Gagged & Bound Page 21

  ‘It’s going great,’ he said. ‘D’you want a sandwich?’

  ‘I’d love one.’

  Chapter 17

  Monday evening 2 April

  ‘Ma’am?’

  Caro looked up and saw PC Greg Lane.

  ‘Hi. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I owe you one, Ma’am, for intervening in the Redan the other day. Can I buy you a drink?’

  Caro smiled to hide her immediate wariness. Had his mates put him up to this? Dared him, or maybe bet him he wouldn’t ask her out? That had happened more than once, but not in the last few years. Did he know she was gay, as well as nearly old enough to be his mother? Experience told her to take the invitation at face value. That way, everyone’s dignity could be protected, whatever the motives for the invitation.

  ‘I have to be home by seven thirty, but a quick one would be great.’ She switched off her computer and locked the drawers in her desk. ‘Let’s go.’

  He took her to one of the new bars in the high street, all blonde wood and shiny metal, with purple sofas in the window. If this was his usual choice of place to drink, it was no wonder he’d missed all the signals in the Redan.

  ‘What’ll you have, Ma’am?’

  ‘Nothing if you go on calling me that, Greg.’ He looked so worried that she quickly asked him for a small glass of dry white wine, adding, ‘Call me Caro when we’re off duty.’

  When he came back with two glasses of wine and sat down beside her, he was still looking nervous, so she asked him the easiest question in the world, ‘What are you working on at the moment?’

  ‘I’ve been doing house-to-house round the common for the Sam Lock investigation.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised you were involved in that,’ Caro said, hoping her keen interest didn’t show. This was exactly the opportunity she’d wanted. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Nowhere. We didn’t get anything, and it’s boring knocking on doors all day. I wish I was on the hunt for the cars.’

  ‘Cars?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He looked surprised, as though he’d expected her to know everything about the investigation from which she’d been so comprehensively barred. ‘The blokes checking the CCTV have found one car – a hatchback – that was on its way towards the common at 3.15 a.m., then drove back again ten minutes later. What else would you go to the common for at that time in the morning?’ He blushed and added, ‘For such a short time, I mean?’

  ‘Sounds hopeful. Did the cameras record a decent view?’

  ‘Not too bad. The registration plate’s clear as clear, but it’s turned out to be fake, and it looks like two people in the front. Even so, it’s a better lead than any of the house-to-house stuff.’

  ‘That’s always necessary. You never know if anyone has information until you ask.’

  ‘Maybe. But it’s frustrating when you know there are people like Johnnie Slabb being interviewed and you’ve got to go tramping from one front door to the next, finding no one at home as often as not, and getting nothing useful even when someone does answer. Lots of them heard odd bumps and saw strange men but couldn’t say whether it was the night in question. None of them ever saw Sam Lock alive.’

  ‘I can imagine how dull it seems. I’ve been there, too. But it has to be done. As often as not, it’s the routine enquiries that uncover the truth, not the brilliance of any one senior officer. Think of the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. It was two uniformed constables who came up with the goods on that one in the end.’

  He looked a bit happier and drank some wine.

  ‘Did they get anywhere with Johnnie Slabb, d’you know?’ Caro hoped she sounded casual.

  He shook his head. ‘He has an alibi, which won’t break. And they say he’s either an Oscar-winning actor or he’s really cut up about his girlfriend’s death. He’s given the team a lot of useful stuff about this Albanian gang that’s been harassing his family. It looks as though the SIO’s half convinced it was them. He’s got a couple of DCs concentrating on them full time.’

  ‘Did he give any idea how the Albanians could have got to Sam Lock?’

  He shook his head again, but a moment later once more came up with the information Caro needed.

  ‘Didn’t you see that stuff in the papers about how her modelling agency sent her out on a job the other day to a PR firm they’ve admitted they’d never done business with before? The story’s true. They liked the idea of the job because it was going to pay a fortune, and the address they gave was in Knightsbridge. They sent a grand car to pick her up at her flat and that was the last anybody saw of her.’

