Mary watched the exchange resentfully, recalling Nicky’s vendetta when she’d joined five months before, to get Craig to order her to take her facial piercings out. It had felt personal then, and the fact that the PA was smiling at the newcomer kicked out the last prop of any defence that Nicky had only been hard on her because she was new. It definitely felt personal now; the PA never smiled at her.
Nicky gestured towards an empty desk on the right-hand side of the squad-room.
“That will be yours, Sergeant, if it suits you? I know you have some difficulty hearing in your right ear, so I thought you might want your left facing towards the room…”
She allowed her sentence to tail off, slightly embarrassed. Even though the sergeant’s hearing deficit was invisible and mostly manageable she was always fearful of causing offence. Police Human Resources staff were zealots on the politically correct ways to deal with people of different ethnicities, creeds and sexualities, but in her opinion their guidance on the handling of disabilities fell very far behind.
Hendron smiled at her warmly. “That’s kind of you. I’ve been completely deaf in it since birth, but my overall hearing is fair enough and I can lip-read, but if someone approaches me from that side it can be a bit difficult.”
Nicky’s confidence revived. “Good. OK, so, I know you’ve already met D.C.S. Craig and D.C.I. Cullen, but they’re both out at the moment. If you wouldn’t mind waiting, I’ll get D.I. Annette Eakin to come across. Did you meet her in December?”
He nodded and smiled. He’d liked Annette.
“She can introduce you to everyone else, although you’ll probably remember most people from working on Drake.” A meaningful glance towards Mary said that she wasn’t on that list. “Also, I know you’re in court next week on that, so you’ll probably want to go over your report. I have a copy if you need it.”
“No, that’s grand.” The D.S. tapped a folder that she hadn’t noticed nestling beneath his arm. “I’ve got everything I need here.” He gestured to the desk. “OK if I get settled before I meet with Annette?”
The PA walked him there on a route that Mary knew was a deliberate choice, passing as it did just six inches in front of her desk. She allowed Nicky to pass by without speaking, but just as the newcomer was walking in front of her she leapt to her feet and thrust out a small hand.
“I’m D.C. Mary Li. Nice to meet you. I’m the other newbie, just started here in March.”
Coming as the greeting did from his right-hand-side, Hendron only heard some of her words, but her extended hand and smile told him what the message was. He smiled back and shook Mary’s hand, surprising her with the warmth and genuineness of his grip. She’d been prepared to hate the interloper simply because Nicky liked him, but now she changed her mind and decided to build on newcomers’ solidarity instead, knowing that would annoy the secretary even more.
It was just about to and Annette had spotted the oncoming storm, so she moved swiftly from her desk and stepped between the two woman, greeting Ryan Hendron as she did.
“Lovely to see you again, Ryan, and great to finally have a D.S. again. Jake left us eighteen months ago for the Hate Crimes Unit and he’s been sorely missed.”
She swung around to face Mary. “D.C. Li has introduced herself I see, and Nicky you know, of course. Any other faces you don’t recognise?”
As the only other people present were Davy and Ash who he’d met before, Hendron shook his head.
“OK, good. We caught a case yesterday so everyone else is out on enquiries.” She gestured to the other women. “Everyone except us. Mary and I are helping the analysts because there’s a lot to get through, and the chief wants it all done yesterday, as usual.”
It prompted a laugh from the D.S., who remembered Craig’s speed of working from before.
“And Nicky here is keeping us all in line.” At the sight of the PA bristling she added hastily. “On the Drake case. He’s conducting his own defence now so there’s been fun and games on that score, but I’ll tell you all about that later.”
She shot Mary a small smile that Nicky didn’t see and then glanced towards the exit, the message clear. Outside now; we need to talk.
“Right, I’m just nipping down to the canteen to get a sandwich. Anyone want anything?”
Shouts of “cheese and onion crisps” and “a Mars Bar” came from the skinniest people there, the analysts, making the middle-aged mother wonder, as she did often did, why the universe wasn’t fair.
She didn’t hang around to debate the point, just headed for the door, responding to Nicky’s, ‘You needn’t think I didn’t see what you did there’ glare with a winsome smile.
Waiting for a decent interval until the PA’s scowl was no longer pointed in her direction and she’d returned to inducting their new D.S., Mary followed Annette out; surprised to find that instead of having already gone to the canteen the D.I. was loitering by the lift.
“I thought you were going downstairs?”
“I was, and I’m heading there soon, but I wanted to talk to you first.”
Mary’s response was to smooth down her sleeveless Wedgewood-blue sundress, something she could only get away with wearing at work because it had been a scorching summer and she had a blazer to wear over it outside the office draped over the back of her chair. Her deliberately slow preening over, she leaned back against the nearest wall and stared Annette right in the eyes.
“About rescuing subordinates by any chance?”
Annette tutted irritably. She was too old to play word games, in fact the older she got the more she thought she was too damn old to play games at all; well, outside the bedroom anyway, but that was a conversation for another place and time. The thing was, and she had noticed this in herself so she had to be honest about it, the older that she got the more boring she found young people. Not the very young, she could watch children playing, her two-year-old daughter in particular, for hours. And actually... not any age up to around twenty; teenagers and children asked questions and bandied words with a mixture of shyness, know-it-all-ness and curiosity that she still found made her smile.
