"Well, let's make sure they've got something to look for, Dr.
Kingston," she whispered. She put her arms round his neck and kissed him, then lowered her hands and started to undo his belt. Nick Kingston grasped her hair, pulling her head back, and explored her mouth with his tongue. If he imagined she were the nineteen-year-old maths student he'd shagged last night, he might just about manage it.
He was beginning to find Melissa repellent and sensed it would lead to trouble between them.
Chapter 2
I made inspector bang on schedule, but by then I had a wife, Vanessa, and a mortgage, and had been sucked into a way of working that wasn't negotiable with much in the outside world. I'd had a brief spell in CID and enjoyed it, so when the opportunity came to head the branch at Heckley I grabbed it with enthusiasm and outstretched arms. The job fell into them and Vanessa fell out. My dad was dying of cancer at this time and I desperately needed a rock to lean on. I rang Dave Sparkington.
"Could I speak to Sparky, please?" I said when he answered.
"Hiya, Shagnasty," he responded. "Congrats on the move. Sorry I didn't make the bash but I wasn't invited."
"We haven't had it yet. Do you still want to be a DC?"
There was a silence, apart from his breathing, then he said: "Are you serious?"
"Deadly. There's an aide ship coming up. Interested?"
"You bet!"
He did six months as aCID aide and sailed through the twelve-week course at Wakefield training college. The day he joined us he came into my office carrying six pairs of white socks and insisted that we change into them, right there and then.
Slowly, I built up the team I wanted. Gilbert Wood arrived as our new superintendent and gave me a free hand to run the show my own way. We rewarded him with the best arrest rate in the division, and some of them were big fish. I'd worked for Gilbert before. He was one of a dying breed the old school who believed that we were there to catch villains and protect the public, and if this meant we upset a few local politicians, or failed to keep within budget, so be it.
Trouble was, Gilbert had no time for meetings, either. Somebody had to go, which was why I was now sitting at the bottom end of the long polished table that graced the conference room at City HQ, while he cast a fly across some lake filled with tame but hungry trout. It was nearly six o'clock and the deputy chief constable was drawing proceedings to a close.
"As you know…" he was saying, '… this will be my last Serious Crimes Operations Group meeting, so I'd like to take the opportunity …"
"Let's have a look," Les Isles whispered to me, leaning closer. Les is another one of my proteges who leapfrogged past me in the promotion stakes.
I'd spent nearly three hours doing sketches of the DCC on my note pad, and the last one had his likeness to a T. He was leaving at the end of the month and I knew that the day before he went somebody would ring me and ask for a cartoon illustrating some inglorious moment from his past. They thought I could churn them out like Barbara Cartland novels. I slid the pad across to Superintendent Isles.
"Brilliant. Can I have it?" he hissed.
"Mmm," I mumbled.
"Sign it." He slid the pad back my way.
With a few deft strokes I gave the DCC a quiff of black hair falling over one eye, added a Penny Black of a moustache, scrawled L. Isles across the bottom and pushed it in front of him again.
"Was there something, Inspector Priest?" the DCC was saying, his head tilted forward so he could see me all the better through his bifocals.
"Er, not really, sir," I improvised. "Superintendent Isles was just commenting that you'll be sorely missed."
A murmur of amusement ran round the table and the assorted chief supers and bog-standard supers who represented their divisions at the SCOG meeting took it as a signal and closed their notebooks. They eased their chairs away from the table to notify the chairman that he was pushing his luck if he thought he was going to keep them here much longer.
"Before we finish…" the boss remonstrated, determined to show us that he wasn't gone yet, '… could we just wind up by going round the table. Anything you'd like to raise, George?" he asked the person sitting on his immediate left.
"No, I think we've covered everything," George replied, clipping his pen into his inside pocket for emphasis.
"No," the next in line added.
Shakes of the head and various negative expressions answered the DCC's query as his glance moved round the table, towards me.
I couldn't resist it. Not often do I have so many bigwigs hanging on my words while slavering in anticipation of the pre-prandial gin and tonic that the little lady was no doubt mixing at that very second. The bifocals flickered in my direction and moved on, but not quickly enough.
"There is just one thing, sir," I said.
They stopped, hesitated, swung back and settled on me like the searchlight at a PoW camp finding a luckless escapee. There was a rumble of groans and the clump of chairs falling back on to four legs.
I had them in the palm of my hand.
"If we could go back to item seven on the agenda…" I continued.
Papers were retrieved from executive-style briefcases and shuffled impatiently.
The DCC said: "Item seven? Retrospective DNA testing? I thought we'd given it a good airing, Mr. Priest. You made it quite plain, if you don't mind me saying so, that Heckley was way ahead of the rest of us in reopening unsolved cases where DNA evidence was available."
"Yes, sir, and with a certain amount of success. As I told the meeting earlier we were able to associate two rapes with a villain already in custody, and a murder with a dead suspect. However, if we examine the statistics, I believe they lead us to consider new lines of enquiry."
The person on my left sighed and tapped his pencil, but the chairman leaned forward on his elbows and Les Isles said: "Go on, Charlie."
Nothing would have stopped me. "If I could just invent some figures, to illustrate my point," I responded. "If we go back, for convenience, for, say, twenty unsolved major crimes murders in the Yorkshire region.
There might be four of those where old DNA samples are available which were of little significance at the time of the offence. The new techniques allow us to link crimes in a way which was unheard of just a few years ago. Our experience at Heckley indicates that of those four crimes with DNA availability, it is highly probable that we will find links. Supposing, for example, we link two of the crimes to the same villain. All well and good. We rope him in, present the evidence, and he gets a few more years on his sentence, probably running concurrently with what he's already serving if he's in custody."
There were murmurs of approval at my disdain for concurrent sentences.
It proved they were listening.
"But!" I went on, raising my hand as if plucking a plum, as I'd seen the Prime Minister do. "But what about the other sixteen cases where there is no DNA evidence? The statistics indicate that eight of those crimes could quite easily have been committed by the same person. Maybe we should be taking a new look at all of them. DNA testing isn't the only new tool we have."
They were silent. They had been listening, unless they'd fallen asleep. "Profiling," someone mumbled.
"Is that what you're thinking, Charlie?" the DCC asked in an uncharacteristic show of intimacy. "That we should set a profiler loose on the files?"
"Some call it profiling, sir," I replied, resisting the urge to call him Clarry. "I prefer to call it good detective work."
"But that's the sort of thing you have in mind?"
"Yes, and computerisation of all the information."
"Going back how far?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "Thirty years?"
I sensed a collective Sheest! In theory, unsolved murder inquiries never close, but it's in our interests to conveniently forget the occasional one, and staying within budget earns more medals than pinning a forgotten murder on some old sod who is in a nursing home in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's. I could see the cogs going round in the DCC's head. A serial killer would be a fantastic high note to go out on, but he was already on notice, and I was talking about results in three years, not three weeks. There was nothing in it for him.