  ‘Until she was found bagged and gagged. Has anybody traced this PR firm?’

  ‘Course not. And although the limo was spotted on some CCTV footage, that hasn’t helped. The number plates were as fake as the hatchback’s. It’s definitely how she was picked up, so maybe it wasn’t anything to do with Johnnie Slabb. I mean, he and his folks wouldn’t have had to set up an elaborate scam like that. They could’ve lifted her from her own bedroom. Or his.’

  ‘True. What’re they like, the MIT officers?’

  ‘They’re OK. I don’t see much of them. We get our orders from our own sergeant, as per. I wish …’

  ‘What? That you were in SCD yourself?’

  His thin face brightened and he shuffled closer to her on the sofa. ‘Yeah, I wanted to ask your advice about that. I mean, I haven’t been in the job very long, but it’s what I want to do.’

  She relaxed against the sofa back. Now she knew why he’d asked her for a drink, she could switch over to automatic pilot and enjoy his company, and use this as an excuse to pump him for information.

  ‘You’d better put your name down for the next course. But let’s see whether you’re made of the right stuff. You talked about the two cars that were spotted on CCTV film. How could that be used in the investigation?’

  He took a minute to think, which pleased her, then drank some more wine, before saying, ‘First, obviously, would be to find the registered keepers of the cars and interview them.’

  ‘But if the plates are false …?’

  ‘They needn’t be complete fakes. I mean, they could have been lifted from another vehicle. So you’d have to find the last registered keeper of the car they did belong to, interview him, find out where and when he disposed of it, and track it back like that.’ His eyes shone suddenly. ‘And one of the Slabbs is sure to have a car-crushing yard or deal in second-hand motors, so if you could track the plates back to one he’d handled you’d be laughing.’

  ‘Not exactly laughing because it would still be no more than circumstantial evidence, but it would help. You’re definitely on the right lines. You should do fine, Greg.’

  ‘Of course if they found DNA from one of the Slabbs and from Sam Lock in the car that would clinch it, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Not necessarily. If you shake my hand now and your hand’s a bit sweaty, I get your DNA on my hand. If I go straight to my car and start driving, your DNA gets on my steering wheel. If I knock someone down and kill him and say you borrowed my car, you’d be in difficulties. Evidence isn’t always what it seems.’

  He looked crushed. Caro waited until she saw his eyes brightening again as another idea occurred to him. So he did have the right stuff in him. The most important quality in any good detective, she’d come to believe, was the ability to follow a line of enquiry until it folded under you, then pick yourself up and find another and another until you’d got the answer. She’d seen too many cases collapse because the senior investigating officer had got a bee in his bonnet and refused to look beyond it. She’d do what she could to help Greg Lane into the Specialist Crime Directorate.

  Her phone rang. Stuffing a finger in her ear to block out the noise she heard that she was urgently needed back at the police station and left at a run.

  David had finished his homework and was watching The Lord of the Rings on DVD. Seeing severed heads flying towards her on the screen, Trish averted her eyes from
the gruesome sight and asked how much longer it would take.

  He glanced quickly at his watch and said, ‘Another hour and a half. It won’t make me crash my bedline by much.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ she said, enjoying the way he compacted words in often-used phrases. This one had started as bedtime deadline. ‘But I doubt if you’ll sleep all that well if you get over-excited by the film.’

  ‘I will. I will. Do let me watch it, Trish. Please.’

  She could hardly refuse after he’d been so cooperative and uncomplaining about her recent absences. The phone in her pocket beeped, alerting her to a new text message. Puzzled, because the only person who ever texted her was David, she looked at the phone. His old phone number was on the screen. Even more puzzled, she pressed the button that would release the message.

  You ask 2 mny qestns. B crful.

