‘Not that I know of,’ Kate said, reluctant to even speculate with the DCI. If there was an issue in her team, she wanted to be the one to deal with it and she wanted the leaker to look her in the eye and explain themselves.
‘Well, find out. And fast.’ Raymond swung his chair round slightly so that he wasn’t directly facing her and picked up his phone. Kate knew she was being dismissed.
* * *
Cooper was at her desk, focussed intently on her computer screen, when Kate left the DCI’s office. Hollis was nowhere to be seen and she knew that O’Connor and Barratt were out on other jobs.
‘Seen Dan?’ she asked. Cooper turned to her, her eyes lacking clarity for a split second as she shifted from whatever she was doing to process Kate’s question.
‘Upstairs. I sent him on a coffee run. We’ve made a start on the CCTV. It’s not easy though – there were so many people going in and out of the bar and the club that night. I’m concentrating on a period of an hour either side of Chloe’s arrival and departure from Madrigal’s at the minute and trying to cross-reference everybody we can even vaguely identify with the footage from X-Ray.’
‘And?’
Cooper smiled. ‘It looks like half of Donny was out that night and most of them hit Madrigal’s between 7 and 9pm. Not quite so many at X-Ray though’
‘So what are you looking for?’
‘A needle in a haystack.’
‘Facial recognition software no good?’
Cooper shook her head. ‘I can’t see that many faces, especially as it gets darker and also when it rains. I’m working from clothing and any other distinguishing features. This guy for example.’
Sam turned back to her computer and rewound the footage from the wine bar. Kate watched as people walked backwards away from the entrance in fast reverse. Eventually she slowed the video down until the frame depicted a stocky man wearing jeans and a white vest. He wouldn’t have been especially unusual except for the fact that shaved into the crown of his closely cropped dark hair was a five-pointed star.
‘Hard to miss,’ Kate said. ‘And probably easy to get an ID for. Somebody’ll know somebody who knows him. Does he show up at the club?’
‘Yep. At about half eleven. He leaves at 2.10.’
‘No good then?’
‘I’ve put him on the ‘unlikely’ list. I’m checking Madrigal’s, and Dan’s checking X-Ray against my list. It’s not very scientific but it’s the best we can do at the minute.’
‘Somebody mention my name?’ Hollis appeared at Kate’s shoulder holding two coffees in takeaway cups with plastic tops. ‘Sorry, didn’t know you’d finished with Raymond or I would have brought you one,’ he said to Kate, passing one of the cups to Cooper. ‘We in bother for the Harrington interview?’
Kate was well aware that Dan knew that any ‘bother’ would be directed at Kate so she appreciated his casual use of ‘we’. She was just about to tell him that he wasn’t as angry about the interview as he was about the leak when she realised that she couldn’t say anything. She couldn’t share the information with two members of her team and not the others – it would look like she was playing favourites or perhaps that she thought that the leak had come from Barratt or O’Connor.
‘I need to call a briefing,’ she said, ignoring Hollis’s question. ‘I’m going to text Steve and Matt and get them back here.’ She checked her watch. It was just after 4pm. ‘I want you all in the incident room at 5.’
Hollis looked puzzled but Sam had already begun watching the CCTV footage again. Obviously she saw the next hour as an opportunity to get some more work done in the hope that she’d have something positive to present at the briefing. Kate texted O’Connor and Barratt on her way up to the canteen. She wasn’t sure how she wanted to handle news of the leak but she had a feeling that caffeine might help her to decide.
* * *
When Kate entered the interview room at 5pm she sensed that she didn’t have to brief the others about the leak. They knew. O’Connor was waving around a newspaper, clearly furious. ‘Have you seen this?’ he asked. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’
Kate held up both hands, palms out, trying to placate him but he wasn’t interested in being told to calm down.
‘How are we supposed to do our job when we’ve got the bloody press undermining us at every turn?’ There was a general shaking of heads, everybody clearly disgusted with what had happened.
