‘Could you tell me what this is about?’ she demanded anxiously, clutching her hands. Kathy had the impression of someone who had faced a fair bit of bad news lately and was bracing for another little smack from fate. ‘It’s not my car is it? Only I told Cheryl when I lent it to her that I’m not going to be responsible…’ She stopped, seeing Kathy smile and shake her head.
‘No, it’s nothing like that, Debbie. It’s just a loose end I have to tie up on a case I’m on at the moment, and it’s absolutely nothing for you to worry about.’
‘Oh, good.’ She drew a cautious breath of relief.
‘It’s in connection with your work at the laboratory.’
‘But you know I don’t work there any more, don’t you? I’m on the clerical staff at the hospital now, full time. I was only part time at the lab, you see, and I really wanted full-time work. If it’s about the same thing they came about before, about the internal review, well I thought I’d done everything needed.’
‘Yes, it probably does overlap with that. When was it, that they spoke to you?’
‘Oh, a week ago? Maybe more.’
‘And what exactly did they ask you about?’
‘He had a report he was writing, about tightening up procedures. He just wanted my signature.’
‘Did you read the report?’
‘Oh no, it was too long, and he was in a hurry.’
This sounded wrong. Kathy wondered what kind of inquiry they’d carried out. She herself had only seen the summary of conclusions, not the background documents.
‘But he explained what was in the report?’
‘Not really. He said he just needed to get everyone who’d worked there in the past twelve months to sign off on it, and frankly I wasn’t bothered, now I don’t work there any more.’
‘Did he talk about last May, about some work the lab was doing then, on a case for us?’
‘May? I don’t think so. Which case was that?’
‘The Verge case.’
‘Oh, I remember that one! We were all fascinated. Well, everyone was. I remember telling Mum when I was typing up the forensic schedules, you know, about the bloodstains and that.’ Debbie suddenly looked anxious again. ‘That is all right, isn’t it? I mean, we could talk about our work…’
‘No, it’s fine. And did the man who saw you last week mention anything about your work on that case?’
‘No, I’m sure he didn’t.’
‘He didn’t say that was what the report was about?’
‘Oh no. I mean, I wouldn’t normally have signed something without reading it, but he was in a hurry, and since I knew him and everything
… Why? Is something wrong?’
‘There’s been a suggestion that someone made a mistake in the original forensic report for the Verge case, Debbie,’ Kathy said carefully. ‘I just thought he might have mentioned that to you, maybe asked you if you knew anything about it.’
‘A mistake? Oh dear, was it serious?’
‘It caused a bit of delay.’
‘Well, it certainly wasn’t me. I was always very careful, especially with the big cases. I was just a keyboard operator, you see, mainly transcribing reports. All those lists! It would have been easy to skip an item. Some of the girls would copy them by eye, but I had my own method to make sure I didn’t make a mistake. If I couldn’t transcribe electronically, I’d make a photocopy and strike out each item in turn after I’d entered it, to make sure I didn’t miss any. It was slower, but it avoided errors.’
‘And he didn’t ask you about the Verge case, about this mistake?’
‘No, he never mentioned it.’ Then she added plaintively, ‘I am very careful, you know. I’ve learned the hard way.’
‘Okay.’ Kathy got to her feet.
‘That’s all?’
‘I think so. You say you knew this person who came to see you? Someone you’d worked with at the lab?’
‘Yes. He was one of your people, one of the LOs.’
‘Oh, really?’ Kathy felt a surge of shock. ‘Not an Indian guy?’
‘No. It was Paul. Paul Oakley.’
On the way home Kathy stopped for a hamburger. She felt dirty, as if she’d been caught peeping through keyholes. Oakley had obviously engineered some kind of cover-up of his mistake back in May, so that his consulting opportunities wouldn’t now be blocked. He had stabbed Debbie Langley in the back, and she didn’t even know it. He must also have inveigled people still working in the lab to accept the ‘confession’ he’d tricked out of her. Maybe he’d persuaded Leon to help. But it was all internal to the lab, none of Kathy’s business. If Leon wanted to get involved, too bad. It was all too personal, too messy.