  It’s a joke, she told herself, fighting off the sensation of chill that seemed to rise up from the floor, through all her bones until it reached her head and made her lips freeze. It’s got to be a joke. Bloody Robert probably. But it couldn’t be, not with that number on the screen. She stood with the little phone nestled in her hand, staring at the back of David’s head as he stared at the dismemberment on the television.

  In the kitchen, she phoned Caro’s flat. Jess answered.

  ‘Hi, Trish,’ she said. ‘Caro’s not here. There’s some awful case she’s involved with, so she’s stuck in the nick. D’you want to give me a message for her?’

  ‘Just that I need to talk to her. But I’ll try her at work too. How are you?’

  Holding down her fear, she chatted to Jess for a few minutes, then phoned Caro’s mobile. Not surprisingly it was on voicemail.

  ‘Caro, it’s Trish. I need to talk to you. I know you’re busy, but this is urgent.’

  Until Caro answered, there was nothing she could do about whoever was sending her text messages from the stolen phone, so she sat beside David on the sofa and pretended to watch the film with him.

  Had the phone-thief been a casual opportunist wanting to make sure she wasn’t trying to track him down? Or had it been stolen to order by someone who wanted to keep tabs on her? Who? John Crayley? Simon Tick? Baiborn?

  Would any of them have bothered to identify David and followed him until he’d left his phone unguarded? Or was it the Slabbs?

  Anxiety sometimes engulfed Trish’s brain like a kind of all-encompassing fog, which stopped her seeing anything except the imagined disasters that would follow whatever her current fears might be. Then she became almost as panicky as Bee Bowman. At other times, the act of rationalising her fears made ideas flash more quickly than usual and sparked a whole new range of perceptions.

  It was like that tonight. As yet another cohort of orcs marched forwards, fangs bared in their hideous leathery faces, with bloody weapons ready to drive on towards the Dark Lord’s fell purpose, a picture of Stephanie Taft’s whole life and death presented itself to her.

  If Stephanie really had been the Slabb schoolgirl who’d cut loose from the family, then everything made sense. She could have joined the police specifically to defeat the villains among whom she’d grown up. Her fear of them, perhaps edging over into paranoia after her escape, might well have made her suspect anyone she particularly wanted to trust. John Crayley for one.

  Trish knew all about the dread that followed a dismantling of your defences in the face of love. Bereft of every shield you’d put up to protect you from past hurt or desertion, you stood exposed to the very thing you most feared. And that could make you see it where it did not exist.

  ‘Poor George,’ she muttered, thinking of the things her fears had once made her say and do to him.

  David’s head turned for an instant. Then he dug her in the ribs in a gesture that was supposed to be comforting. ‘George is OK. He’s at a big wine-tasting dinner tonight. You know he is. And he doesn’t like this DVD any more than you do.’

  Trish repaid the dig in the ribs with a friendly ruffle of David’s hair.

  ‘I need tea,’ she said. D‘you want anything?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  In the kitchen, Trish tested her ideas in the context of Stephanie’s suspicion of John Crayley. After a while, finding nothing that made them impossible, she grabbed a pad to scribble down a list of questions for Caro.

  1) Can you join the police under a false name – or one changed by deed poll?

  2) Were those Stephanie’s parents at the funeral?

  3) What does anyone know of Stephanie’s background?

  She re-read it, then added the most important question of all:

  4) What do I do about the text message and the possibility that someone who sees me as a threat has been following David?

  Back on the sofa, sipping her tea, she tried to concentrate on the drama that held David in thrall. Twenty minutes later, he hit the pause button on the remote control.

  ‘I need a pee. Can I get you anything?’

  ‘No thanks. But I might make another phone call, if you wouldn’t feel deserted.’

  He laughed at her. ‘You haven’t been watching anyway.’

  She couldn’t help hugging him and felt a surge of reassurance as he hugged her back.

  Caro still wasn’t answering her mobile. There was no point leaving another message. Frustrated, Trish phoned Benedict Wallsford, the journalist author of the unpublished book about organised crime, to ask whether he had any idea how old the Slabb rebel might be.

