Jane looked around, picturing the flat as it had been when she’d last visited. Now all she could see was lies.
Back in the lab, Lawrence set up three trestle tables covered in plastic sheeting before each rubbish bag they’d brought from Natalie’s was tipped out on them. The stench of rotting food filled the lab. Lawrence wore a mask as he plucked out a chicken carcass that was crawling with maggots. Using a wooden spatula, he picked his way through the mound of potato peelings and apple pie crust. It was a tedious and distasteful process. He set aside the empty food cans for fingerprinting, but it was not until he reached the damp, stinking, newspapers that many of the items had been wrapped in that he came across something of interest.
The newspapers had been flattened out, and the dates were noted in the blurred wet print. One of the headlines from the Evening Standard was ‘Covent Garden Bomb Horror’. Lawrence had to be careful as the sodden paper was falling apart, but the front page had a picture of Jane Tennison standing by an ambulance. Using a magnifying glass and leaning closer to the blurred picture, Lawrence could see a very faint red ring drawn around Jane Tennison’s face, and her name underlined. Sifting further through the bin he found a cutting of the press release with the artist’s impression of the suspect and the interview with Jane.
DCI Crowley sat in his office with DCI Church discussing the investigation.
‘Natalie Wilde must have recognised Tennison from the press conference or bomb scene photographs in the paper,’ Church suggested.
‘Yes, and no doubt the rest of the ASU were rubbing their hands with glee once they realised Wilde knew Tennison from Hendon training college.’
‘Perhaps Wilde was a sleeper when she joined the Met. Lucky in some ways she couldn’t swim otherwise she might have been Commissioner by now,’ Church said, trying to make light of the situation, but Crowley wasn’t amused.
‘Don’t even go there. The press will have a field day when it comes out, which it will if we arrest her and she stands trial. Every one of us will be made to look fools, thanks to Tennison.’
‘She’s young and inexperienced. She wasn’t to know who and what Wilde really was. I’m not pointing any fingers, but the reality is that we all put Jane in this situation with Natalie. Jane was adamant that she could not identify the bomber, but the press release and artist’s impression marked her out as our only witness who saw him.’
‘Whatever I did or didn’t do was for the sake of the investigation and arresting those IRA bastards before they killed and maimed more innocent people. Tennison divulged confidential information to a fuckin’ IRA sleeper and now they are one jump ahead of us!’
‘So, why the phone call from Natalie last night?’ Church asked quietly.
Crowley pursed his lips, not answering. Church leaned forward, patting his pocket for a cigarette pack.
‘She’s coming out of hiding. It doesn’t make sense, unless she’s not going to turn up tonight. Why lie about working late at the bank and being at her flat when she’d already gone to ground? Stanley’s one of my best guys, and he is adamant that she was not aware of being tailed. The way she acted was like a pro, making sure she was safe. I mean, Jesus Christ, for one second Stanley thought there was going to be another bomb explosion at Selfridges.’
‘But she didn’t have a bomb so there wasn’t,’ Crowley said. He pulled out a pack of Marlboro from his jacket pocket and tossed them over his desk to Church. ‘Listen, we’ve had talks about what could be on the agenda… We know that Natalie Wilde is aware of the time and place of tonight’s dinner, but we’ve got high security at the hotel so it’s still going ahead. The Yard’s detective squads have had a dinner dance on Good Friday for years and I’m not letting the IRA stop this one.’
‘I know that! But why did she call Jane?’ Church snapped.
Crowley leaned back in his desk chair and counted off the points on his fingers. ‘One, she was making sure the venue was still the same. Two, she’s checking we had no knowledge, or evidence, of her connection to the bomber. Three—’
‘Three, she takes Tennison out, removing our key witness, and we never catch the bomber. Then another bloody bomb goes off and we’re to blame.’
‘I was coming to that. I think she’s going to turn up. We need a wire on Tennison to record everything Wilde says as evidence against her.’
Church said angrily, ‘Wilde is going there to help Jane with her dress… how on earth is she going to conceal a bloody wire? Have you not considered her safety at all?’
‘Of course I have… OK — the wire won’t work, but we can hide listening devices in the flat instead.’
‘Even then Natalie might stumble across a listening device. Armed officers should arrest her on the pavement before she gets into Tennison’s block of flats.’
‘That’s a fair point,’ Crowley conceded. ‘Safer all round.’
Together they began to select officers to be in position outside Baker Street underground station so they could arrest Wilde on the street. As an extra precaution, they would have two men in the surveillance position opposite Jane’s flat. ‘And we should place Stanley inside the flat with her as additional protection,’ Church added. Crowley agreed.
By the time DCI Church had left Scotland Yard he was confident that Crowley had set a watertight trap for Natalie Wilde. He drove to Melcombe Street to update Jane. When he arrived it was after two o’clock. She was in her dressing gown with her hair in rollers, and had been waiting for him. He spoke calmly as he explained what the plan was: just as he’d promised, Natalie would be arrested before she even got to Jane’s flat.
‘All you have to do is sit tight and wait. You’ll be given a blow-by-blow account over the surveillance radio. Just keep that close by and then you and Stanley will get to the venue by taxi when it’s all clear.’ He smiled. ‘Save the first waltz for me?’
As Church left, Jane seemed surprisingly relaxed, saying that she would start getting herself ready for the evening.
‘Stanley will have do up all the little buttons on my dress,’ she joked, ‘that part was true, you know, I can’t do the dress up by myself.’
After Church had gone, Jane smoked the last cigarette in the pack he had left behind the day before. Holding her other hand up, she saw that it was shaking. She inhaled a deep lungful of smoke, stubbed out the cigarette and went into the bathroom.
Jane spent a long time applying her make-up. She used more foundation than usual, with a damp sponge to smooth the pale ivory liquid down her neck and over her cleavage. She darkened her eyebrows, and outlined her eyelashes and lids in brown eyeshadow and liner before finishing with black mascara. The pale lipstick was enhanced with a little dab of Vaseline, making her lips look shiny as she pouted in front of the mirror.
She jumped as the phone rang, then went into the hall and tentatively picked up the receiver.
It was Michael, asking if she was free for dinner that night. She told him she had a work function, and that she’d call tomorrow to arrange a date over the weekend. She would have liked to have told Michael everything was far from fine, but she couldn’t. She checked her bedside clock and saw that it was after five, so she began taking out her rollers. She brushed her hair loose and was about to pin it up, but decided against it as it looked lovely down. She put on her best underwear and the strapless bra, which reminded her of the awful bridesmaid’s dress she’d worn for her sister’s wedding. Her mother had followed her round, constantly trying to pull up the dress, worried about Jane showing too much cleavage, which had attracted even more attention.