building. ‘Stuart told me. I was just heading out, so I thought I’d grab you on my way past.’
‘Always delighted to be grabbed by you, Annie.’ Dwyer was a year or two younger than Annie but had the air of being prematurely middle-aged. He’d obviously been an athletic type once, but was now running slightly to fat, with incipient baldness and jowls. He’d make an ideal Chief Constable one day, she thought. He certainly made no effort to conceal his ambition.
‘You’d better not try that kind of talk with Sheena. She’s been known to castrate a man for less.’
Dwyer looked mildly startled before realising she was joking. ‘That’s really what I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Your fear of castration? Don’t worry. She only does it figuratively.’ She allowed him a smile. ‘Seriously, happy to help you in any way I can. We just want to get this sorted.’
‘Trust me, I’ll pull out all the stops. I just thought it might be helpful to know a bit more about Ms Pearson before I talk to her. In case, there’s any useful background you can give me.’
‘Not sure what I can tell you. I’ve known her for years. We were at uni together. Before she was an MP she was a politics lecturer. She’d always been active in Labour politics, but she never really thought she’d become an MP. The party half-expected her to lose in 2010. She was very different from her predecessor and the majority was getting squeezed.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m just throwing facts at you. Probably not very useful.’
‘It’s helpful just to get a feel for the kind of person she is. I looked her up online but it didn’t tell me too much.’
‘She tends to avoid controversy. Until now, anyway. She’s very driven, conscientious, wants to do the best for her constituents. Takes it seriously.’
‘I don’t share her politics,’ Dwyer said. ‘But we could do with more MPs like that. From what I’ve read, she strikes me as a decent sort.’
‘She’s that all right.’
‘Not sure if I should be asking this, but did it cause any problems? Her becoming an MP while you were a serving officer, I mean.’
‘I got it all cleared through the right channels.’ Annie was conscious that she could sound defensive in responding to questions like this, though she wasn’t sure what she had to be defensive about. ‘Even when she was first elected as a councillor, in fact. Everything we both do is transparent and above board, and we have a kind of “Chinese wall” arrangement on anything political. We just don’t discuss it, in the same way I don’t discuss police business with her. Everybody seems happy with that.’
Dwyer held up his hands. ‘Didn’t mean to imply anything different. I was just curious, that’s all. How’s she taken all this?’
‘As you’d expect, really. Very shaken, but she’s pretty resilient. The main challenge will be to stop her getting straight back to work.’
‘This may be a daft question given her line of work, but do you think there’s anyone who’d have a reason to want to hurt her? She seems to do a fair bit of campaigning.’
‘Well, that’s part of her job. She stirred a bit of a hornets’ nest with her comments, hence the protest outside her office. And like a lot of MPs, particularly female ones, she gets more than her fair share of abusive messages and correspondence.’
‘I’ve seen her social media timelines,’ Dwyer said. ‘Some nasty stuff.’
‘And, in fairness, some very nice stuff. And a lot of the abuse is just from lonely men who get their kicks from trying to scare what they imagine to be a vulnerable female. Most of it you can disregard. The trick is trying to spot the tiny percentage you need to take seriously. But, like I say, Sheena’s not really the provocative type. She speaks out when she feels strongly about something, as she did on the Bulldog thing, but she doesn’t go looking for trouble.’
‘What about last night’s developments?’ Dwyer said. ‘Someone had clearly been into your garden to place those cameras. Have you seen anyone suspicious hanging around?’
‘Not that I can recall. But Sheena and I are out of the place a lot. You know the kind of hours we can work in this job, and Sheena’s down in London for most of the week when Parliament’s sitting. It wouldn’t be difficult or particularly risky for someone to get into the garden. I assume you’ll be speaking to some of the neighbours? There aren’t that many houses around us, but there are one or two neighbours who tend to notice any comings and goings.’
‘We’re on to that. You have any security cameras at the house?’
‘We do, actually. But they’re trained on the front and rear doors, so they wouldn’t pick up anyone who was just in the garden.’
‘Worth checking, though. And we’ll do a search around the garden just in case there are other cameras.’
‘What about the shootings? Are you making any progress with those?’
‘Surprisingly little with yesterday’s, to be honest. I’d assumed we’d pick someone or something up on CCTV. There are plenty of cameras around the hospital site. But our friend seems to have neatly eluded all of them.’
‘Almost as if they knew what they were doing?’
