“Yes, sir.”
“Hmm.” Randle bent to the file he’d been reading. Ian leaned forward to get a look.
Randle looked up. “What are you waiting for?”
“Sorry, sir.” Heat crept up Ian’s neck. He tugged on his collar. “Just let me know if you need me, sir.”
He pulled the door open, trying not to show his disappointment. As he closed it behind him he heard Randle mutter bloody idiot.
Chapter Fifty
Sofia froze. Andreea stared at her, a smile spreading across her face.
“Andreea!” Sofia shrieked. She ran across the kitchen and threw herself at her sister. Andreea was skinnier than ever, her body stiff and jagged in Sofia’s embrace. But she was here, and she was safe.
After a long hug, she pulled back. “Where have you been?” she asked in Romanian.
Andreea’s gaze went to Titi. She shrugged. “A hotel.”
“A hotel?” Sofia turned to her boyfriend, switching to English. “Why does she not stay here?”
He approached them, smiling as if the last twenty-four hours had never happened. “She’s been staying in a nice hotel. Get a flavour of the country. You don’t want her invading our privacy do you, my love?” He kissed Sofia on the cheek.
Sofia gazed up at him. “We have plenty room. She can stay here. Until she finds own place. Job.”
Andreea had hold of Sofia’s hand. “It is OK. Hotel is nice. Do not worry about me.” She looked at Titi again. He frowned at her as if in warning.
Sofia looked between her boyfriend and sister. Andreea had a bright red scratch on her cheek and her hair was lank, not gelled like it normally was.
She had to keep Andreea here. She had to make sure no one took her away.
“Did Titi bring you here?” she asked.
“Uh-uh. English,” he interrupted. “I don’t want to think you ladies are plotting something.” He winked.
Sofia felt a flutter in her chest. “No. No plotting.” Not yet. She tugged Andreea’s hand. “How did you get here?”
“He bring me.”
“Brought me,” he corrected.
“Brought me. From hotel.”
“Why did you not tell me where she was?” Sofia asked him. “I could have gone to her while you were working.”
He smiled. “A surprise for you.”
And it was a wonderful surprise. It really was. Sofia led Andreea into the living room. Mrs Brooking brought a tray of something divine-smelling out of the oven and set it down in front of them.
The sisters sat together on the vast sofa. Andreea’s eyes ran across the room as she took her seat. Until two days ago she’d been living at home, in their parents’ rundown farmhouse. She would never have seen anything like this.
“Is very nice here,” she said. She sounded stiff, formal.
Sofia shrugged. “Is nicer now you are here. Please say you will stay.”
Andreea turned to her. “Will you show me around?”
Titi stood up. “I’ll come with you.”
Andreea wrinkled her nose then smiled. “Yes. Both of you, show me beautiful house.”
They walked towards the stairs. Sofia would show her sister her vast bedroom, the soft bed and the walk-in shower. She wouldn’t tell her she’d spent the last twenty-four hours in the spare room.
“This is so big,” Andreea said. Her voice was tight. Sofia stroked her arm.
“Are you OK?” she whispered. “You seem… different.”
“English.” Her boyfriend’s voice was firm behind them.
“I am happy to be in England,” Andreea replied in English. “He says he find me job.”
Sofia turned to her boyfriend. “Is that true? Thank you, darling. You give her job in your company?”
He nodded. “I will.”
“Then she can stay here. Get a work visa.”
Titi shrugged. Andreea stiffened.
What was it they weren’t telling her?
“Come and see rest of the house,” she said. Titi would bore of this. He would leave them alone, and they could talk.
She led Andreea to the room where she’d been locked up until just half an hour earlier. It was neat and tidy, no evidence of her occupation. The tray had gone and the bedclothes were straight.
“A family could live in this bed,” Andreea said. “It is a lovely house for children.” She nudged her sister in the ribs. “You could start family.”
Sofia blanched. “Children have be—”
“Come on,” said Titi. “Dinner’s ready.” He grabbed Sofia by the wrist and steered her down the stairs. Andreea followed in silence, none of her usual rough edges in evidence.
What had happened to make her sister this meek? And what wasn’t anyone telling her?
Chapter Fifty-One
Tuesday
Zoe yawned as she dug into her fry-up. Mo sat opposite her, sipping on a mug of tea.
“Not eating?” she asked.
“Catriona says I need to lose weight.”
She laughed, allowing herself a glance at his waistline. “You’re fine.”
He shrugged. “It’s not for vanity. She’s a doctor, remember?”
Zoe shrugged. “Glad I’m not married to her.”
“You’re OK. With your height, you’ll always be slim.”
She pushed her stomach in and out, making him laugh. “Maybe I should cut down on the fish and chips.”
“And all those packets of biscuits Rhodri brings into the office.”
“Yeah. He does like his junk food.” She swallowed a mouthful of beans and bacon. “Can’t let him eat it all, can I?”
Mo leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms above his head. “So how’s your side of the investigation going?”