But there was an age, yes, that one, between twenty and thirty, where she found that shyness and curiosity had often dissipated and left nothing but opinionated arrogance behind, joined unfortunately by a large dollop of pity for anyone over thirty and a sense that their own generation had invented anything useful that there was to know. Annette found that the age group possessed none of the charm of children and none of the wisdom of age, and with very few exceptions, her own university-age children not included, people who fell within that decade were a huge pain in the collective, and more importantly her, ass.
With that in mind she stared back at one of her biggest pains currently, answering Mary’s sarcasm with, “No. About why you should need rescuing at all.” The D.I’s voice tightened as she said what needed to be said. “Mary, this war that’s brewing between you and Nicky has to stop. Now.”
She paused, expecting a barrage of “but”s, “she did it”s, and “it’s not my fault”s, and not being disappointed. When they had finally died away Annette spoke again.
“I don’t care.”
Mary spluttered “What?”, sure that she must have misheard, so Annette repeated herself louder, wishing that subtitles would appear with her words to drive them home.
“I. DON’T. CARE.”
She gave a few seconds for the words to sink in and then elaborated.
“I don’t care if Nicky bitched about your piercings, because I’d already told you that they had to come out. I don’t care if she isn’t all warm and fuzzy towards you, because no-one likes everyone and if you expect the whole world to like you then you’ll be sorely disappointed in life. And I don’t care if she won’t give you your own way all the time, because frankly, constable, you can be a massive pain in the ass. But you know what? Even if you were Little Bo Peep and everyone else loved you, Nicky doesn’t have to. The only thing she has to do is be the
best PA that she can possibly be for the chief, which she is. In fact, she’s the best PA in the force, and that means that in the team context she comes above us all-”
Mary had been gasping since the second “I don’t care”, but now she finally found her voice.
“No, she doesn’t! She’s a civilian, and, and…she’s only a secretary!”
Annette could feel her anger rising, but instead of counting to ten and swallowing it as she normally did she made a conscious decision to let rip. Over the previous five months she’d tried kindness, niceness, reasoning and mild chastisement with Mary and nothing had worked, so the gloves were coming off.
“BE QUIET!”
It had the desired effect, clamping Mary’s ‘Summer Berry’-tinged mouth tight shut.
“First, don’t ever, ever be derogatory about someone because of their job. It’s snobbish, stupid and displays your ignorance. And for all you know....” She searched for something she thought indicated extreme intelligence. “Nicky could have a PhD in astrophysics!”
Mary furrowed her brow curiously. “Does she?”
She didn’t but Annette wasn’t about to say that.
“I don’t know.” Her tone became sly. “Why don’t you ask her?”
When there was no taker she carried on.
“Second, you wouldn’t last ten minutes in Nicky’s job. She juggles phones, files, enquiries, court reports, diaries, pathology, forensic and computer data, us, with all our less than charming foibles, and most importantly she handles the chief. How she tolerates his mood at times God only knows, but he would be lost without her.” Her speech slowed to a warning. “And if you ever ask him to choose between you and Nicky, you’ll be out of the squad before you can ask again.”
She decided that it was time for a dramatic exit, and the lift not yet appearing she swept towards the stairs, realising after a few seconds that Mary was following her, unfortunately failing to realise that she had just been dismissed.
Annette decided to use the descent to reinforce her point.
“You will lose any fight with Nicky, that’s all you need to know, so instead of constantly sniping and fighting you need to work out how to get along with her-”
A fire lit the constable’s eyes and her pursuit of her boss speeded up.
“How about her trying to get along with me?”
Annette stopped on the first landing down.
“She doesn’t have to get on with you, Mary, get that through your head. Nicky has been here since before I joined seven years ago and she’ll be here when both of us are dead and gone. You need to make things work between you, not her.” She kept descending. “Now, go back upstairs and start on it, because I want to have my cappuccino in peace.”
The girl in the sundress stood her ground until her boss had disappeared around the corner and then she raced back up to the tenth floor, wondering whether there was any truth in Annette’s words and deciding in her know-it-all fashion to put it to the test.
****
The Police Archives.
The reason the squad-room had been so empty when Ryan Hendron had entered was because most of the detectives were off doing detecting-type things. Quickly. Their haste being a measure of how much they would rather avoid Craig’s anger at the briefing; something that would definitely be coming their way if they didn’t have all the answers that he required.
To that end Aidan Hughes was on his way to Northern Ireland’s Emergency Call Centre, and Andy Angel and Kyle Spence were knee-deep in files; the reason that they were knee-deep in actual paper was the subject of a disgruntled exchange.
“If I get my hands on the numpty whose job it was to scan this lot into the database, he’ll be sorry.”
Kyle snorted in derision, yes, at their predicament, but even more so at Andy’s mild words.