All the same, she found it hard to leave it alone. That night, lying awake, she decided that there was one last thing she could do, just to make sure it really was none of her business.
The Crime Strategy Working Party was scheduled to convene at ten the next morning. At nine Kathy was standing in the stark reception area of the Verge Practice offices. She asked for the personal secretary of Sandy Clarke, and gave her name and identification to the receptionist, who entered the details into the computer on her glass table.
Kathy remembered Clarke’s secretary from her visit with Brock two weeks earlier. She introduced herself and followed her to the lift. Close to, her face seemed frozen, and Kathy recalled an article on botox injections she’d read in the paper, but the woman’s eyes showed a glazed immobility, and Kathy decided she might be on sedatives.
‘Had you worked with Mr Clarke for long?’ she asked, and the woman, not shifting her gaze from the flicker of steel passing beyond the glass walls of the lift, gave a little sigh.
‘Fifteen years.’
In her office she offered Kathy the desk diary she had kept for Clarke, and Kathy sat down and began to work through it, taking notes from time to time. As she worked she was aware of the other woman sitting motionless at her desk, watching. The phone didn’t ring.
Eventually Kathy said, ‘There are a number of entries where the names of the people aren’t recorded, just their organisation. I suppose the receptionist downstairs will have a record of everyone who came?’
‘Yes.’ The woman blinked, and Kathy imagined a frozen brain behind the frozen face. Then she added, ‘You can access that on my computer.’ She swivelled in her seat and slowly brought the machine to life.
The firm had an awful lot of visitors, Kathy realised, seeing the names scrolling down the screen, and thinking of her ten o’clock meeting. She began giving the secretary dates and times, checking the column with the names of organisations. Eventually the woman seemed to realise the pattern.
‘These are all visits by the police?’
‘Yes. There’s a mix-up in our records. I just have to check for our reports.’
‘Oh.’ She gave a sigh of deep disapproval and continued to the next entry.
At last, the minutes ticking away, they came to the twenty-third of May, a Wednesday, nine days after Miki Norinaga’s body had been discovered. The name Sergeant Paul Oakley jumped out of the screen at Kathy with an almost physical impact. ‘You remember this one?’ she asked calmly.
The woman thought, then she checked the appointments in the desk diary. ‘I don’t remember him particularly, but I remember that morning, because the next appointment was with the Mayor, and Sandy kept him waiting.’
‘According to the reception record, Sergeant Oakley arrived on time for his appointment, and left forty-three minutes later.’
‘That’s right, he overran his time. You see there… the Mayor arrived ten minutes before your sergeant left, and Sandy kept him waiting…’
Kathy thought she was going to say more, but when she looked at her face she saw tears welling out of her eyes and spilling down her cheeks. The woman just stared back at Kathy, saying nothing.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kathy said softly. ‘But just let me be clear. Sergeant Oakley stayed talking to Mr Clarke in his office all that
time, did he? He didn’t go up to check the apartment again, or anything like that?’
After a long moment’s silence Kathy didn’t think she was going to get a reply. Then the stiff lips whispered, ‘That’s right.’
She was late for her meeting, but nobody seemed to mind. The mood had changed, and everyone was cooperative and enthusiastic. They had all prepared their presentations; some on laptops, others on alarmingly thick sheafs of paper. As the first presentation got under way, Kathy’s heart sank. It seemed pretentious to her, and ridiculously remote from the reality of policing. Soon her attention began to drift, and she turned her mind to the problem of what she was going to do about Paul Oakley.
When the afternoon session finally came to an end, everyone except Kathy seemed highly satisfied by their efforts. Robert beamed smugly as he gathered up his papers, and even the reluctant Rex was full of good humour. Kathy hurried to the door, anxious to get back to the office, but she was intercepted again by Jay.
