They sat. Brock’s office was more of a mess than usual, files everywhere, resistant to Dot’s attempts to keep things tidy.
Brock rammed down the phone. ‘I turn my back for ten minutes… All right, tell me about Sundeep’s little mystery.’
Kathy quickly summarised the ground they had covered, then went on to the next steps, which would involve much more manpower. All of the offices around St James’s Square and the surrounding streets would have to be canvassed, cafes and other shops visited, statements taken from everyone who was in the library, CCTV tapes scanned. The list went on, Brock listening in silence, occasionally nodding his approval, while Pip paid close attention, making notes. Finally Kathy came to her own requirements for the murder team. Three more detectives as a start, she thought, plus one additional to work with the City of Westminster police to organise the teams of uniforms, plus an Action Manager, Exhibits Officer and Statement Reader, plus a Rainbow Coordinator for the CCTV stuff.
When she was finished, Brock said, ‘You’re right, that is what you need, plus someone to press your suit, because the media are going to be very interested in this one. But unfortunately I haven’t got anyone. No one at all. It’s just you and Pip, Kathy, I’m sorry. You’re on your own, at least till the end of the week. I’ll speak to Westminster police and make sure they do what they can for you. They can take care of the CCTV. And you can borrow Phil, part time, as Action Manager, to keep on top of your admin.’
Kathy, taken aback, bit off the retort that came into her mind-that without a team there wouldn’t be any admin. Brock read her expression and nodded sympathetically. ‘Now, what about this boyfriend, if that’s where she’s been living? Why didn’t she want anyone to know? And why hasn’t he come forward? You’ve checked Missing Persons, I take it?’
A small choking sound came from Pip’s corner of the desk. She darted a glance at Kathy. ‘Sorry, boss. Not yet.’
Kathy bit her lip, then raised an eyebrow at Brock, meaning, You see? I need people.
Brock appeared not to notice. ‘Surely there must have been someone, a student friend, a priest, a doctor, someone she would have confided in?’
Kathy said, ‘I’d like to release her picture to the press, and a statement saying forensic tests indicate she was poisoned, and giving a general warning to the public to be alert. But I don’t want to say anything about arsenic at this stage, not until we find its source.’
‘What do we know about it? Does it have a taste? What does it look like?’
‘According to Sundeep it depends on the particular compound, but in general arsenic has very little taste, just a mild sweetness, comes as a white powder and can be made in a soluble form. It used to be deliberately contaminated with taste and colouring to stop it being taken accidentally.’
‘Used to be?’
‘In the days when it was publicly available. But now… well, I suppose we’d have to be looking at a laboratory of some kind, or as part of some industrial process. Sundeep’s first thought was that it might have been brought in from overseas.’
‘The terrorist angle.’
‘Yes. I haven’t had anything back on that yet.’
They waited while Brock made the call to Westminster Borough Command, setting up a meeting for Kathy at West End Central police station, not far from St James’s Square. ‘They’ll take care of you, Kathy. They understand the situation. Get over there and get them organised.’
She left Pip checking Missing Persons. ‘And I want her phone records, Pip,’ she said on her way out, not bothering to hide the irritation in her voice. ‘I want to know everyone she phoned in the past six months.’
She decided to cut through St James’s Park, and had turned the car into Birdcage Walk when her phone rang. It was her friend Nicole Palmer from Criminal Records.
‘Hi, Kathy. Just wanted to tell you I’ve confirmed our bookings for this weekend.’
‘This weekend?’ Kathy groaned. ‘Oh no, I thought it was the one after.’ She’d completely forgotten about the trip they’d been planning to Prague. Nicole’s brother, a jazz guitarist, was appearing in a club there and had persuaded them to go. ‘It’s impossible, Nicole. I’ve got this case just blown up…’
‘You’ve always got some case just blown up. It’s only the weekend for God’s sake. You can take the weekend off.’
‘Yes, normally, but there’s this crisis.’
Nicole’s voice became firm. ‘Kathy, Rusty’ll be devastated if I don’t go, and I’m not going on my own. I’ve paid for the flights, and the hotel room. You were so keen.’
