by Zoe Sharp
If she expected him to remonstrate—either for the guesswork or the trace of sarcasm—she was rewarded by a frown of concentration instead.
“Where were the prints?”
The question surprised her. “On the bicycle, you mean? There were quite a few, but the most recent seem to be on the seat stem and head tube.” She leaned over the frame with gloved hands outstretched to demonstrate. “Where you would naturally grab to lift it, like so. The bicycle was found dumped in a skip, so perhaps whoever ran over it—with or without rider—probably heaved it into the skip afterwards.”
“Right, of course,” he murmured. “Good, well… As I’m here, I’ll suit up and give you a hand, shall I?”
He posed it as a question but was already turning toward the shelves filled with disposable Tyvek suits, still in their wrappers.
Grace cleared her throat, making him pause.
“I’d rather you didn’t, Chris, if you don’t mind,” she said firmly. “I have a system and I’m working through it.”
“Come on, Grace. Many hands make light work, and all that.”
“And too many cooks spoil the broth,” she returned, adding a smile to soften what he clearly took as a personal blow.
He hesitated a moment longer, scowling, then turned away. “All right, but make sure you finish that report and have it in my inbox by lunchtime, if you don’t mind.”
“I will do my best,” she promised.
“Aye, well, see that you do.” He stomped toward the door, had almost reached it before Grace felt unable to hold her tongue any longer.
“I know you have your doubts, but I do know what I’m doing, Christopher,” she said, halting him in his tracks. “I have been absolutely meticulous with the trace evidence in this case, as I am with every case. You bring me a suspect vehicle and I will be able to match the material I’ve collected from the bicycle to it with enough certainty to stand up in court, have no fear.”
For several seconds he didn’t respond, just stared at her with, she felt, a quantity of doubt in his face that was downright insulting.
Then he gave a jerky nod and turned on his heel.
As the door closed behind him, Grace allowed herself to sag a little against the table and took a couple of steadying breaths.
Damn the wretched man.
There was something he’d said that niggled at her but then, so much of what he’d said niggled at her in one way or another. It was hard to put her finger on any point in particular.
She shook her head. Then she straightened and reached once again for her camera.
18
Blenkinship climbed into his car, slamming the door behind him. He slumped in the driver’s seat, let his head thump back against the rest and closed his eyes.
When that failed to generate a sense of calm, he swore under his breath instead. Every expletive he could think of, uttered with venom and feeling that was only intensified by the near-whisper of his voice inside the car.
Bloody Grace McColl. It would have to be her, wouldn’t it?
Privately, he admitted that most of his dislike for the redheaded CSI was down to jealousy, pure and simple. He’d had to work hard to get where he was, put in the hours, slogged through the courses when sometimes it felt as though he was trying to take in an utterly foreign language.
It had been the same when he was still at school. He would be the first to admit he was not the most gifted academic. His father was an unforgiving man who’d kept him hard at it, more with stick than carrot as incentive. Blenkinship’s overall performance had been doggedly persistent, achieving middling grades no matter how diligently he studied. It had grieved him that some of his classmates did nothing but loaf through the school year, yet were always in the top few percent when it came to the exams. It seemed they never even had to try.
Some people just had everything in life handed to them on a silver platter.
Grace McColl, he felt, was another of those people.
His annoyance with her was not because she was bad at her job, far from it. Instead, it was because she had an instinctive flair for reading the scene and listening to the story being described by the evidence that Blenkinship recognised he would never have. Not in a million years.
However much he wished for it.
Oh, he was good enough, he knew that. Reliable, sound. A solid member of the team.
He could follow the trail as well as anybody and probably better than most. But when it petered out he couldn’t quite make those same leaps across the void. He could observe the scene, but that only meant he could see it as it was now, not as it had been.
Not like Grace.
He thumped a fist on the steering wheel. That made him feel no better, either.
As he started the engine, he replayed the conversation they’d just had in the workshop. However casually he’d tried to behave around her, he knew she’d sensed something was slightly off. Was that why she had refused his offer of assistance? Or was it down to territorial pride?
And as he went back and forth over it, he tried to work out—had it been any other case—if he would have stood his ground, insisted. As her superior, he had a right to monitor her work occasionally, after all. Some kind of ongoing performance review, he could call it.
Trouble was, the longer he spent around her, the more he got the feeling she’d suspect.
Damn it.
He rubbed his fist into the hollow ache at his sternum, fished in his pocket for a couple of antacid tablets.
“You need to stay out of her way,” he murmured to himself. But he knew that wouldn’t help him keep an eye on how the investigation was progressing.
Because soon it would turn from a missing persons case into one of manslaughter. Even then, he knew he was fooling himself. As soon as he’d taken the decision not to report the boy’s death, the only way this was going to end was in a full-blown murder enquiry.
And it was imperative he stayed close to that.
His only hope was for a sudden crime wave in Penrith to give him a legitimate excuse for reassigning Grace. Or that she might screw up in some way. OK, so the prospect of her making a mistake wasn’t particularly likely, but a man could dream, couldn’t he?