‘Hi. That went really well, didn’t it?’
‘I suppose.’
Seeing Kathy turn to go, Jay added, ‘There’s something I wanted to ask you.’
‘Can it wait, Jay? I need to get back to the office before people leave.’
‘I’ll come down with you.’
Kathy found herself alone in the lift with Jay, who went on, ‘I’m going with some friends to a gig next Saturday, and I just wondered if you’d like to come along.’
‘Oh.’ Kathy was surprised. Suddenly she was being showered with invitations. Well, why not? ‘Okay… fine.’
‘You will? Great!’ Jay seemed unexpectedly pleased. The lift doors opened at the ground floor. ‘Fantastic. I’ll let you have the details tomorrow. See you.’ Jay grinned and waved goodbye as she surrendered her pass and hurried out into the street.
Kathy found Bren at his desk, head bowed over paper, thinning dome gleaming under the fluorescent lights. ‘Hi, Kathy. How’s it going? Look at this stuff. It’s all been piling up while we were working on Verge. Now there’s no escape. I’d much rather be out stomping around the countryside in wellies looking for stiffs. You’re lucky to be tied up in that committee. Cushy number, yeah?’
‘Swap.’
‘Like that, is it?’
‘Yes.’ She hesitated, not wanting to add to his burdens, then said, ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem, Bren. I wondered if I could talk it over with you.’
‘Sure.’ He waved a hand at a chair. ‘Take a pew. I’m glad of the excuse. Want a coffee?’
Kathy said, ‘I’ll get it,’ and went over to the pot brewing on top of a filing cabinet nearby while Bren sorted his papers into piles. ‘It’s to do with that business I asked you about yesterday.’
‘The stuff-up with the lab? Yes, fire away.’
‘Well…’ She sat down, handing his mug over, ‘I followed it up. I went to see the clerk they said was responsible.’
‘Did you?’ He grinned. ‘Blimey, you have got time on your hands. So what was the problem?’
Kathy accepted the rebuke with a shrug. ‘Something about it bothered me. Anyway, when I spoke to her it turned out she didn’t know a thing about it. She’d got a new job because she wanted full-time work, and the lab never questioned her. Instead, someone went to her house and got her to sign something she didn’t even have a chance to read. They never mentioned the Verge case. She was set up.’
Bren frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound like the lab.’
‘No, it doesn’t, does it? And the thing is, the person who went to see her was one of ours, the LO who was implicated in the initial mistake, Paul Oakley.’
‘Blimey, that smells.’ He thought about this, then said, ‘But if the lab accepted it… I mean it’s their business, isn’t it? And Oakley’s left the force now, hasn’t he? Was the woman upset when you spoke to her? Did she want to complain?’
‘No, not at all. She just wants a quiet life.’
‘Well then, I don’t see the problem, Kathy. These things happen.’
‘I think there’s more to it than that. This morning I went to the offices of the Verge Practice, to talk to Sandy Clarke’s secretary.’
Bren looked puzzled. ‘You have been busy.’
‘Going through their records, I found that Sandy Clarke had a visit from Paul Oakley on the morning of the twenty-third of May.’
Bren’s perplexity deepened. ‘Yeah…?’
‘This was nine days after Miki’s body was found, and two days after Oakley took over from Leon as LO on the case. It was also two days after the lab results on the pillow with Clarke’s DNA were first recorded.’
‘Okay. So Oakley wanted to familiarise himself with the scene.’
‘No, he didn’t go up to the apartment. He stayed in Clarke’s office the whole time. The secretary remembers that they were so engrossed that Clarke kept the Mayor waiting for his next appointment.’
There was silence for a moment, then Bren said softly, ‘What are you thinking, Kathy?’
‘I don’t know…’ Now it came to the point, she found she couldn’t bring it out into the open.
