‘Google is the main search engine used,’ Walling said. ‘Obviously it’s impossible to tell whether these searches were done by Jackie or Eddie,’ he explained. ‘I trawled through loads of stuff to see what had been visited and one thing sort of stood out. I mean, it was mostly rubbish, but when I started looking at the history pages I saw there had been a series of searches for doctors’ surgeries and health centres in London, which I found interesting.’
‘Why interesting?’ Angela asked.
Walling shrugged. ‘Anything a bit odd interests me,’ he said. Henry glanced at him and thought, A jack speaking, and knew that Walling should have been better looked after, should still have been a detective somewhere. Henry waited. Although curious, he knew there was nothing more annoying for a cop than to be interrupted in full flow, especially when the cop thought he was going to reveal something vital. Walling was on a little stage, the centre of attention, and needed his few moments of fame.
‘I went into every site visited and then dug into the sites as well. Just curiosity, really, but, like I said, it just struck me as odd and I assumed this was because of something maybe Eddie had been investigating. These searches, by the way, are about six months old. The history pages have never been wiped, so there was a lot of crap on it, if you’ll pardon my French. Most of the recent stuff doesn’t have any sort of pattern to it. People look at such rubbish.’
A yawn tried to break from Henry’s mouth. He held it back, his face rippling with the effort. He caught Angela’s eyes and she opened them wider, seductively. A quick memory of her straddling him on the single bed flitted in and out, her lovely boobs hanging just above his face. Hell, a deputy chief constable. What a coup! Not that there were many like Angela Cranlow. Mostly they were gnarled, angry looking blokes and the idea of sex with them, even from a female or gay perspective, was pretty bleak.
‘… So, I went on every site visited,’ Walling said, and in true dramatic fashion, revealed the best last, ‘and this is the one that’s the key.’
He clicked on it. The computer thought for a moment and then the connection was made, revealing the site of the Empress Medical Centre, Earl’s Court, London. The homepage showed a photograph of a newly built, single storey building which could have been any health centre anywhere in the country.
There was a menu on the right side of the page: general practitioners, the practice team; how to use the surgery: repeat prescriptions; services available to patients; well baby clinic; zero tolerance — violent patients; self treatment of common illnesses; useful telephone numbers; locums.
He moved the cursor over each one and most of them expanded into a sub-menu.
‘Mostly uninteresting stuff until we get to this one,’ Walling said. He clicked on the ‘locums’ icon. This produced a further list of names and he clicked on one, which opened into a photograph of an Asian woman by the name of Dr Sabera Ismat. ‘Ring any bells?’
All three observers peered closely at the photo.
Henry’s brow creased. The woman looked familiar and somewhere deep in his subconscious he believed he should know why, but he could not drag it up. She was a very attractive woman with sparkling eyes and an infectious smile, useful qualities for a doctor.
‘No.’ Henry looked at the other two. They shook their heads.
‘OK,’ Walling said, clearly relishing this. ‘What about this then?’
He clicked on the ‘minimize screen’ button and the photograph disappeared and the blue background of the desktop reappeared. He clicked through a number of programmes. ‘This is a programme that is used to download digital photos from a camera on to a computer to store them, view them, mess around with them, print them off — whatever. The photos I’m about to show you were put on about six months ago, according to the properties.’
‘I’ve got one on my computer I use for my holiday piccies,’ Jenny chirped up.
‘Yeah, they’re pretty common. There’s a lot of photos in this file, mainly of Eddie Daley and Jackie Kippax on holiday, by the looks of them. But this is the interesting one, filed under “Work”.’ He clicked on a file icon and a series of small photographs unfolded which focused in on a woman sitting at a table outside a restaurant, with some other people. Walling selected one and expanded it to full screen size. In it, the woman was laughing at something, her head thrown back, revealing her long, slender, dark neck. An Asian man was sitting next to her, smiling.
Henry’s mouth opened slowly.
It was a photograph of the woman doctor, Sabera Ismat.
But there was something on the photograph that had caught his eye, which made him go quite weak.
‘There’s about ten photos in this file,’ Walling said, ‘mainly of this woman sitting having a meal.’ He minimized the photo and clicked on a few more of them to prove his point. ‘It’s the locum.’ Walling did a bit of rearranging of the size of the frames and put two photos side by side, one from the health centre website and one of the digital photos. ‘Dr Sabera Ismat.’
He fiddled about a bit more and then worked his way back through the health centre website and clicked open the list of GPs, clicked on a name and opened one of the files. ‘Dr Sanjay Khan. Dr Ismat was sitting with this guy at the restaurant.’ He again minimized the screen and went back to the file with the downloaded digital photographs, picked one and enlarged it. It was a fairly grainy image of two people embracing. ‘The two doctors, I’d say.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Angela Cranlow said, quickly checking her watch. She was obviously short of time. ‘Why are you showing us these?’ She looked at Henry, puzzled.
Henry already knew why, but he still let Walling have the floor.
‘Aha,’ Walling said, sounding like a second-rate magician. He tabbed back to a better photograph of the couple at the restaurant. In the background was another pretty Asian lady. ‘One of Eddie Daley’s locate/trace jobs, don’t you think?’
‘What has this to do with Darren Langmead?’ Angela asked. ‘Like you said, these are six months old?’
‘Nothing at all, I’d say,’ Walling said. ‘Just hang on …’ Using the zoom tool on the programme, he focused in on the Ismat woman, bringing her closer and closer, moving down away from her face to her neck. ‘Now what do you see?’
Henry kept quiet.
Jenny said, ‘A necklace.’
‘Yep.’ Walling glanced over his shoulder, smiling at his audience. He reached for a piece of paper on the desk and flipped it over. It was a copy of Lancashire Constabulary’s latest intelligence bulletin, solely devoted to an update of the murder of the female found six months earlier near Blackpool, her body having been burned to a crisp. There was a photograph of the facial reconstruction and also of the unusual necklace, believed to have been worn by the woman, which had turned up when the conscience of the man who had found the body got the better of him.
The two women gasped.
Henry had already done his gasping internally.
The necklace on the bulletin was exactly the same one as around the neck of the woman in the photograph, an image, Henry assumed, that had been taken by Eddie Daley. Henry picked up the bulletin and held it alongside the computer screen, comparing the facial reconstruction to the actual face of the woman in the photo.
‘Pretty bloody good match,’ Walling said. He raised his eyebrows.
The implications of this sank in immediately. Henry placed a hand on Walling’s bulky shoulder, realizing that if he could get him a job as an operational detective again, he would have to lose some weight.
‘Brilliant,’ he said.
‘My office, now, Henry,’ Angela Cranlow said.
‘What’ve we got then?’ She was sitting on the business side of her wide desk, dwarfed by its size. Her back was to the window, which overlooked the playing fields at the front of HQ.