That last crack she’d made—about the black plastic trace. Oh, he knew exactly where it had come from and she couldn’t have been any more accurate if she’d witnessed the collision first hand.
How does she do that?
He cranked the engine and reversed out of his parking space, aware all the time of those incriminating scuffs on the front corner of his bumper. What had seemed almost insignificant at the time now felt as if they were painted in Day-Glo and lit with neon arrows.
He needed to get the damage sorted as a priority. The trouble was, this was his work vehicle. Any repairs went through the official garage. And if he went to some private body shop, got it done on the sly… Well, that opened up a path to more potential complications than he wanted to explore.
He headed slowly for the exit, still lost in furious thought. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw another vehicle swing into the narrow approach to the car park. Instinctively, the muscles of his right leg tensed to shift his foot from throttle to brake. Then he realised the golden opportunity being presented to him.
The incoming car wasn’t moving quickly.
But it might just be moving quickly enough…
Afterwards, he could hardly analyse the rapid progression of his thoughts. He stamped down on the accelerator and his car lurched forward, the front corner swinging out into the gap between the other parked vehicles.
The driver of the other car reacted immediately. It wasn’t enough. The two came together with a graunching thud.
Blenkinship’s footballing youth had taught him that the best form of defence was attack. He switched off the engine and was out of his car in a flash.
“Oi, why don’t you watch where you’re damn well going?” he demanded.
The other driver unfastened h
is seatbelt and took his time about getting out. A twinge of dismay set Blenkinship’s heartburn off again when he saw who it was—that smart-arse detective who’d transferred up from the Met, Nick Weston.
The same Nick Weston who was, he recalled, particularly pally with Grace McColl.
In fact, at one point during the big sniper case the previous summer, the rumour mill suggested they might be more than simply colleagues. Well, with Sibson out of the way, a woman like that was always going to try getting her hooks into somebody else pretty sharpish, wasn’t she?
Of all the bloody people…
He disguised his sudden uncertainty by fisting his hands on his hips, pushing his chin out and shoulders back.
Weston eyed him as if—like Grace—he, too, could read far more in another man’s stance than Blenkinship was happy to reveal.
“I thought you’d seen me and stopped,” Weston said after a moment, with only a hint of annoyance in his voice. The car was one of those suped-up Subaru Imprezas, Blenkinship saw, all bulging bodywork and big wheels, in a girly mid-blue. If it had been his car—and it could only have been Weston’s personal vehicle—Blenkinship would have been livid. If anything, Weston seemed resigned.
“And you were going like an idiot in that thing.”
Weston didn’t reply to that. He merely raised an eyebrow before squatting to inspect the damage. Blenkinship moved round the front of his own car, relieved when he saw the existing marks had been obliterated by the second impact. The front corner of his bumper had broken loose from its mounting points, distorted and split. His headlight lens was cracked, too. Weston’s vehicle hadn’t come off much better. It had some kind of lower lip below the bumper—some fancy ground-effects that only worked on a rally stage or a race track. Poseur.
It wouldn’t have much aerodynamic effect now, though, since it had ripped free and was hanging mostly on the ground under the car. His bumper had taken a pounding, too. Blenkinship felt the smile trying to stretch his cheeks and bit down on it hard, turning it into a grimace.
“Bit of a mess on both sides, eh?” he said, aiming for casual. “We’ll just put it down to experience and go knock-for-knock on this one, shall we?”
“Perhaps we ought to take a look at the video before we make any decisions on that score,” Weston said.
“Well, you can if you like”—Blenkinship jerked his head to the nearest camera, mounted on a corner of the building and pointed firmly away from them—“but I think you’ll find the CCTV only covers the marked bays. They tend to assume that trained police drivers can manage to get in and out of here without the need for surveillance.”
Weston smiled then, a tight smile with little humour in it. “That wasn’t the video I was referring to.” He straightened, leaned across and tapped a finger to his windscreen, up near the rear-view mirror. Blenkinship nearly let out a groan.
A dash-cam.
He hid his dismay behind pursed lips, twisting slowly to take in a good long look at the angles and lines of sight. The roads of Cumbria were often tortuous, and thronged with tourists, summer and winter. Road traffic incidents were commonplace and fatalities often a sad result. Blenkinship had been to his share. He was experienced enough to know that the view from Weston’s car—or the mounting position of his camera—was not good enough to prove anything conclusive.
“I’m not exactly inexperienced at reading the evidence,” he said, authoritative now, “and it’s my opinion that by the time I saw you, it was too late to avoid a collision.”
“If you’ll forgive me for saying so, your opinion doesn’t make much difference.”
“Oh, you reckon?” Blenkinship bristled. “I’ll have you know—”
But Weston didn’t let him finish. Instead, he stabbed a finger toward the other car windscreen. Blenkinship wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t turned to look.
His stomach dropped away like he was on a rollercoaster.
“You may not want to believe my dash-cam,” Weston said then, a definite edge to his voice. “But I hardly think you can ignore your own.”
19
Nick rapped smartly on DI Pollock’s office door, waited for the bark of “Come!” and reached for the handle. His inspector glanced up from the report he was reading as Nick entered, caught his glowering expression and froze, pen poised in mid air.