‘Look, the information’s out there,’ Kate said. She pulled out a chair and sat at the head of the table. This was going to be more difficult than she’d anticipated. The shared outrage in the room was palpable. If she mentioned that Raymond suspected that the leaker might be one of her team she might as well have thrown a grenade among her colleagues. But it had to be done.
‘The pressing issue now is…’
‘Where the information came from,’ Barratt finished her sentence, his expression grim. He looked at each of his colleagues in turn. ‘And the finger of suspicion is going to point at one of us.’
‘No,’ Hollis was shaking his head. ‘That’s not right. Nobody here would do that.’
Sam Cooper nodded her agreement but she looked like she wanted to cry. Kate understood how she must be feeling. To fall under suspicion like this was the worst thing for a police officer – especially a detective – and she really didn’t want to have to tell them what her next step had to be.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But there is the possibility that somebody on this team spoke to the press and revealed key information, however inadvertently.’ She was trying to soften the blow but Barratt was having none of it.
‘Inadvertently? How stupid would somebody have to be to casually mention something like this to a journalist? If it was somebody here, then it was done deliberately and I can’t believe that any of us would do that. If you think that, Kate, then you need to be able to prove it beyond doubt.’
Kate was stunned. Barratt hardly ever used her first name, despite her frequent requests that he do so. And he had never raised his voice to her. She’d expected him, of all the members of her team, to take this the hardest as he was proud of his reputation as somebody who could be trusted. Barratt knew that the others thought he was a bit anal, he’d joked about it often enough, so calling his integrity into question would really sting.
‘Matt, I’m not saying—’
‘Yes, you are,’ he said, his usually pale face colouring as he stood up. ‘And I’m not going to sit here and be accused of doing something that would compromise this investigation.’ He pointed to the photographs of Melissa and Chloe that had been stuck to the whiteboard. ‘They deserve better and, honestly, we deserve better.’
He made a move towards the door.
‘Sit down, Barratt!’
Next to her, Hollis flinched. Kate never raised her voice to her colleagues – mainly because they never did anything to merit any form of rebuke but Barratt was bordering on insubordination and she would not allow him to rip the team apart for the sake of his own pride. To her surprise he turned and stared her down.
‘I said, sit down,’ Kate continued. ‘We need to address this leak and, to be frank, being a drama queen just makes you look guilty.’
Barratt’s eyes narrowed and he looked like he was about to say something else when Cooper stepped in. ‘Matt. Sit down. You’re making an arse of yourself.’
Eyes still fixed on Kate, Barratt slid back into his seat.
‘Right,’ Kate said. ‘I get that this is upsetting but I’m going to ask and I’m going to take whatever you say as the truth. Did any of you give information about Melissa Buckley’s wounds to the press?’
Headshakes all round and three vehement verbal denials from the men on the team
‘So where could the information have come from?’
‘Pathologist’s office,’ Barratt suggested, his tone sulky.
‘I thought about that,’ Kate responded. ‘But they’re in the same position as us. I will be following i
t up with Kailisa though.’
‘There’s the SOCO team,’ O’Connor suggested. ‘I don’t know what they get paid but I’ll bet there’s one of two who wouldn’t turn down a few grand for slipping somebody a titbit of information over a pint.’
‘Which would be grounds for dismissal,’ Kate pointed out. ‘But, again, it’ll have to be investigated. Cooper, any thoughts?’
‘Who has the least to lose and the most to gain?’ Cooper responded cryptically.
‘Oh, come on Confucius, don’t talk in riddles.’ Hollis’s tone was light but his eyes and the set of his mouth were serious. Cooper picked up a pen with both hands and began to roll it between her palms. Kate knew how much she hated to be put on the spot like this.
‘SOCOs, Kailisa’s staff, us, we all have a lot to lose if we get caught talking to the press about something like this. Who saw Melissa Buckley’s body and doesn’t have to risk their job if they talk about it?’
‘A witness,’ Kate said, realisation dawning. ‘Shit. Duncan Cawthorne.’