‘Sorry I can’t talk now, Nicole. I’m due somewhere. I’ll call you tonight, okay?’
She rang off, feeling a tightness in her chest. It was still there when she arrived at West End Central where, it was rapidly made plain, Brock’s assessment of their ability to help was wildly optimistic.
‘I can let you have one PC and a couple of PCSOs for the best part of tomorrow,’ the inspector said. ‘That’s about it.’
After prolonged haggling, he promised to see if the West End and Chinatown Team could spare another constable and another police community support officer.
She felt as if she were running in soft sand, making no progress. It was dark when she emerged from West End Central, a light rain falling, and she drove back to Queen Anne’s Gate with the swish of windscreen wipers and the glitter of lights on raindrops. When she got to her office she found Pip looking fiercely busy at her desk. There had been no missing person reports for Marion, she said, and someone from the media unit had left a draft press release on her desk for her urgent attention. Kathy checked it and rang them back with a couple of amendments, then forced herself to sit down with a cup of coffee and think.
Towards seven, typing up a report, she became aware of Pip checking her watch and looking edgy.
‘Time you went home,’ Kathy said.
‘Will that be all right? Only I’m supposed to be going out.’
‘Of course. Have a good evening.’
‘Thanks.’
Kathy watched her go with a touch of envy. Pip had a private life, it seemed.
A little later she took a call from an officer in the Counter Terrorism Command. They were inclined to discount a terrorist angle to Marion’s death, he said. It didn’t fit with anything else they had, but they’d be pleased to hear if anything new cropped up.
She also heard back from someone in the Environment and Planning department of Westminster City Council. They had collected over a thousand tonnes of rubbish on the third of April, and whatever Kathy was interested in had almost certainly been incinerated by now.
She rubbed her eyes, feeling suddenly exhausted. This was not going well. She stared at the picture of Marion Summers that she’d propped up beside her phone. ‘Why does nobody know where you live?’ she murmured. ‘Why is your phone blank? Where is your boyfriend?’
She was distracted by the smell of food and looked up, puzzled. She had thought she was the last one left in the building. The door of the office opened, and Brock stood there holding a cardboard pizza box. ‘Hungry?’
She realised she was-very, and he nodded and said, ‘Let’s go down to the pub.’
In the basement of the Queen Anne’s Gate offices was a small Victorian bar, the Bride of Denmark, assembled by earlier owners of the building, and it was there that Brock would go when he needed a quiet retreat, or inspiration. He got a couple of bottles of beer from behind the bar, and they sat at one of the tables and ate and drank in silence for a while, overlooked by the large salmon and stuffed lion in the glass cases mounted on the walls.
Finally Brock wiped his mouth and asked Kathy about her day. He nodded sympathetically and said, ‘Tell you what, why don’t we just get West End Central to take over the whole case? There’s plenty of other things you could be doing. I’ll square it with Sundeep.’
‘No.’ Kathy surprised herself with the firmness of her decision. ‘No, I’ll run with it.’
He gave her a little smile. ‘You’re intrigued.’
‘Yes, well, it is different.’
‘And the victim, Marion, she interests you.’
Kathy shrugged. He was right of course, perceptive as always.
‘Okay.’ He yawned and stretched the muscles of his shoulders, and she decided to change the subject.
‘How’s Suzanne?’ Kathy wasn’t quite sure what the appropriate word was to describe Brock’s friend. Lover seemed intrusive, companion made her sound like an elderly helper. They were a couple, their relationship recently recovered from a shaky patch, and not helped, in Kathy’s opinion, by the fact that they lived fifty miles apart; Suzanne ran an antiques business in Battle, near the Channel coast. Kathy sometimes wondered if Brock, on the other hand, believed the distance was the reason their relationship had survived.
‘Very well. Very busy of course, with the shop and the grandchildren.’
‘She’s still looking after them?’