‘Come on. You’ve got a theory, haven’t you?’
‘Well…it’s just, the mistake, the cover-up. Like you said, both unlike the lab. And both involving the same officer who pays a private visit to the suspect at the critical time when the crucial information gets lost…’ Again she hesitated, hoping Bren would finish the train of thought for her, save her from actually putting it into words.
‘Go on,’ he said impassively.
‘I thought about that case last year, the SOCO who tried to lose evidence for money.’
Bren said nothing at first, then under his breath, ‘Hell.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you should talk to Brock.’
‘I can’t.’ And this time she knew she couldn’t put it into words, not all of it. ‘Oakley is a good friend of Leon, and Leon himself might have got involved without realising it, and Leon and I have just split up, so it’d look as if I was stirring this up out of spite.’
‘So you want me to take it on.’
She nodded.
‘Well…we can’t just leave it, can we?’
‘I appreciate it, Bren. I mean it. This has been really bothering me.’
‘Don’t worry. You can forget about it now.’
‘Thanks. It’s been weighing me down.’
And that was true, she realised, as she walked away. She literally did feel as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
There was a stack of mail and papers waiting on her desk, too. She flicked through them, then froze at the sight of an envelope addressed to her in immaculate handwriting she knew very well. Leon’s. A rush of possibilities came to her- he had made a terrible mistake, he couldn’t live without her, he wanted to meet again. She almost got on the phone to tell Bren to forget what she’d said about Oakley, but instead she picked up the envelope, seeing it tremble in her hand. Inside was a standard form with the report of forensic tests carried out on her car. There was no accompanying letter, not even a signature.
She sat down with a deep breath and scanned the report, hardly taking it in. No fingerprints, no distinguishing MO. Some fabric traces had been found on the jagged edge of glass remaining in the window frame. Further action requested? Kathy ticked the ‘NO’ box and slipped the form into the file tray. She tore the envelope with its neat handwriting into a dozen small pieces and threw them into the bin.
23
Paul Oakley sounded delighted to get the call from Bren, requesting a meeting. ‘I’ll come to you, Bren,’ he said. ‘Any time it suits. Today? Not a problem. I’ll be there.’
He was under the impression, so Bren soon realised, that the purpose of their meeting was to discuss ways in which his fledgling company, Independent Forensic Services, could assist the Met, and specifically the Serious Crime Branch.
‘Leon put in a plug, did he, Bren? Well, what are mates for, eh? To be hone
st, there’s a fortune to be made out there in what I call the badlands, you know, discreet testing of celebrities’ fag ends for dodgy journos who want to know what diseases they’ve got, that sort of stuff. But that’s not what we’re interested in. With my background in the force, true forensic work is our forte.’
Bren let him talk without interruption, trying to assess the man. He’d had little contact with him before, and tried to keep an open mind, but Oakley’s endless optimism and overenthusiastic sales pitch began to grate.
‘… Rigorous support for rigorous police work has always been my passion, Bren, and I think we can honestly compete with the old hands and come up with a service of absolute dependability, integrity and, most important, attractive cost. You and I both know what a burden it is to your inquiries to know that each and every DNA test is costing your budget three hundred and twenty pounds.
Suppose we could improve on that by, say, twenty per cent. That means twenty per cent more tests, maybe a twenty per cent better success rate.’
‘Cost is important, sure,’ Bren said, breaking into the flow. ‘But reliability has got to be the most important thing.’
‘Absolutely!’
‘And there have been a few slip-ups in the past that have been both costly and embarrassing.’
‘Sure, sure.’ Oakley nodded his head vigorously.
‘We’re just cleaning up the end of the Verge inquiry, and that was badly compromised by a lab mistake. Well, you must know all about that. You were the LO at the time, weren’t you?’
Oakley’s smile didn’t waver, but his eyes became a little brighter. ‘Briefly, Bren, briefly. Then I left the force and went overseas.’
‘Where did you go?’
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