‘What’s to stop him accepting money from a journalist?’ Cooper asked. ‘He might not even realise what he’s done. It’s not hard to picture somebody plying him with booze and offering a sympathetic shoulder.’
She was right. Cawthorne claimed not to have got a good look at the body but he’d been cagey about why he was anywhere near it in the first place. Kate could easily imagine him saying whatever he thought might cause him the least trouble with the police.
‘What do you think, Dan? You were there when I spoke to him.’
‘Could be,’ Hollis confirmed. ‘I’ll have a look at his written statement, find out exactly what he said he saw.’
‘No, Matt can do it, I want you back on the CCTV footage with Sam.’ She knew that Barratt would see such a task as being beneath him but Kate had to do something to let him know that his previous outburst hadn’t been appreciated. ‘Steve, you have a tame journalist in your address book, don’t you?’
O’Connor gave her a smile in response. Kate had used O’Connor’s contact on a previous case and had got the impression that there might have been more than just a professional connection between the DS and the journalist.
‘See if you can get her to make some discreet enquiries and find out where the info came from. I know this case is frustrating, believe me, I feel it as much as you lot do. Raymond’s going to hold a press conference in the morning, see if that’ll generate anything new. Cooper, Hollis, I’ll work with you two – an extra pair of eyes might help.’
Jobs allocated, Kate watched her colleagues file out of the incident room. She turned and looked at the photographs of the two murdered women and was surprised to feel her eyes tear up. The frustration was starting to get to her. It was time to try something different, and she knew that Raymond wouldn’t like it.
Chapter 27
‘You want me to pay for a what?’ Raymond dropped into his seat and pulled his tie loose. He’d just returned from a briefing with the Chief Super and he looked like he’d taken a verbal battering.
‘A clinical psychologist,’ Kate repeated. ‘Kailisa thinks that the injuries to Melissa’s and Chloe’s bodies are ritualistic and I’m inclined to agree with him. If we can understand why this killer mutilates women in this way we might get closer to catching him.’
Raymond snorted in disgust. ‘This is Doncaster not bloody LA. I never expected you to go all Silence of the Lambs on me, Kate.’
She’d expected this. Raymond was well known for his aversion to spending money and that aversion grew stronger if he thought the expense was for something that he was inclined to dismiss as nonsense. She knew that psychological profiling was a contentious issue and that a lot of police forces were reluctant to admit that they’d employed the services of a psychologist for fear of a public backlash, but Kate had seen results for herself on a previous investigation and she was convinced that they had nothing to lose in this case. She also knew that she might have a way to persuade her DCI.
‘I know somebody who might be able to help,’ she said. ‘I’ve worked with her before, in Cumbria and she gave us some real insight.’
‘Insight,’ Raymond snorted. ‘We don’t need insight, we need a concrete lead and I don’t think we’ll get that from somebody telling us that we’re looking for a white male in his mid to late thirties who used to torture his pet rabbits.’
Kate tried to keep a straight face. She’d expected this. While Raymond was perfectly comfortable with the technological advances that had aided modern policing she knew that he, and many others, thought psychological profiling was second only to hiring a psychic when it came to trying to find the perpetrator of a crime.
‘She might do it as a favour to me,’ Kate continued. ‘We could keep it off the books and, that way, out of the media.’
Raymond’s eyes sparked with interest. ‘Free, like? No strings?’
Kate nodded. The DCI swung round in his seat and appeared to be staring out of the window but Kate knew that he was processing the potential consequences of her suggestion. She didn’t tell him that she’d already put the wheels in motion, that she’d contacted her friend Anna who’d already confirmed that she’d be willing to help.
‘Okay,’ the DCI said, spinning his chair back round. ‘I don’t suppose I can stop you asking somebody, off the record, but I don’t want it to direct the course of the investigation. You said yourself that it might give us some insight – that won’t replace real leg work. And I don’t want to read about this in next week’s Gazette.’
‘You won’t. Cooper’s got a theory about the leaker and it’s not one of ours.’