  ‘None at all,’ he said. ‘The only description I ever got was “a young girl just out of school”, but no one said when that was.’

  ‘And you were asking your questions, what? About five years ago?’

  ‘About that. Sorry I can’t be more help. You will tell me what’s going on in due course, won’t you?’

  ‘As soon as I can. Thanks. Bye.’

  ‘Before you go, you asked me to check out the ownership of the house where that policewoman was shot.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It does belong to the property-developing Slabb cousin. Thought you ought to know.’

  ‘Great. Thanks. Bye.’

  Trish clicked off the phone and relieved her feelings with a string of swearwords she’d forbidden David ever to use on pain of some dreadful but unspecified punishment, before descending the spiral staircase to become his respectable elder sister again.

  All she could think of throughout the rest of the film was Benedict’s news and the inescapable implication that Stephanie had been killed on the orders of one of the Slabbs. Caro’s old question came back to her: how could they have known Stephanie would be the first police officer through the door of the house?

  The answer to that seemed pretty obvious in the light of Bill Femur’s warning. Someone involved in allocating jobs and responsibilities in the police station where Stephanie worked was in the pay of the Slabbs.

  Or maybe it doesn’t actually have to be someone directly involved, Trish thought. If the story doing the rounds of the Metropolitan Police really is that the shooting was an internal punishment that went horribly wrong, then it could have been one of any number of people who persuaded the officer in charge of the operation that day to put Stephanie in the front line. Has anyone interviewed him yet? I must ask Caro.

  Chapter 18

  Thursday 5 April

  The Royal Courts of Justice were bustling like a termite tower, with counsel, solicitors, claimants, witnesses, tourists and hangers-on jostling each other as they made their way about the stony, church-like halls of the building. Trish and Nessa emerged into the crowd when their judge rose for the short adjournment, otherwise known as lunch, at 12.45. Because the contract case was a relatively simple one, now that Trish had found the flaw in her opponent’s argument, there was no need to tear through the morning’s evidence and thrash out a plan of campaign for the afternoon. She and Nessa could take their time in the coffee shop.

  All round them were barristers, some still wearing their wigs, other
s carrying them jammed under an arm or clutched with a handful of papers. Solicitors and clients followed in the wake of their exotically floating gowns. Trish could see Nessa loving every minute of it. She joined the queue to buy the sandwiches, while Trish grabbed a table with two free chairs.

  Sitting down, with her papers piled neatly by one table leg, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and saw four missed calls and a text message. Caro’s number still wasn’t there. Why hadn’t she answered the call for help? However busy she was, she’d never ignored an urgent message before. What was going on?

  The text was from David’s new phone, asking whether he could have permission to stay late at school this afternoon to help Mr Thompson with the preparations for tomorrow’s end-of-term party. It would only be an hour, he said.

  Trish longed to keep him under close watch until she knew who had stolen his old phone and what they were planning to do next, but she couldn’t unless she told him why, and anything she said could only frighten him. He wouldn’t come to any harm with Mr Thompson. She tapped in a message giving him permission.

  Caro looked at the young thug opposite her. He was sprawled in his chair to show how little he cared for her authority or for his victim. At his side sat his social worker and the duty solicitor, both keeping the impatience off their faces with difficulty. They’d seen as many clones of this particular individual as Caro had. This time it wasn’t arson or joyriding or burglary, but rape. His age had been given as fourteen and his victim was a year older.

  ‘She wanted it, I tell you,’ he said. ‘She was gagging for it. Taunted me, like, when I said no. So I had to give her one.’

  Upstairs in the rape suite, the girl had choked out her story to two specially trained officers, who’d done their best to restore her confidence after the essential indignities of the medical examination and the wholly inessential viciousness she’d suffered at the hands of this boy. Even at her most charitable, Caro would never be able to believe that any male, however alienated and ignorant, could begin to imagine that any female could wish to be battered, cut and bitten during sex as his victim had been.