‘I can’t get into this, Wellard. You know that.’
‘Yeah – and that’s what’s wrong with the world. No one will say it. It’s bloody McCarthyism all over again.’
‘I don’t give a stuff about McCarthyism, Wellard. Just finish the sodding thing. You only have to tick the right bloody boxes. A trained seal could do it.’
He returned to clicking around the screen. Flea closed the door and went to her desk, where she sat, gazing blankly through the open door into the locker room, trying for the hundredth time to focus on the idea sitting just out of her line of vision.
A Christmas card was taped to one of the lockers, the first, as solitary and naked as a January snowdrop. Everything else – the boots on the rack in the corner, the noticeboard with all the filthy postcards and stupid cartoons – had been there for months. Years. They’d been there when Thom had run Misty over – she was sure of that because she remembered sitting in exactly this place trying to work out what the rotten-meat stench was. She hadn’t known at the time that it was coming from her own car parked outside. That the smell of decomposing flesh in the boot was being carried into the building by the air-conditioning system.
Air-conditioning. She drummed her fingers on the table. Airconditioning. She felt the electromagnetic field crackle around her skull and her neck, pushing goosebumps up on her arms. What alarms were kicking off in the back of her head? The exchange of gas. The replacement of old air for new. She thought of where Misty was now: the way the air made its way up from the cave deep in the rock, along unseen passages, tiny crevices no wider than a finger, and out, out, out into the open.
And then, in a rush, it came to her. She stood and pulled out her project file, a loose-leaf folder full of all the things that needed doing in the unit day after day, leafed quickly through it until she found the notes from the search yesterday. Shakily she pulled them out, spread them on the desk and stood with her hands on the table, poring over them, the whole thing slotting into place in her head.
Air shafts. That’s what she’d been missing. The fucking air shafts.
Someone knocked at the door.
‘Yes?’ Half guiltily she shovelled the paper back into the file, turned her back to the desk. ‘What?’
Wellard appeared. He was holding a pad with a message written on it in his untidy handwriting. ‘Sarge?’
‘Yes, Wellard.’ She leaned back on the desk to hide the file. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Got a job. Just got the call.’
‘What sort of job?’
‘Arrest warrant.’
‘Who are we supposed to be arresting?’
‘Don’t know. They told us to expedite our journey to the RV point. No firearms coding, but sounds pretty hefty all the same.’
She looked at him steadily. ‘You do it, Wellard, you act up for me. I’m taking the afternoon off.’
Wellard always stepped in as acting sergeant when she couldn’t be there but usually a handover would be scheduled in advance. He frowned. ‘You’re rostered for today.’
‘I’m ill. I’ll self-certify.’
‘You’re not ill.’ He looked at her suspiciously. ‘Hey. It’s not ’cos of what I said, is it? You know, when I said you won’t catch me calling a n—’
She held up a hand to stop him, her heart racing. ‘Thank you, Wellard. No. That’s not why.’
‘Then, what?’
If she told him the way her mind was careening along he’d lose it with her. He’d tell her she was obsessed and that she should let it go. He’d make fun of her or, worse, threaten to tell the inspector. Or give her a lecture. Or even try to come with her. Anyway. She’d be fine. Nothing was going to happen. ‘Because I’m sick. Swine flu – whatever looks good on the forms. I’m going home now to put my feet up.’ She bundled the file into her rucksack and swung it over her shoulders, straightened and gave Wellard a bright smile. ‘Good luck with the arrest. Don’t forget to put in for the acting’s allowance.’
37
‘It’s not just the car park he’d have had access codes for,’ said Turner. ‘He’d have been able to walk round the whole building, in and out of all the offices. He might as well have been invisible.’
Caffery, Turner and Prody were crammed into Prody’s office. The heating was on full and the windows were steamed up. The smell of paint and sweat hung heavy in the air.
‘There’s CCTV in the car park.’ Caffery was standing in the corner, hands in his pockets. ‘If he put the tracker on the car we’d have footage of it. Has anyone looked at that?’
The two other men were silent.
‘What?’
Turner shrugged. Didn’t meet his eyes. ‘Camera’s broken.’
‘Again? That was the excuse when the sodding unit car was stolen. You’re telling me it’s happened again?’
‘Not again. It just never got fixed in the first place.’
‘Oh, great. How long’s it been on the blink?’
‘Two months. He was the handyman – it was kind of his job to fix it.’
‘And how long has this wanker been working for us?’
‘Two months.’
‘Christ, Christ, Christ.’ Caffery put his knuckles to his head. Dropped them, exasperated. ‘I hope we folded his fucking napkin when we served Martha up to him on a plate.’
He picked up the paperwork on Prody’s desk that had been faxed over from Human Resources. A photo was stapled to the top. Richard Moon. Thirty-one. Employed by the police as a ‘maintenance officer’ for the last year and at MCIU for the last eight weeks, doing general jobs around the building: painting, fixing lights, nailing skirting-boards, replacing broken lavatory cisterns. Planning Martha’s abduction and how best to indulge his habits without being caught.
It was Prody who’d made the connection. He’d remembered a note he’d found on his desk that morning and had crumpled up in his wastepaper basket. A message from the handyman Moon: Sorry about the smell of paint. Don’t touch the radiator. The Barack Obama CSM, who knew a little about handwriting, was sure they’d been written by the same person who’d sent the notes to the Bradleys. Then someone had pointed out that the notes to the Bradleys and the Costellos had been written on paper that looked suspiciously like the notepads issued to them from HQ. The jacker had been using the force’s own stationery to write his sick messages on. How brilliant was that?
Moon had been at work this morning. But he was rostered off duty at midday and had left the building just as the meeting with the CSM had started. He’d been here, right under their noses. Caffery stared at his photo, remembering the guy he’d seen around the place a couple of times. Tall, if he recalled rightly, overweight. Usually dressed in overalls, though in the photo he wore a khaki T-shirt. He was white, with an olive skin, a broad forehead, wide-spaced eyes, a full mouth. Dark hair cut close, probably a number three, not a number two. A number two took maintenance. Caffery looked at the eyes. He tried to see something reflected in them. The eyes that had seen God-only-knew-what happen to Martha Bradley. The mouth that had done God-only-knew-what to her.
Christ, he thought, what a total feast of snakes this was. Heads would roll.
‘He’s got no cars registered to his name,’ Turner said, ‘but he was driving himself to and from work. Lots of the boys remember seeing him.’
‘I saw him too,’ Prody said dully.
The two men turned to him. He was sitting in his chair, his shoulders slumped. He hadn’t spoken much. He was furious with himself that he hadn’t picked it up sooner. For a while Caffery had been tempted to use it as a stick to beat him with, to ram home the point that if he’d had his head properly locked on this case they might have picked up Moon earlier. But Prody was ashamed enough already. If there were lessons to be learned, he was doing all the teaching himself.
‘Yeah – he had a car.’ Prody gave them a thin, sick smile. ‘And guess what it was?’