We didn’t have a clue what their next move would be. Harlan Shapiro was worth billions. His daughter had been a sprat set to catch a diamond-studded mackerel. The ransom demand had always seemed small to us. Now we knew why. Looked like it was seed money to set up the real deal. The stakes were about to go very high.
Kirsty had been as good as her word and had copied everything the Met had on the case over to me. Maybe there was something in all the data that had been missed.
Del Rio had taken Hannah back to her college rooms. She needed a shower and clean clothes. Suzy had gone with them.
I was sitting with Adrian Tuttle, working our way through the photographs that the SOCO team had collected. They were all digital, not as good as Adrian would have taken, and were displayed on his widescreen Apple monitor.
Doctor Wendy Lee, meanwhile, was looking at the other forensic reports. Sam was reading through the police interviews of the students and staff who had been in the bar, or near it, when the abduction had gone down.
On the screen Adrian Tuttle had yet another shot of the cobbled street. Close-ups of the blood which we already knew was Laura Skelton’s.
He clicked his mouse and moved onto a wide-angle shot of the street. Pretty much an exact version of the same pictures that we had taken when our people had got to the scene. Except that had been later and the police had gone by then.
I moved the mouse and clicked on the next photo.
Another wide-angle shot of the scene from another perspective. But Adrian muttered something and snatched the mouse from me, clicking back to the previous shot.
I looked at the picture, puzzled. He’d seen something I hadn’t. ‘What?’ I asked.
Chapter 77
Adrian Tuttle ignored me, clicking on a series of icons and drop-down menus. The screen split in two and he pulled down more menus.
The picture we had been looking at remained on the left-hand screen. On the right he had called up our own forensic photos that had been taken on the night of the kidnapping. Adrian hadn’t been responsible for those: he had been working on the woman found in the lock-up in King’s Cross.
He flicked through the images until he found a wide-angle shot that matched the one the police had taken. If it was a spot-the-difference competition I couldn’t have circled one, let alone ten.
He pointed to the top left-hand corner of the first picture. ‘See that?’
I shrugged. ‘Just the differences of light,’ I said. ‘Ours were taken later, remember, and they had their lights set up in different positions.’
Adrian shook his head. ‘It’s not a trick of the light.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘It’s an object. It was here in this street when the police SOCO unit were there. And it wasn’t there an hour or so later when we took our photos.’
‘So what is it, then?’ I repeated.
‘I don’t know.’
Adrian clicked on the mouse again, dragging a dotted line around the small area and releasing it to blow up the image. The picture became pixelated, even more blurred.
‘Still none the wiser, Adrian,’ I said.
‘We can do something about that,’ he replied.
He typed on his keyboard and bounced the image across to Sci in the Los Angeles headquarters.
Within minutes, a message pinged back across the Atlantic and Adrian opened the attachment. Our American associate had run the image through a powerful image-enhancement system. The kind of technology that analyses space-telescope imagery of landscapes on Mars.
What we had was the corner and a fold or two of a blanket. Dark brown and red, in a chequered or tartan pattern. One edge of the blanket was folded across but there was part of a label visible, with the letters Q and U on it.
‘Doesn’t tell us much, I’m afraid, Dan,’ said Adrian apologetically.
See, Adrian was good with the detail. He hadn’t even taken the photograph and yet he remembered the smallest discrepancy between the two images. But me? I knew a goddamned clue when I saw one!
Chapter 78
‘Shit!’
DI Kirsty Webb kicked the tyre of her car. But it did little to ease her frustration.
She had thought she’d made a breakthrough in the case but now that she had arrived in Chesham it seemed extremely probable that she was looking at another dead end.
Literally.
The house she had come to had had a sizeable chunk blown out of it. Debris strewn all around. The windows smashed in the small station across the road from it.
She checked the address on the open page of her notebook as she walked up to the Police – Do Not Cross line. No mistake about it. It was the last known address of Adriana Kisslinger.
She ducked under the tape and flashed a quick, humourless smile to the young uniformed officer who approached her. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, flashing her warrant card. ‘DI Webb. So, what have we got?’
‘There’s been an accident.’
He would have said more but DI James appeared in the doorway. ‘Inspector Webb,’ she said, a little puzzled to see her.
‘Natalie.’
‘Have there been some developments? On the Colin Harris case? Is that why you’re here?’
‘It looks that way,’ said Kirsty.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Whatever this was… I’m guessing it wasn’t an accident,’ Kirsty gestured at the house.
‘We were working on the assumption that it was.’
DI Natalie James led Kirsty through the house into a kitchen, the far wall of which was missing. A third of the ceiling was gone, with beams and plaster hanging down and debris strewn across the floor.
Kirsty looked up a little suspiciously. ‘Is it safe?’
The Buckinghamshire DI smiled reassuringly. ‘Come through.’
Kirsty followed her through what would have been a back door to the garden patio off the kitchen. A brick wall had been blown into the next-door neighbour’s garden, with metal wreckage strewn around both. A number of white-suited SOCO officers were working the garden.
‘They’re mainly looking for the rest of his body,’ she explained.
‘Who was it?’
‘Local optician. Peter Chappel. Wasn’t he who you were here to see?’ she asked, puzzled.
Kirsty shook her head. ‘This was the last address I could find for my Jane Doe discovered on Friday night.’
‘With the finger missing?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And you know who she is now?’
‘A tip-off from a collar. Information to barter. Vice Squad alerted us. Her name is Adriana Kisslinger. Romanian. Busted back home for prostitution.’
‘And here?’
‘Working as a contract nurse. Dropped off the radar some months back. She was working at Stoke Mandeville.’
‘So Serious Crimes aren’t going away any time soon.’
‘They won’t when they find this out, no.’
‘You haven’t told them?’
‘I didn’t know, did I? Anonymous tips have to be checked out. I was just following up an old address on a possible ident. You know how it works. So what happened here, exactly?’
‘Peter Chappel had a barbecue planned for this afternoon. Came home from his shop after sorting out some paperwork. Put the wine to chill in the fridge and came out here to get the grill going.’
‘It was a gas barbecue?’
‘Range-style, three-burner. Propane gas cylinder in the metal oven. He turned the dial, pushed the ignite button. And… Boom!’
‘There was a leak?’
‘Looks that way. Like I said, we thought it was accidental.’
‘Think again,’ said Kirsty Webb.
Chapter 79
Chloe, Laura and Hannah all shared a three-bed apartment in a student-accommodation block.