‘Exactly. Looks to me like someone who’d fairly carefully sussed out where the cameras were and did their best to avoid them. I’ve got someone going through the footage for the last few days to see if we can spot anyone acting suspiciously but it’s a long shot. And so far no strong leads from any of the CCTV or other cameras on the surrounding roads, either. My guess is whoever did it was parked discreetly somewhere outside the site, but the main roads round there are busy, so it’s difficult to pick out anything useful. As you know, we issued a warning in the media that the shooter or shooters remain at large, along with an appeal for any information. We’ve had the usual small deluge of calls but there are only a handful of even potentially promising leads.’ He paused. ‘Wish there was more. But it’s early days.’
Or, alternatively, the Golden Hours, she thought. The early days of an investigation when you were most likely to make a breakthrough. It didn’t always work like that, of course. Many cases were cracked simply through long hours and sheer hard work. But it was discouraging to have so few leads at this stage. She knew Dwyer would be leaving nothing to chance but she felt frustration, tinged with fear. ‘What about the previous day’s shooting?’
‘We’re making more progress with that.’ She could see Dwyer visibly relax as they moved on to more comfortable territory. ‘Got some decent CCTV footage of the protestors and we’ve identified a few of them from the system. Small-time thugs, most of them. We’ve also had a couple shopped by their friends or family. So we’re following up on all those. The challenge will be identifying who actually fired the shot. So far, they’re all denying any knowledge. Claiming they didn’t know that anyone on the protest was carrying a gun, and they wouldn’t have allowed it if they’d known. Thing is, it might even be true. The first part, anyway.’
‘You think so?’
‘We’ve been checking the ballistics of the shot. We’ve now found the bullet, so we’ve an idea of what sort of gun it was and where it was fired. I don’t pretend to understand the technical details but it was fired from some distance away from the protest itself, probably from near the corner of an adjacent street. The ballistics guy even reckoned that it might not have been intended to hit at all. The angle suggests it was probably intended to be fired over the heads of the protestors and Ms Pearson. One possibility is that, because the crowd had drawn closer, the shooter misjudged the angle and aimed too low.’ He shrugged. ‘But that’s just guesswork, really. The real question is whether the two shots were fired by the same individual, or whether the second was a more calculated attempt to feed off the publicity. We’re waiting for confirmation, but now we’re able to compare the bullets, it does look as if both shots could have been fired from the same weapon.’
Annie nodded. ‘The other question is whether the intention was actually to kill Sheena or just intimidate her.’
‘Exactly. That feels marginally more likely at the moment, but that’s really nothing more than gut instinct.’
‘You mean that if they’d really wanted to kill Sheena, they’d have succeeded by now?’
‘I wouldn’t have put it quite like that,’ Dwyer said.
‘For what it’s worth, I think you’ve got a point. We both know only too well that it’s not too difficult to kill someone if you’ve got the means and the will. Whoever’s doing this – if it’s one person – obviously has the means. So either they lack the will or they’ve just been unlucky. But last night’s email suggests it might be more about intimidation than a serious intent to kill.’
‘Which doesn’t mean she shouldn’t take the threats seriously. But you know that.’
‘I know that. And I’ll make sure Sheena remembers it. Any luck with tracing the email?’
‘Not so far. I’m not too hopeful, to be honest. It’s a bit like the CCTV at the hospital. Whoever sent the email knew what they were doing. The IT people are giving it their best shot but they didn’t seem too optimistic. They’re also trying to see if it matches any of the other emails sent to her in recent days, but most of those seem to have just been from idiots who made no serious attempt to conceal their identities.’
Annie looked at her watch. ‘I’d better be getting on. I’ve got Zoe Everett waiting in town for me.’
‘This the sacrificial bodies case? Weird stuff.’
‘Don’t know about sacrificial, but it’s weird all right. We certainly seem to be getting them at the moment, don’t we?’
Dwyer gave a grim smile. ‘It’s because the fates discovered that Stuart Jennings thought he was transferring over here for a quiet life. That’ll teach him.’
‘Something like that.’ She pushed herself to her feet. ‘Good luck, Andy. You heading out to Sheena this morning?’
‘That’s the plan. If you think she’s up to it.’
‘She’s more than up to it. We both just want to go back to our normal lives. If there’s anything else you need from me, just let me know. I don’t want to do anything inappropriate, but I’m happy to give all the help I can.’
‘Thanks, Annie. We’ll put everything into it, you know. We’re not going to let this bastard get away.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know that.’