‘Oh yes. There’s Ginny in the shop, of course, and she does a bit of babysitting, but we don’t see enough of each other. Hopefully we’ll get together this weekend. The kids are great though, growing up fast.’
He gave a little smile to himself, scratching the side of his beard as he recalled some memory, and Kathy thought what an excellent grandfather he would have made.
‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’ she said.
He raised a quizzical eyebrow.
‘When we were stuck in that cottage with Spider Roach…’
Brock nodded, remembering the climax of their last big case.
‘… he said that he’d been responsible for your wife leaving you, to protect the baby she was carrying, because she was afraid of what he might do.’
‘Yes.’
‘And when we first worked together, you mentioned you had a son in Canada.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You haven’t kept in touch?’
He drew in a deep breath. ‘I’m still here, in the same place, doing the same job as when she left. If he wanted to find me it wouldn’t be difficult. I’ve left it to him.’
‘So you don’t know if he’s married? If he has a family of his own?’
Brock frowned, looked down at the remains of pizza on the table, and Kathy realised she’d gone too far and felt sad. She shivered. ‘Sorry. It’s cold down here.’
‘Mm, and since we’re in a ruminative mood, have you been keeping tabs on Tom Reeves?’
She fiddled with her empty bottle. ‘I heard he’s living in France somewhere. Calvi, wherever that is.’
‘How is he, do you know?’
DI Tom Reeves, Special Branch, had also been involved in their last case, and, more personally, with Kathy.
She shook her head. ‘No, we’re not in contact.’
‘He resigned of course. A clean break, according to HR. I imagine that’s how he wants it. Well…’ He got stiffly to his feet. ‘Time to go home.’ five
T hings looked a little brighter the following day. When Kathy got to West End Central she found that the inspector had rustled up another five people from different teams within the borough, and the group that he and Kathy briefed that morning looked almost adequate. They shuffled out armed with clipboards, photographs and report sheets, and the inspector took Pip away to work with the local Rainbow Coordinator on the CCTV footage, while Kathy headed back to the London Library, where she’d arranged to interview everyone that Gael Rayner had been able to track down as having been there on Tuesday when Marion had collapsed.
It was a slow job. One of the regular readers, a Mr Vujkovic, said that he had picked up Marion’s belongings from the floor, including her phone, which he insisted no one had opened. The others had little to add, and no one apart from Nigel Ogilvie had seen Marion eating her lunch in the square. But several had noticed her out there on other days, and one woman had sat with her for a while, on the same bench, about a week beforehand. She was certain that Marion had been drinking a bottle of juice, because Marion had commented that she usually carried one with her, in case she needed a sugar fix for her diabetes. The woman described the orange bottle and yellow plastic cap, but had no idea where Marion might have bought it. Kathy immediately phoned the information to Brock’s office, thinking of other cases of industrial sabotage and tampering with supermarket foodstuffs that had been in the news lately.
From time to time she got up and stretched her legs, going over to the big windows and looking out at the uniforms working their way around the square. She knew they’d phone her if they discovered anything interesting, but by mid-afternoon she’d heard nothing from them or from Pip. She had interviewed thirty-six people, not one of whom had a clue where Marion had lived. None had seen anyone tampering with her bag.
As the streetlights came on and dusk began to fall, she collected Pip and they returned to Queen Anne’s Gate carrying sheafs of interview sheets to process. On Kathy’s desk was a stack of reports from the police hotline detailing phone calls from the public following the newspaper and TV coverage that morning of Marion’s death, and on Pip’s was a computer printout of Marion’s phone records. Kathy had a sense of the overwhelming tide of information which so often bogged down murder investigations that didn’t make a breakthrough in the first couple of days.
Brock came in and pulled up a chair beside them. ‘How’s it looking?’
Kathy pointed to the pile of phone messages. ‘It’s touched a nerve-the anonymous poisoner, the hidden assassin, striking you down where you’re most vulnerable, inside your stomach, without you even knowing it’s been done. People convinced they’ve seen someone putting something in the sugar bowls of the local cafe, sticking syringes into pastries, adulterating milk.’