Zoe chewed, pointing to her mouth to tell him to wait until she could speak. They were in Café Face, their favourite place to meet for breakfast before going into work. It was twenty to eight and the only other customers were grabbing takeaway coffee and toasties. No students coming in to sit down at this time of day.
“There’s this man,” she said. “I reckon he pushed the bomber off the escalator. Our witness says she was looking at him. I’m wondering if they were working together. Or if he put her up to it.”
“You think she was coerced?”
Zoe shrugged. “Could have been. We need to find better video, something closer to her, or to him. I feel that if we work out who he is, it’ll be what we need.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“What about you?”
He gulped down a mouthful of tea. “Dawson’s got me running around with him. Thinks I’m the perfect person to deal with our Muslim suspect from the plane.”
“Typical Dawson.”
“He was surprised when I didn’t mollycoddle the guy’s wife. What am I supposed to do? Her husband detonated a bomb and killed eighty-six people.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“He had explosives on his hands.”
“He was a victim of the bomb.”
“Apparently the residue on him is different. From working with the material, not from being hit by it.”
“Yeah. I heard Adi talking about that too. So what happened to your prostitution investigation?”
“It went cold. The brothel we’d been watching was emptied out.”
“That’s convenient.” Zoe scraped the last of her baked beans from her plate and pushed it back. “That was just what I needed.”
“I guess they knew we were watching them.”
“And they moved everyone out.”
“Uh-huh. They didn’t do it in a hurry though.”
“No?”
“The place was spotless. Nothing left behind, nothing dropped. It was a careful job. Not rushed.”
“Didn’t anyone spot this?”
“Must have happened when everyone was distracted by the attacks on Saturday.”
Zoe nodded and checked her watch. “Better get going. Briefing at eight.”
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“Yeah.” He stood up, leaving a fiver on the table as a tip. “How’s things with Nicholas? He’s been through an ordeal.”
“I’m not sure. He and Zaf, I thought they’d be able to help each other with it. But it seems to be the opposite. Now Zaf’s talking about taking a year out and Nicholas can’t wait to get to uni and away from Birmingham. And to top it all off, my mum’s come to stay.”
“Why?”
“Scared, apparently. As if someone’s going to set off a bomb in her street in Kings Norton. It was supposed to be a couple of nights, but she’s showing no sign of buggering off.”
“Maybe it’s a chance to patch up your differences.”
Zoe pushed open the door to the café. Her Mini was parked directly outside while Mo’s car was around the corner. “You know better than to suggest that, Mo.”
“It’s been a long time,” he said. “Almost twenty years.”
She turned to face him, hands on her hips. “If you’d gone through what I did as a child, you wouldn’t say that. I don’t want her ruining Nicholas’s life too.”
“OK. I’m not going to stick my oar in. Let’s get to work.”
“Yes. Let’s.” Zoe yanked open the door of her car, her chest tight.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Andreea gazed out of the window of her narrow bedroom. It was cold today, as it always was here, and ice had formed on the glass.
Last night, she’d been spared. Her trip to Sofia’s luxurious house meant she didn’t have to endure the horrors of the brothel. But she’d heard the other women returning to the hotel in the early hours. They’d been subdued and moved slowly. She’d heard sobbing in the room next door.
The angry man from the van that had brought them from the airport was outside. He stood by a large black car, holding a door open. The skinny woman from the first night emerged from below the window with two girls, both about thirteen years old.
Andreea shifted her weight to get a better view. She hadn’t seen children. Were they staying here too?
The woman said something to the man, then held out the hand of the first girl, handing her over to him. He smiled into the girl’s face and took her hand. The girl pulled back and the man tightened his grip. Andreea felt her stomach clench.
Who were these children? And where were they taking them?
She thought of the way she’d been treated two nights ago. The man who’d pinned her to the wall, and the four other men who’d come into the room after him. After the second one, she’d lost her will to fight.
She felt her legs buckle. Surely they couldn’t be taking these children to men like that?
She stood and placed a hand against the window. The girl got into the car and the second girl followed. The man closed the door and walked round to the driver’s seat. He looked relaxed, confident. He spoke to the woman, who laughed and then retreated into the hotel.
Andreea watched as the car drove away.
She might have lost the energy to fight for herself, but she had to fight for those children. She had to get them away from here.
Chapter Fifty-Three
“OK,” said Randle. He was standing at his laptop, photos of the Sharif house on the screen behind him. “So the Sharif house is clean. Which means that he made the bomb elsewhere. Probably in Pakistan. Dawson, where are we with that?”
“It’s going slow, sir,” replied Dawson. “Authorities over there don’t seem to see it as a priority. Inter-Services Intelligence aren’t helping at all. I may need to push it further up the food chain.”
“I’ll talk to the Assistant Chief Constable. Zoe, any further with identifying our New Street suspect?”
Zoe flicked through her notes. “My team are still working on the CCTV, sir. We’ve got a few images of her, but none that help with identification. And the calls we’ve had from the hotline have been dead ends.”
Randle sighed. “I need you all to do better than this. This is the highest profile case we’ve had for a decade. If we don’t make progress soon, it’ll be taken off us.”
