And now this new operation was going to demand that she actually lived in this world that was not — but was supposed to have been — a happy-ever-after one. It was mad. It was irrelevant. She focused her attention back on the man they were calling Costain, and set about memorizing him as if one day she’d have to profile him.
Lofthouse pointed to the round table in the middle of the room. ‘Please, sit.’
Quill, aware that he was eyeing her interrogatively, even a bit desperately, made to do so but she held up a hand. ‘Ah, no. Wait.’ They all halted. She toyed with her charm bracelet for a moment, lost in thought, then pointed from each person to a chair. ‘Jimmy, you go there. Tony there. Kevin there, Lisa there, please.’
They moved around to their assigned places, feeling rather amazed. None of them had witnessed a detective superintendent having a nervous breakdown before.
‘I’m leaving the name of this new operation,’ she said, passing out the documents, ‘to you.’
Quill gaped at that too. There was a reason that job and subject names were picked from lists of randomly chosen words. What if he suffered a fit of madness and called it after the target? Speaking of which: ‘What’s the objective?’
‘Investigate what happened in that interview room. Find out who killed Robert Toshack.’
Quill’s heart sank.
‘And how, because the pathologist’s tests found no evidence of poisoning or physical assault.’
‘So. .’ he couldn’t quite find the words for a moment. ‘How are you so sure he didn’t die of natural causes, ma’am?’ He wanted her to confirm he was in the clear.
‘Because, according to the many experts I’ve spent a long time talking to, there are no natural causes able to do that.’
He looked to his insanely small team. They looked back, equally flabbergasted. They had, as the old joke about the stolen toilets went, nothing to go on.
‘You’ll stay at Gipsy Hill.’ She finally managed a smile. ‘Lisa, you’ll finally be able to join them. But I’ve found you a nice new Ops Room, to keep you out of the general population.’
Two days later, Quill staggered into the Portakabin, carrying an ancient overhead projector he’d found in the stores at Gipsy Hill, and had heaved the quarter-mile back to the trading estate across the way. The inside of this new ‘Ops Room’ looked as unpromising as the outside. An Ops Board that had been improvised from a cork board found at the market, but empty except for a single photo of Toshack. Some desks. A stack of chairs. One desktop PC, perhaps even more ancient than those in Gipsy Hill. A new kettle. He looked out of the window towards the building in which he’d previously worked. He could smell the distrust even from here. ‘Gone all Professional Standards on us, have you?’ That had been Mark Salter when Quill had popped into the canteen this morning. He’d said it with a smile, but it hadn’t extended to his eyes.
They’re sure we’re looking for a mole. And Lofthouse has bloody kept us here on the Hill to do it. When he’d stopped Lofthouse on the way out of that insane meeting, she’d firmly told him there was nothing further to discuss. And that tone in her voice was one he’d learned to pay attention to.
Ross entered and nodded to him, still wearing that face of hers that looked like it might one day end up on a wanted poster or a stamp. Understandable. The only change for her was that now her anonymous building had slightly more people in it. He made tea as first one car and then another stopped outside, and first Sefton, then Costain, entered, having both taken the shortest possible route from vehicle to door. At least Lofthouse had realized how neither of those two would be eager to show his warrant card at the gate of Gipsy Hill, especially since now there was a strong possibility that someone might write down the name on it, so that a visit to friends and family could be arranged. Not that they weren’t still vulnerable out here. Not just politically but physically.
‘So,’ he said to his unlikely unit now it had been assembled, ‘what have we got?’
‘A nagging fear that this is all bollocks, Jimmy,’ replied Costain.
They went over every detail. Quill then called the pathologist to hear it for himself, but it was open and shut. No known toxin. No known medical condition. An impossibility.
There were only a few avenues of investigation that he could even think of as places to begin with. He next set his team to the task of checking out the records of everyone who’d been in and out of Gipsy Hill on the day Toshack died.
‘Okay,’ said Sefton, but with an enormous internal sigh written on his face. And this was just the first day.
‘This,’ said Costain, ‘is why we became UCs: to share a computer in a Portakabin, processing data.’
‘Well,’ said Quill, limiting himself to a knowing look at Costain, ‘just think — it could have been so much worse.’
And that was the first week, with the sound of the rain pounding on the roof of the Portakabin, and the slow sensation of false trail after false trail coming to an end. Since the time frame to be checked was the early hours of New Year’s Day until the following morning, no civilians had visited, except Toshack’s brief. ‘So it’s either a copper or he “ingested the poison” before he arrived at Gipsy Hill,’ said Costain.
‘You reckon that’s likely?’ asked Quill.
‘No,’ said Costain casually, as if it was none of his concern anyway.
This felt like internal exile, as if somehow Lofthouse expected Quill to accuse himself of something. The week lasted forever, and Quill underwent several pints of therapy, on his own, each night.
It was early on a Monday morning, before the other two had come in, that Ross looked up from the wheezing PC and caught his eye. She, in her quiet way, had dug in, had become the one who was too busy to make tea. Quill realized that, for her, doing something that still even tangentially involved Toshack must be some sort of lifeline. And he wondered if it would actually be a mercy to her to cut that line and to let her get on with life.
‘I’ve found something in the Goodfellow case notes,’ she said.
He went over, and she pointed out the entry: ‘Lassiter, the driver of the Fulham Road security van. He lost a lot of blood, too. It was assumed that he’d been beaten, but I think someone was a bit quick to jump to that conclusion, ’cos the injuries I’ve got here aren’t entirely consistent with that explanation.’
‘You’re saying getting people’s blood to explode in all directions might be someone’s modus operandi?’
‘It’s just one data point, so I’m not, not yet.’
Quill sighed. ‘Listen, do you want to go and check out the scene of the crime over at the Hill? The other two bloody can’t, but while it’s just you and me here. .’
‘I think that’s a reasonable risk.’
‘You think Tony’s dodgy,’ said Ross, as they crossed the road and headed towards the rear gate of Gipsy Hill.
Quill neither confirmed nor denied it. ‘I do sometimes think there might be some other reason for this weird unit assignment. Maybe to shake something out.’
‘So why us too?’
Quill shrugged. He saw that it was Josh Stuart stationed at the back gate, and actually got a smile out of him as he showed him his warrant card and then Ross’ ID. Ross seemed to be trying to make herself invisible, and she was doing a good job. They headed down the garden path and out of earshot.
‘I need this op to be real,’ she said. ‘Is it?’
Quill stopped. They were by that strange pile of earth, and still nobody had planted that bloody tree or whatever it was going to be. ‘You know as much as I do.’
‘Only, you three already have that look on your faces. .’