Brock said, ‘We’ve alerted soft-drink manufacturers and distributors and supermarket chains. They say they haven’t received any recent threats. They also point out that they all have tamper-proof caps. Wouldn’t the sandwich be more likely?’
‘Maybe. I’d be more inclined to accept it was a random act if Marion wasn’t so damn mysterious. None of the people phoning in have any information on her, and nobody’s reported her missing. But somebody knows, and they’re keeping quiet.’
The duty officer appeared with a message for Brock. He scanned it and said, ‘I have to go. Good luck.’ He headed off, looking as weary and frustrated as she felt, Kathy thought.
She looked across at Pip and said, ‘Why wouldn’t you tell your mother where you live?’
Pip laughed. ‘Lots of reasons. You don’t know my mum.’
Kathy shook her head, trying to clear the cotton wool that seemed to have accumulated there during her mind-numbing day. ‘But you’d still tell her, unless…’
‘What?’
‘Unless she’d tell someone else who’s giving you grief.’
‘Her husband? What’s he like, the stepfather?’
‘Looked a bit of a thug. Why don’t you see what you can find out about him?’ She checked her notebook. ‘His name’s Keith Rafferty. He looked younger than Marion’s mother, maybe late thirties. Address in Ealing: Flat 3, 37 Bradshaw Street. Works as a driver for an outfit called Brentford Pyrotechnics. They sell fireworks.’
Ten minutes later Pip came over to her desk with a printout from her computer. ‘Assault, actual bodily harm, three years ago. He got four months. The previous year he was charged under the Sexual Offences Act, section 30, living off the earnings, and section 32, soliciting. That case didn’t get to court.’
‘Aha…’ Kathy looked up at Pip’s expression. There was more. ‘Go on.’
‘And Brentford Pyrotechnics don’t just sell fireworks, they also manufacture them.’
‘So?’
‘You know that brilliant blue light they have in star shells? Apparently it’s almost impossible to get it without using arsenic.’
‘Seriously? How did you find that out?’
‘Google.’ Pip shrugged, as if to say, What else?
K
athy checked the time. ‘Got their number?’
•
The manager at Brentford Pyrotechnics seemed unsurprised by her request to pay him a visit; apparently it had happened before. ‘Just last month,’ he said. ‘It’s the terrorist thing, I know, but really, you’ve got no need to worry about us. You’ll see.’ They were working late that night on an order, and he’d be available whenever they called.
The industrial estate lay within a curve of the Grand Union Canal, beyond which the elevated M4 emitted a low traffic roar into the night. Kathy pulled the car into a parking bay in front of the doors of the offices and showrooms, whose windows were lit from within. Pip looked down the darkened flank of the big sheds to their left and gave a pout of disappointment.
‘Aw, I thought they’d have a few sparklers going, at least.’
Mr Pigeon bustled out in answer to their ding on the counter bell. He looked as if they’d caught him in the middle of a crisis, and he spoke quickly, the glow of perspiration on his bald head. He barely glanced at their ID. ‘We’ve got a lot on this month, and several big productions next weekend.’
‘Really? I thought it’d be a quiet time for you-away from November the fifth, I mean.’
‘Oh no!’ Mr Pigeon chuckled at her ignorance. ‘It’s not just Guy Fawkes night for us, you know. We’re doing functions all the year round-weddings, public events, garden parties, funerals, celebrations of all kinds.’ He handed Kathy several brochures from the desk.
‘Funerals?’
‘Oh indeed. What better way to go than in a blaze of glory in the night sky above your assembled friends.’
‘You mean you pack their ashes into…?’
‘Rockets, Roman candles, giant catherine-wheels. Some want lots of whizzes and bangs, and others prefer a quieter, more contemplative presentation.’
‘I didn’t know that. And you manufacture these special fireworks to order?’
‘That’s right. Our run-of-the-mill stuff all comes from China now. Well, that’s the way of things these days, isn’t it? The great days of British fireworks are past, I’m afraid-Brock’s, Phoenix, Britannia. You have to specialise now.’
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