‘It’d better not be. Christ, I’ve got enough on with this press conference tomorrow without having to start an internal investigation. Do what you need to do, Kate, but if there’s any shit from it, I’ll make sure it sticks to you.’
Kate assured him that she’d be discreet and left Raymond’s office with a big grin plastered across her face. For all his bluster, Kate knew that the DCI would defend her if his bosses questioned any decisions that she’d made – he was a dinosaur but he was fiercely loyal.
Cooper and Hollis were staring at their computer monitors when Kate went back through to the team office. Sam was running a section of CCTV footage in slow-motion, staring at it intently, while Hollis appeared to be flicking through a database of known offenders.
Leaving them to it, Kate sat at her own desk and logged on to her email on her PC. She’d already sent a message to Anna Carson about the case – not the specifics but a general outline – so her friend had been prepared. Kate uploaded a selection of case notes and images and typed a quick message. Anna was a friend from university. Kate had taken a couple of psychology units as part of her degree and she’d met Anna during a seminar on ‘The Psychology of Sexual Politics’. It hadn’t been the most inspiring course but Kate and Anna had been paired up to investigate attitudes to feminism in the Thatcher era and had bonded over a mutual dislike of Britain’s first female prime minister.
Anna’s background was very different from Kate’s. Brought up in Edinburgh, the only child of two doctors, Anna had tried to downplay her middle-class roots but Kate wouldn’t let her get away with any suggestion of ‘Champagne socialism’. She’d played on her own working-class credentials as the daughter of a miner, to challenge and stretch her friend’s political awareness. Their late-night conversations had been the start of a life-long bond. Anna had stuck to psychology and was currently working in a secure unit for violent offenders in Berkshire but she enjoyed a puzzle and was always happy to help Kate if she could.
When Kate had struggled with a serial rapist in Kendal it had been Anna who had given her the insight to view their list of suspects in a different light and now Kate was hoping that she could do the same with this case. Except that they didn’t really have a viable list of suspects.
Kate quickly reviewed her message, held her breath and hit ‘send’ feeling a sense of finality
about the keystroke. Anna might just be their last hope.
‘You two got anything?’ Kate asked, turning her attention to her colleagues. Hollis responded with a heavy sigh.
‘Got a headache,’ he said. ‘It’s not much fun scrolling through a never-ending parade of Doncaster’s thugs and rapists. Even if one of them was on the CCTV I’m not sure I’d recognise his mug shot. Different camera angles, different hairstyles.’
‘Looking for anybody in particular?’
Hollis passed her a thin sheaf of printouts, each of them a still from the footage outside Madrigal’s. Kate skimmed through a gallery of half glimpsed faces and tops of heads and felt Dan’s pain. She passed them back to him without comment, leaving him to continue.
‘Sam, how about you?’
Cooper paused the video that was playing on her monitor but she didn’t look away from the screen. ‘I’m still trying to cross-match the two lots of footage. I’ve got three or four possible matches between Madrigal’s and X-Ray and I’ve given Dan some of the clearer still images to see if he can identify anybody.’
‘Three or four possibles?’ Kate was surprised that her colleague was downplaying what could be their most significant lead so far. If she’d seen the same person entering and leaving the bar and the nightclub at around the same time as Chloe then they just might be looking at her killer.
‘Hang on.’ Sam closed the programme that she was running and clicked on a folder of stills. She’d paired the images so that it was easy to compare the person from Madrigal’s against stills from X-Ray’s camera. The four that she’d already found looked like good matches to each other. One pair was clearly the same person, shaved head and trendy rectangular glasses, he looked like Heston Bloomenthal’s younger brother.
‘What about facial recognition technology?’ she asked. ‘Now you’ve actually got some decent stills. Can you not run each through a programme and see if they’re the same person? And can’t we do the same with the database of mug shots?’ She could hear the excitement in her own voice. How had Cooper not thought of this? And then she realised. Of course Cooper would have used facial recognition if it had been possible. If she hadn’t used it there would be a good reason.
Bad Seed: DI Kate Fletcher Book 3 Page 19