“Hell’s teeth, lad. Who pissed on your chips?”
“Don’t ask,” Nick said sourly. He quickly thought better of it, took a breath and flashed a wry smile. “Sorry, sir. Mr Blenkinship just managed to get up to ramming speed in the car park.”
Pollock sucked in a breath of his own, more loudly, as he waved Nick into a chair. “Oh dear. Not that nice snazzy motor of yours?”
“Yessir.”
“Will she live?”
“Minor surgery, I think, rather than intensive care.” Nick’s smile was more heart-felt this time. “Mind you, she gave as good as she got.”
“Ah well, I daresay the insurance companies will sort it all out—although I don’t envy you having to argue with a CSI over who was to blame.”
“Dash-cam,” Nick said shortly. “Good job, too…”
“Oh?”
Brian Pollock had been a copper too long not to pick up on the trace of bitterness in his voice, Nick realised. He paused. The DI had never liked tales told out of school but even he didn’t have any particular regard for Blenkinship. Nick shook his head, shrugged it off.
“I don’t know. He seemed to see me coming, slow down, then accelerate again. Maybe his foot slipped and he’s too embarrassed to own up.”
“Aye, lad. There’s two places where no bloke cares to admit he’s anything other than world class. One is in the bedroom and the other is behind the wheel of a motor vehicle.”
They shared a grin that reminded Nick why he was beginning to feel a considerable amount of loyalty as well as respect for his superior. At first meeting, Pollock had seemed an old-fashioned blunt instrument. But the longer Nick worked under him, the more he’d come to appreciate there was often a surprising subtlety there, too. Not to mention a sense of humour so dry it could be arid.
“You wanted to see me, sir?” Nick said now.
“Jordan Elliot,” Pollock said, opening a folder and spinning it round to face Nick’s side of the desk. Inside was a blow-up of the picture Yvonne Elliot had given them of her son. A head-and-shoulders shot of him, self-conscious in his school uniform, his dark hair plastered flat to his forehead. The boy’s eyes were anxious and his smile just starting to deflate, leading Nick to suspect the photographer had made him hold it a second too long.
Grace would have got the best out of him, he thought suddenly. At his request, she’d taken a couple of snaps of Sophie at a mutual colleague’s wedding a month or so ago. Candid shots that had turned out far better than any of the posed studio portraits they’d tried to have done. Even Lisa was reluctantly impressed.
“Our Grace has confirmed that the blood she found is from the kid. And the damage to the bicycle is consistent with it having been involved in a collision with a vehicle, which then also ran over it.”
“And the boy?”
Pollock shook his head. “Not enough blood to say he was still on it at the time, apparently. Or bone fragments or other tissue. So, as far as we know, Jordan Elliot is injured—severity unknown—but still alive. And that’s the basis we’ll continue to work on until we know different.”
“There’s been no sign of him?”
“Not a sausage. We’ve got uniforms searching the area around Water Yat where the bicycle was dumped and doing house-to-house all the way along the valley.” He sat back heavily in his chair, which groaned under him. Pollock’s wife was always trying to modify his eating habits but his biscuit addiction was beyond cure. “It’s a damn nuisance we weren’t able to locate the site of the original collision before that thunderstorm washed away whatever residual evidence might have been available to us.”
“If only the parents h
ad reported him missing earlier…”
Pollock snorted. “If only they’d noticed he was missing earlier, you mean.”
“Sounds as though we’ve not much to go on, sir.”
“Well, I didn’t say that, lad.”
Nick’s turn for a simple, “Oh?”
Pollock plucked another folder from his desktop and chucked it in Nick’s direction.
When Nick opened it he saw another face staring out at him. This one was of a man perhaps in his late twenties, dark eyed, dark haired, with heavy brows and a face tanned either by genes or weather. The man’s expression was one of weary resignation, perhaps tinged with defiance.
“Not his first arrest,” Nick said, a gut reaction.
Pollock eyed him from under bushy eyebrows of his own for a moment. “You know him?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir. Who is he?”
“His name is Vano Smith—one of our Travelling brethren.”
“Smith? Really?”
“No joke. It’s a fine old Gypsy name, apparently. In fact, Mr Smith’s related to royalty, in a manner of speaking.”
Nick raised his eyebrows for a moment, then said, “Ah, yes—the Shera Rom you mentioned yesterday.”
“Aye, we’re going to miss old Hezekiah. He wasn’t a bad bloke. Kept his house in order, dealt with the troublemakers and if he didn’t entirely put a stop to some of the dodgier deals that go on at Appleby every year, at least he made ’em keep it off the main street and out of the public eye.”
Nick frowned. “Since when are we only interested in crime that happens where we can see it, sir?”
“Don’t take that line, lad. I appreciate your zeal but when you’ve had as many years coping with this annual invasion as I have, then you can pass judgement. Until then, our biggest priority is keeping the peace. For the most part that means stopping any trouble from brewing up between the locals and the incomers, of whatever stripe, rather than sorting out internal strife. Got it?”