“He’ll be sorry? He’ll be sorry? Is that the best you can do? How about ‘I’ll give him a good kicking’, or ‘I’m gonna put a cap in his ass’? Then you’d be talking!”
He tutted in disgust at a large clump of dust on his suit, tutting even louder when his attempt to brush it off resulted in a long grey smear.
“I mean, look at this! This is my best bloody suit, and just because some lazy glipe of a filing clerk couldn’t be arsed to do his job, it’s going to cost me thirty quid to get it cleaned!”
Andy gawped at him. “Thirty quid? Where are you taking it? Buckingham Palace?”
“That’s what it costs nowadays, Scrooge.” Kyle gave a pointed sniff. “Which just shows how often you get yours done.”
The easy-going D.C.I. was unoffended.
“Yes, well, when you have a kid to support you’ll think differently about throwing money away. You’d be surprised how much cleaning you can manage with a wet sponge.”
Kyle’s immediate smirk said that he could think of far more enjoyable uses for a wet sponge than that. Andy tried not to think about what they might be, or how long it had been since he’d even been on a date, instead diverting his energy into a yawn and a stretch and then rising to his feet to stare down at the mountain of files.
They had started the afternoon optimistically enough, with a search of the crime database for the first fortnight in August two-thousand-and-seven during which Davy had discovered The HTH’s new floor coverings had been officially laid, the ‘official’ part being optimistic thinking in Andy’s book. The chances of a killer waiting for designated floor-laying dates to dump a body suggested a respect for order and process that criminals rarely possessed, which was why an hour before he had extended the search period for a week either side.
Focusing specifically on police interventions but not necessarily arrests in the square mile around the hotel, they’d discovered that the day-time crimes had fallen mainly into the categories of: attempted thefts, successful thefts, mostly shoplifting, and the odd verbal assault. So, Andy as the boss, at least in rank, had taken on Liam’s suggestion that people preferred to dispose of bodies in the dark and narrowed the search hours from eight p.m. to six a.m., and had been shocked by how markedly the crime profile had changed. From petty thefts and harassment, the seriousness had risen to grievous bodily harm, attempted rapes and drug offences, with a few breakings and enterings thrown in on the side.
The effect that an absence of daylight had on the behaviour of human beings was startling, and it made the D.C.I. wonder whether some people were only ever well behaved because of fears that others might witness their misdemeanours, enhanced as that chance was in the middle of the day. He decided to test the theory in his spare time, by researching the crime profiles in countries with the lowest annual amounts of sunlight. If his hunch was correct it could explain a lot about the prevalence of Scandi Noir.
Their night-time sift eventually yielded a total of twenty-eight police attendances within the square mile around The HTH over the four-week search period and Andy managed to persuade the secretary in main archives to print them off, both as a list, sectioned by the streets where they’d occurred, and in a map view. The latter revealed eight incidents within one street of the hotel’s site so he reckoned that was as good a place to focus as any, especially since he’d spotted four of Ash’s seven cases on the list.
The D.C.I. scrutinised the short-list for a moment before speaking, and when he did it was a continuation of his process.
“So… these four are Ash’s cases. Break-ins at the actual HTH site-”
Kyle cut across him, no respecter of the Poirot-like technique of exercising the ‘little grey cells’ aloud.
“You extended the search period and caught two that happened at the end of July, just before the handover when it was still the DoE’s site, so that disqualifies them straight away. The other two after handover match the squatting and drugs ones he mentioned at the briefing.”
Andy, irritated by both the interruption and Kyle’s imperious tone that said he would brook no dispute, decided that dispute the words he most definitely would.
“Why does i
t disqualify them? They still happened on the site of the hotel.”
The ex-spook sighed in a manner that said he pitied anyone who wasn’t as clever as him.
“Because Ash was only looking for crimes that happened between the DoE vacating in February oh-six and The Barr Group taking over the site at the end of July oh-seven, whereas we’re looking at things that happened around the period when the floor was being laid in August, after the site had been bought by the Barrs. That’s when the concrete might have been wet and the bones could have gone in.”
Andy went to correct him and then realised that he was right.
“Why did the girl in archives even give us them then, if they fell outside our dates?”
Kyle answered distractedly. “They weren’t outside our dates. You extended the search period to four weeks, remember.”
Andy glanced at the dates on the list and realised that he was correct. Then he noticed something else; not only did they have everything from the four weeks that he’d specified but the over-enthusiastic clerk had taken the search back to cover the whole of July, giving them an almost seven week period from the first of July during which both the DoE and the Barrs had owned the land at different times.
He was just about to start discarding cases by date when he saw that Kyle had lifted one of the files and was flicking slowly through its first few sheets. Suddenly he stopped, jabbing a page hard.
“Look at that!”
Andy peered at the paper, wondering what he was supposed to be seeing, and when he looked at the file’s front cover and saw a date at the start of July oh-seven his confusion grew.
“That was on the third of July, between exchange of contracts in the middle of June and completion and handover to The Barr Group at the end of July, so technically the place still legally belonged to the DoE then. But it’s not one of Ash’s, so I wonder why he didn’t find it. What was the crime?”
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