She switched on her computer, but before she could check the overnights for any further progress, Sam Evans, freshly returned from the Lake District, perched on the corner of her desk. He was fractionally too close, just marginally in her personal space. It was a thing that men did unconsciously to diminish women, she thought. To put us on the back foot.
But with Sam, it never bothered her. He was one of those few men who were entirely relaxed around lesbians. There was nothing threatening in his closeness. If Paula was honest, she liked Sam. She knew he was nakedly ambitious, always out for number one. What amused her was that he thought nobody apart from the chief had sussed him. And if you knew what somebody’s weakness was, it was easy to circumvent it. She liked Sam’s quick mind. And, curiously, she liked his smell. His cologne was spicy, with a hint of lime, but it didn’t completely erase the maleness of his natural odour. Mostly it was the smell of individual women that pleased Paula, but Sam was a rare exception and she knew it made her more susceptible to his charm.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Ten o’clock briefing in the middle of a high-profile murder. What’s going on with the guv’nor?’
Paula pulled a face. ‘No idea. I assumed she was briefing the incident room at Northern about Daniel Morrison and talking to Central about the search for Seth Viner.’
Sam shook his head. ‘She was at Northern at half past eight. Sorted out the actions for the day and she was out the door by ten to nine. My spies tell me she’s not been at Central yet.’
Kevin was openly eavesdropping on their conversation. ‘And she was on the missing list yesterday morning. When you called in from the crime scene, she wasn’t here.’ He went to refill his coffee then joined Paula and Sam.
‘Where was she?’ Paula asked.
‘Don’t know. It took her a while to get there, though. So not anywhere in the immediate vicinity.’
‘And she wasn’t around yesterday evening,’ Sam said.
‘She was,’ Paula said. ‘When I texted her about Jessica Morrison’s heart attack, she was there soon as.’
‘Earlier, I mean. I came back here, thinking she’d be around. I’ve got news and I wanted to talk to her, but she wasn’t here. Stacey said she’d been and gone. Not a word about where.’ Sam folded his arms confidentially and said, ‘You think its lurve? You think her and Tony have finally noticed what everybody else has known for years?’
Paula snorted. ‘Give me a break. Those two are never going to be an item. He’d analyse it to death. He’d have diagrams all over his whiteboard.’
‘I don’t know,’ Kevin said. ‘She can be very imposing. Very commanding. If anybody can get Tony to shut up shop and pay attention to her, it’s the guv’nor.’
‘Maybe that’s the real reason he’s not working this case,’ Sam said. ‘Maybe it’s got nothing to do with budget. You know what she’s like. She wouldn’t have him working with us if they were getting it on in their spare time. She’d see it as a conflict. And she’d knock it into touch. She’s a law unto herself when it comes to running a case, but as far as internal discipline is concerned, she doesn’t like it when we step out of line.’
‘Don’t I know it,’ Kevin muttered. Years ago, Carol had been instrumental in his disgrace and demotion. That she had also been the agent of his rehabilitation made him feel he would never escape being in her debt. He’d tried hard to like her, but he’d never quite succeeded. ‘If that’s what’s going on, she’s chosen the worst possible time for it. With Blake on our backs, we need all the help we can get. I know I used to think Tony was a weird fuck, that he didn’t have any place on our team. But I’ve learned different. And I think we need him now.’
As he spoke, Sam straightened up, cleared his throat and said loudly, ‘Morning, ma’am.’
Carol swept in, coat spreading around her as she strode to the conference table. How much had she heard? Paula wondered. ‘I couldn’t agree more, Kevin,’ Carol said, dumping bags and coat on the floor by her chair. ‘But Mr Blake says we need to cut our budget. So if we need expertise, we have to find it on the cheap. Apparently the National Crime Faculty has some baby profilers they’d like to try out in the field. Halle-fucking-lujah.’ She looked at them all in turn and grinned complicity. ‘Is there any coffee in this godforsaken hole?’
Five minutes later, they were all settled in their usual positions. Paula couldn’t help wondering whether Sam was right. Or half-right, maybe. Perhaps there was a man in Carol’s life. Just not Tony. One who brought out her appetite for battle, apparently, if her energy this morning was anything to go by. She took their reports one by one, filleting the key elements and suggesting new avenues of approach. But it was clear by the end of their accounts that there was almost nothing to take them any further forward in the case of Daniel’s murder and not much more as far as Seth’s disappearance was concerned.
Kevin had followed up on Asif Khan’s tale of the comedy producer who was looking for young talent. He’d spoken to commissioning editors at the BBC in Manchester, Glasgow, London and Cardiff, but nobody had ever had a pitch remotely like this. And there was certainly nothing in the pipeline that might fit even loosely the version Daniel had given his friend. ‘So it’s a dead end.’ He pushed his notebook from him. ‘To be honest, I thought it’d go nowhere, but you gotta cover the bases.’
‘You do,’ Carol agreed. ‘And we do it better than most.’
Paula lifted her hand a few inches. ‘Can I just check, chief? Are we working on the basis that these two cases are linked? Daniel and Seth?’
Carol nodded. ‘Good question, Paula. I think we have to acknowledge that there’s a strong probability we’re looking at one perp. We need to be cautious at this stage. Because coincidences do happen. And so do copycats.’
‘But from what Seth’s girlfriend said to me, this JJ’s been stalking Seth online for ages. Surely that precludes a copycat?’ Paula said.
‘That’s making a lot of assumptions,’ Sam said, amazingly up to speed for a man who’d been a hundred miles away for days. He was such a hot dog, Paula thought with a trace of resentment. ‘It’s assuming Seth’s been abducted, not just gone underground for some reason nobody knows about or nobody’s letting on about. It’s also assuming that, if he has been abducted, it’s the person he’s been talking to online, this JJ. Who might just be straight up.’ He held up a hand to still their noisy protests. ‘He might be. It’s possible. I’m just agreeing with the guv’nor. We need to keep an open mind. And it could be an opportunist copycat.’
‘No, it couldn’t,’ Kevin said. ‘Seth was already missing before we found Daniel’s body.’
‘We’d released Daniel to the media as a missing person,’ Stacey pointed out. ‘It’s possible.’
Paula watched Carol cover her eyes with her hand and wished she’d kept her mouth shut. ‘Point taken,’ she said hastily.
Carol looked up and gave her a faint smile. ‘You lot are very feisty this morning,’ she said.
‘Picking it up from you, boss,’ Kevin said. ‘So where do we go from here?’
‘Let’s hear what Stacey has to say first,’ Carol said.
Stacey treated them all to a neat little smile. ‘I’ve not had much luck with facial-recognition software and the city-centre CCTVs. They’re too low-res, and the angles are pretty crap, frankly.’
‘I sometimes wonder why we bother with all this surveillance, ‘ Carol said. ‘Whenever we need it, nine times out of ten it’s as much use as a chocolate teapot.’
‘If Stacey was running the game, none of us would have a single secret left,’ Sam said.
Stacey looked surprised and pleased at what she took as a compliment. ‘The cameras would work a lot better, that’s for sure,’ she said. ‘As far as the other stuff goes, RigMarole seemed to be the place to start. I’ve had access to Seth’s computer and there’s a lot of chat with this JJ character. On the surface, it’s all pretty innocuous, and very similar to shedloads of other online chatter. But he is definitely holding out a hand to Seth. And the interesting thing is that his personal pages on Rig have disappeared. They were closed down the afternoon Seth went missing. Which gives more weight to Paula’s assumption, I’m afraid.’