For the millionth time, she dialled his number. And it went straight to his voicemail. Not his voice, just an impersonal one telling her sorry, the person she had called was not available and inviting her to leave a message.
She hung up, sipped her tea, then lit the cigarette and coughed. A deep, hacking cough which made her eyes water. They were now showing the smouldering rubble, the skeletal walls, the whole apocalyptic scene of what had been, until yesterday morning, the World Trade Center. She tried to work out from the images now on the screen – first a tight shot of a fireman in the foreground wearing a face mask, stumbling across a hillock of shifting, smoking masonry, then a much wider shot showing a slab maybe a hundred feet high and a flattened cop car – where the South Tower had been. What was left of it. When had Ronnie got out of it and how?
Her front doorbell rang. She froze. Then there was a sharp rap.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
She slunk upstairs and into the front bedroom, the one that Ronnie used, and peered down. There was a blue van outside in the street, blocking her drive, and two burly men were standing outside her front door. One had a shaven head and was wearing a parka and jeans; the other, with close-cropped hair and a large gold earring, was holding a document.
She lay still, almost holding her breath. There were more raps on the door. The bell rang again, twice. Then, finally, she heard the van drive off.
62
Tosser!
Cassian Pewe had been in Sussex House for a couple of days, but it had taken about three minutes for Tony Case, the Senior Support Officer, to sum him up.
Case, a former police officer himself, ran the administration for this building and the three other buildings that housed between them all the Major Incident Suites in Sussex – at Littlehampton, Horsham and Eastbourne. Among his duties were performing risk assessments for raids, budgeting forensic requirements and new equipment, and general compliance, as well as ensuring that the people who worked here had everything they needed.
Such as picture hooks.
‘Look,’ Pewe said, as if he were addressing a flunky, ‘I want that picture hook moved three inches to the right and six inches higher. OK? And I want this one moved exactly eight inches higher. Understand? You don’t seem to be writing any of this down.’
‘Perhaps you’d like me to get you a supply of hooks, a hammer and a ruler, then you could put them up yourself?’ Case suggested. It was what every other officer did, including the Chief Superintendent.
Pewe, who had removed his suit jacket and hung it over his chair, was wearing red braces over his white shirt. He strutted around the room now, twanging them. ‘I don’t do DIY,’hesaid. ‘And I don’t have time. You must have someone here to do stuff like this.’
‘Yes,’ Tony Case said. ‘Me.’
Pewe was looking out of the window at the grim custody block. The rain was stopping. ‘Not much of a view,’ he moaned.
‘Detective Superintendent Grace was quite happy with it.’
Pewe went a strange colour, as if he had swallowed something to which he was allergic. ‘This was his office?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s really a lousy view.’
‘Perhaps if you call ACC Vosper, she’ll have the custody block demolished for you.’
‘That’s not funny,’ Pewe said.
‘Funny?’ Tony Case said. ‘I’m not being funny. I’m at work. We don’t do humour here. Just serious police work. I’ll go and get you a hammer – if no one’s nicked it.’
‘And what about my assistants? I’ve requested two DCs. Where will they be seated?’
‘No one told me anything about two assistants.’
‘I need some space for them. They will have to sit somewhere fairly near me.’
‘I could get you a smaller desk,’ Tony Case said. ‘And put them both in here.’ He left the room.
Pewe couldn’t work out whether the man was being facetious or was for real, but his thoughts were interrupted by the phone ringing. He answered it with an important-sounding, ‘Detective Superintendent Pewe.’
It was a controller. ‘Sir, I have an officer at Interpol on the line. On behalf of the Victoria Police in Australia. He asked specifically for someone working on cold-case inquiries.’
‘OK, put him through.’ He sat down, taking his time about it, and put his feet up on his desk, in a space between bundles of documents. Then he brought the receiver to his ear. ‘Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe,’ he said.
‘Ah, good morning, ah, Cashon, this is Detective Sergeant James Franks from the Interpol bureau in London.’
Franks had a clipped public school accent. Pewe didn’t like the way desk-jockey Interpol members tended to think they were superior and ride roughshod over other police officers.
‘Let me have your number and I’ll call you back,’ Pewe said.
‘That’s OK, you don’t need to do that.’
‘Security. It’s our policy here in Sussex,’ Pewe said importantly, getting pleasure out of exercising his little bit of power.
Franks repaid the compliment by making him listen to an endless loop of ‘Nessun dorma’ for a good four minutes before he finally came back on the line. He would have been even happier had he known it was a song that Pewe, a classical music and opera purist, particularly hated.
‘OK, Cashon, our bureau’s been contacted by police outside Melbourne in Australia. I understand they have the body of an unidentified pregnant woman recovered from the boot of car – been in a river for some two and a half years. They’ve obtained DNA samples from her and the foetus, but they have not been able to get any match off their Australian databases. But here’s the thing…’
Franks paused and Pewe heard a slurp, as if he was swigging some coffee, before he resumed.
‘The woman has silicone breast implants. I understand these are all printed with the manufacturer’s batch number and each of them has a serial number that’s kept in the hospital register under the recipient’s name. This particular batch of implants was supplied to a hospital called the Nuffield in Woodingdean, in the city of Brighton and Hove, back in 1997.’
Pewe took his feet off the table and looked around hopelessly for a notebook, before using the back of an envelope to scribble down a few details. He then asked Franks to fax through the information on the implants and the DNA analysis of both the mother and the foetus, promising that he would start making enquiries right away. He then pointed out rather crisply that his name was Cassian, not Cashon, and hung up.
He really did need a junior officer to assist him. He had far more important things to deal with than a floater in an Australian river. One of them much more important.
63
Abby was laughing. Her father was laughing too.
‘You stupid girl, you did that deliberately, didn’t you?’
‘No I didn’t, Daddy!’
Both of them stood back, staring at the partially tiled bathroom wall. White tiles with a navy-blue dado rail and a scattering of navy tiles as relief, one of which she had just put on backwards, so that the coarse grey underside was now visible, looking like a square of cement.
‘You’re meant to be helping me, young lady, not hindering me!’ her dad admonished.
She burst into loud giggles. ‘I didn’t do it deliberately, Daddy, honestly.’
For an answer, he patted her squarely on the forehead with his trowel, depositing a small lump of grout.
‘Hey!’ she cried. ‘I’m not a bathroom wall, so you can’t tile me.’
‘Oh yes, I can.’