Detective Superintendent Silton cleared his throat. “You know we want to work in tandem with your people, Detective Superintendent Randle. You have the local knowledge, we have the wider intelligence.”
Randle looked at him, wrinkling his nose.
The door opened and Adi Hanson walked in, followed by a woman Zoe remembered from the airport: the fire investigator.
“Mr Hanson, good of you to grace us with your presence. Any news on the forensics from the Sharif house?”
Adi didn’t sit down, but instead went to the front of the room. “No. But we do have new evidence relating to our suspect.”
Randle stiffened. “Go on.”
“After the questions that were raised yesterday about how the explosives got onto his skin and clothes, we decided to run an extra layer of analysis.”
The woman who’d entered with Adi interrupted. “We ran a combination of tests that enable us to determine how long the residues had been on his skin. We apply combinations of three different chemicals, and—”
“Spare us the geeky detail, said Randle. “Who are you?”
“We met at the airport. Sue Turbin, West Midlands Fire Service.”
“The fire investigator.”
“Fire and explosives.”
“She knows her stuff, sir,” said Adi. The two of them exchanged a grin.
Randle sighed. “Just tell us what you’ve found.”
Ian, sitting next to Zoe, sat up in his chair. His hands gripped the seat.
“Sir,” said Adi. “What we found is that the residue hadn’t been on the suspect’s skin and clothes for as long as we thought. In fact, they’d been there for a maximum of just a few hours when we took the original samples.”
“And when did you take those samples?” Silton asked.
“When the body was still on the tarmac,” said Turbin. “Soon after the explosion.”
“Hang on a minute,” Silton said. “You’ll need to be more precise. When exactly did you take the samples?”
Adi inhaled. Zoe watched him, puzzled. He looked at his notes. “Five twenty-five pm, sir. The explosion was at five past four. We took the samples, and they were preserved and sent to the lab. That was over an hour after the explosion. Our analysis shows that the residue got onto the suspect after 3pm the same day.”
“What does that mean?” said Zoe.
“If he prepared the bomb before arriving at the airport in Karachi, the residue would have been on him for at least nine hours. Longer, if you include travel time. There’s no way it was on him for that long.”
“So the residue got onto him after the explosion?” Zoe asked.
“Definitely not during the flight,” said Turbin. “The explosives were in the hold, no access from the passenger compartment.”
“Could he have accessed them after the explosion?” asked Ian.
“He was killed,” said Zoe.
“Instantly,” said Adi. “His lung was punctured by a section of a chair that sheared off. It would have been quick.”
“So someone put the residue on him,” Zoe breathed.
Randle took a step forward. “That’s a hell of an accusation, DI Finch.”
Adi looked at her. He was pale. He scanned the room, his lips moving silently. Then he nodded. “I can’t say it was planted, Zoe. But I can say it got there after the bomb exploded. And as we’ve already established, it didn’t get there as a result of the bomb detonating.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
Zoe left the briefing room, trying to maintain her composure. She ran through the events of Saturday afternoon and evening in her head. Lesley had been called away, Randle had rushed her to the airport, Ian had appeared from nowhere, and they’d gone to the plane. The fire service people had sent them away for a while, and then they’d returned.
At some point during that chain of events, evidence had been planted on the suspect.
Who had had access?
The pathologist, Dr Adebayo. The fire service investigators, and firefighters. Zoe and Ian.
There would be an investigation.
She leaned on the door to the team office. Connie and Rhodri hadn’t been in the meeting, the briefings were getting too full and she preferred to leave them working on the case.
Taking a few short breaths, she opened the door and closed it behind her. Ian hadn’t left the briefing with her but he would be along shortly.
“Boss? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Rhodri stared at her, a half-eaten chocolate digestive in his hand.
She stood by the door, her hand on the handle. “The shit may be about to hit the fan,” she told him.
“How so?”
She grabbed the biscuit from him and crammed it into her mouth. “Come into my office, both of you.”
They followed her, exchanging nervous glances. As she opened the inner door, Ian appeared. He and Zoe looked at each other.
“Ian, you come in here too.”
He nodded and followed the constables into her office. She sat down, not something she normally did when the team were in here. But her legs felt weak. She wished she’d stopped to get a coffee. Anything to hold in her hand, to steady the trembling.
“Right,” she said. “Adi Hanson and his colleague from the fire service have uncovered evidence that’s going to rip a hole through this investigation. And this team.”
Connie put a hand to her chest. Rhodri chewed his lip.
“They have no firm evidence,” said Ian.
Zoe clenched her fist on the desk and screwed her eyes shut. “You know how serious this is, Ian. The whole department witnessed that. Why Adi didn’t just go to Randle with it, I don’t know…”
She swallowed. If Adi hadn’t gone straight to Randle, could that mean he knew Randle was under investigation by Professional Standards?
“OK,” she said. She forced herself to breathe. “The explosives residue on the suspect at the airport. It turns out it got there after the explosion. Not nine or more hours before, like it would have been if it had transferred to him while he was preparing the bomb.”
Deadly Terror (Detective Zoe Finch Book 4) Page 16
