“No, he won’t be. He doesn’t care about me that much.”
“Just shut up and let me think.”
“Look,” said Tracy, as calmly as she could manage. “Why don’t I just go? Really. I’ll go back to Leeds right now, as if none of this ever happened. I can get a bus to Eastvale from the village. You can drive on down to London in Vic’s car, get your passport and finances sorted and disappear. It’ll be all over and done with before my dad gets back from holiday. He needn’t know a thing.” The words sounded hollow and desperate to her even as she spoke them.
“Now it’s you who must think I’m stupid,” said Jaff. “Why?”
“Do you think I’m going to let you just walk out of here and tell the cops everything you know?”
“I won’t tell them anything. I don’t even know anything. Remember? You haven’t told me anything.”
“You know about the coke, the money and the gun. That’s enough.”
“But you’ll be even worse off with me as a traveling companion. You can hardly take me with you, can you? I’ll only slow you down. Just let me walk away now, Jaff. Please.”
Then Tracy saw the look on his face and froze.
“Well,” Jaff said. “It seems to me that gives me just two options. Either I don’t let you out of my sight for a second from now on, or…”
And Tracy went cold to the marrow of her bones when she realized exactly what the second option was.
8
THIS IS NAOMI WORTHING,” SAID DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT Gervaise to the Serious Crimes team assembled in the boardroom late that afternoon. “She’s come up from Birmingham to tell us all about the gun we sent down. Many thanks for the quick work, Naomi.”
Naomi smiled at Gervaise. “Not a problem,” she said. “We got a lucky break.” She was a plump middle-aged woman with graying hair and a benevolent manner, hardly what Annie would have expected in a ballistics expert. She seemed more like Miss Marple than a member of the CSI cast. Her audience was small-only Gervaise, Annie, Winsome, Harry Potter and Geraldine Masterson, who was new to Major Crimes and dead keen to make a good impression.
“I’m not going to bore you with all the technical details,” Naomi began, “but basically we’re dealing with a 9-mm Smith and Wesson automatic, or, more correctly, semiautomatic. This particular model dates from the mid-eighties. It has a four-inch barrel, a sixteen round capacity, and it weighs just under two pounds unloaded. Any questions so far?”
“Isn’t Smith and Wesson an American company?” asked Annie.
“Yes. The pistol in question was manufactured in the USA,” replied Naomi. “Which perhaps makes it a little rarer around these parts than a Czech or a Russian model. I mean, you wouldn’t find one for sale in the local pub. And, of course, a Smith and Wesson would cost you a lot more money.”
“Are they readily available over here?”
“On and off. Though they’re certainly not as common at street level as the Eastern European models I mentioned. Look, if I can perhaps make a guess at where you’re going with this, Detective…?”
“Cabbot. DI Annie Cabbot.”
“Yes, well, I wouldn’t let the fact that this pistol is American in origin influence your search for its owner and user. The odds are that it has been floating around the UK since the nineties, if not before. It’s a very popular, simple and practical piece of equipment, and ammunition for it isn’t hard to come by.”
“Did you say ‘user,’ Naomi?” Gervaise asked.
Naomi turned to her. “Yes. That’s what I was about to get to. The reason I came up here, rather than simply filing a written report. Not that a trip to Eastvale isn’t always a pleasant prospect.”
“Do tell,” said Gervaise.
Naomi helped herself to coffee, added milk and sugar and opened her file folder. “There were two rounds missing from the magazine. Bullets and casings. That’s often the case with automatics, as you probably know. They eject the casing after firing. A clever criminal picks up his spent casings and disposes of them, but sometimes people are careless, or in a hurry, and leave them lying around.”
“Any idea when the shots were fired?” Annie asked.
Naomi shook her head. “We can’t ascertain when they were fired by examining the pistol,” she said. “Only that they were fired from that magazine.”
“But perhaps even from a different gun?”
“It’s possible, I suppose, but unlikely. Unfortunately, as I said, we don’t have the spent casings, so we can’t check them against the firing pin to make sure. Unless someone’s trying to pull a very elaborate trick, though, I would say there’s no reason to doubt that the bullets were fired from this pistol.”
“I see. Sorry, please go on.”
“Naturally, we then consulted the National Firearms Forensic Intelligence Database, which is a bit of a mouthful, so I’ll refer to it as the NFFID in future. There we discovered that a pistol of this description had been used to commit an unsolved murder in November 2004. This information, of course, is not conclusive. It merely refers to a case number and the general model and kind of ammunition consistent with that we found in the magazine, but it piqued our curiosity. The next step involved shooting the gun under controlled circumstances in order to obtain a sample of a used bullet we could then run through IBIS-that’s the Integrated Ballistics Identification System-don’t we just love acronyms? The result is that we found a definite link between this pistol and the 2004 crime. The next step we need to carry out, for absolute certainty, is to get hold of one of the actual bullets retrieved from the victim and do a physical examination, side by side, through a comparison microscope. This is the kind of thing you see on TV crime programs, lands and grooves. Looks very sexy on screen.”
“And where would you get hold of one of these bullets?” Annie asked.
“West Yorkshire. I’m not sure exactly where they are, but they should still be locked in an evidence room somewhere.”
“Where did the shooting take place?”
“Woodhouse Moor. Leeds.”
“I’m not sure where they keep their cold case exhibits,” said Gervaise, “but that’ll probably be Weetwood, on Otley Road. On the other hand, you might be better off trying the Homicide and Major Enquiries team first. We may be the largest single county force in the country, but West Yorkshire’s got a much bigger urban population than we have, and they’ve got all the specialists. We’ve got Wildlife Crime officers, and they have a Homicide squad. They’d probably be the ones to handle a case like that.”
“Thanks,” said Naomi. “I’ve dealt with them before. That’ll be my next stop.”
“So what can you tell us pending a physical comparison?”
Naomi sipped her milky coffee. “Not much more, I’m afraid. You’ll have to get the rest of the details from the investigating team. All I know is that on the fifth of November, 2004, a suspected drug dealer called Marlon Kincaid was shot to death near a bonfire site on Woodhouse Moor.”
“Any witnesses?” Annie asked.
“Not according to what little information I’ve got. As I say, though, the NFFID and IBIS files are skimpy on details. I’m sure the detectives involved will be able to tell you a lot more.”
“Bonfire Night, though,” said Annie. “Fireworks might be useful to cover up the noise of gunshots.”
“Indeed,” said Naomi. “Oh, there is one more thing. It may be important. We examined the pistol for fingerprints, of course, and we found only Patrick Doyle’s, the ones you sent us, on the grip and barrel, which is consistent with his checking to see if it was loaded. We did, however, find two clear sets of prints on the magazine itself, only one of them belonging to Patrick Doyle. People often forget that. They have to load it by hand, you see, and they hardly ever think of wearing gloves. The magazine remains protected inside the handle, and the prints are preserved. There are also several partials on the cartridges, and they also appear to match the mystery prints on the magazine.”