13

A COUPLE OF MINUTES LATER, TULLOCH BROUGHT THE meeting to a close. People began drifting out, one or two nodding to me. Gayle Mizon paused in the act of biting on an apple to give me a smile.

‘Lacey, how are you?’ Tulloch beckoned me inside. She indicated a seat and then sat down herself. She looked tired. There were shadows under her eyes and her make-up had all but disappeared. Joesbury perched himself on the desk behind her with a proprietorial air.

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ I said, thinking that if I concentrated on Tulloch, I wouldn’t be tempted to raise my eyes a few inches and look at the man directly behind.

‘Sleep well?’ asked Joesbury. We both ignored him.

‘Lacey, I’ve put in a request to have you transferred to one of the other stations until this investigation is over,’ said Tulloch. ‘One north of the river. I know it—’

‘What?’ I said, before correcting myself. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but surely that’s not—’

‘Call me Dana,’ she interrupted, ‘and I’m afraid it is necessary. You’re an important witness and if the wrong person saw you last night, I want you well out of the way.’

‘I can’t leave Southwark,’ I said. ‘That witness I was telling you about, she came in this morning. I’m just getting closer to her. I may be able to persuade her to press charges.’

There was the tiniest glint in her eyes. ‘We’ll make sure someone takes over …’ she began.

‘But she trusts me,’ I said, making an effort not to talk too quickly. ‘Or at least, she’s starting to. She’s seriously scared. If I leave now she’ll think I’ve run out on her.’

Tulloch sighed. ‘I understand how you feel, but last night’s murder has to take priority.’

I should just agree. It made no real difference to me what station I worked from. Besides, I was low-profile girl, I didn’t rock boats. ‘She was raped by five boys,’ I said. ‘She thinks they’re going after her twelve-year-old sister next. Her mother is out of her head on drugs most of the time and these girls have no one to look out for them.’

Those green eyes suddenly looked a whole lot colder. ‘The decision’s made, Flint,’ she said. ‘Deal with it.’ She stood up and turned away from me. I watched her walk halfway across the room.

‘Hold up a sec, Tully. Why doesn’t she come here?’

Tulloch stopped and turned round. ‘What?’ she said.

‘Bring her here,’ said Joesbury, talking over my head. ‘She’ll be close enough to Southwark to stay with her current cases.’

Tulloch looked at him like he was simple. ‘I can’t have her near the investigation,’ she said. ‘Her credibility in court will be completely undermined if it comes out that—’

‘If a detective on your team had arrived before your victim died, you’d have exactly the same issues with him,’ said Joesbury. ‘Keep her at arm’s length, if you have to,’ he went on. ‘But you’re going to want her on hand. She needs to go through the CCTV footage, for one thing.’

Tulloch frowned at him. A muscle beneath her left eye was flickering. ‘That will take hours, at most,’ she said.

‘If you go ahead with the reconstruction, she’ll be involved in that.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘You need to make sure she gets trauma counselling, unless you want the Met to face a personal-injury claim. Much easier to see that happens if she’s here.’

Tulloch stared at him for a moment, then said, ‘Mark, can I talk to you for a second?’

He stood and started to follow her out of the room, before stopping and looking down at me. He took his time, taking in my lace-up brogues, pale chinos that I always wore a little too big, and the loose white shirt. My hair, as usual, was tied back at the nape of my neck and plaited. I wore my dark-rimmed glasses. No make-up or jewellery. Exactly how I always look at work.

‘You certainly scrub up well,’ he said at last.

‘Mark!’ Tulloch was at the end of her patience with both of us. Without another word, he joined her and they left the room.

I gave them a two-minute head start and then followed. I was feeling the need for caffeine. I walked the length of the corridor towards the drinks machine at the far end. I stopped just before I reached it.

The deep voice with its distinctive south London accent had already become unpleasantly familiar. Joesbury was feet away, just out of sight around the corner. ‘All I’m saying is, keep an eye on her,’ he said. ‘You can do that a lot better if she’s close. And let me make a few discreet inquiries.’

‘And this has nothing to do with the fact that she’s gor—’

Joesbury didn’t let Tulloch finish. ‘Let’s just say my spider sense is tingling,’ he said, in a voice I could barely hear above the gurgling of the drinks machine. ‘Indulge me on this, sweetheart, OK?’

Back in the incident room, I sat alone, waiting. If I transferred to Lewisham I could stay in contact with Rona and her friends on the estate, and I’d get to see how the murder investigation panned out. The woman had died holding my hand. I couldn’t help but be curious. On the other hand, I didn’t really want to be surrounded by people who knew how badly I’d screwed up last night. And I still wasn’t sure what to make of Joesbury and his antics.

I moved to a desk and, using a remote access password, opened up the Met’s website and keyed in SO10.

Which was no longer SO10, I learned, but had been renamed the Specialist Crime Directorate, or SCD10 for short. Informally and colloquially, though, SO10 had stuck. I read that it had been formed in the 1960s to collect information on organized crime and prominent criminals. Due to advances in technology, the website claimed, the command had become a recognized world leader in covert policing methods.

So, I’d attracted the attention of a senior officer from a division with a worldwide reputation for specialist investigative techniques. Well, wasn’t that a result?

After an hour, one of Tulloch’s team, a good-looking black bloke in his late twenties who introduced himself as Tom Barrett, asked me to come and look at the CCTV footage from the murder site. Barrett and I crossed the small inner courtyard to another wing of the station and a tiny windowless room with a TV screen. For the next three hours I watched seemingly endless recordings of people and traffic around the estate where the murder had taken place. I saw myself, driving my black Golf along the Camberwell New Road and turning off towards the car park.

‘What’s that?’ I asked a few minutes later. Thirty minutes or so after I drove my car into the car park, another vehicle – one decidedly out of place on an inner London council estate – went the same way.

‘We’ve already spotted that,’ replied Barrett, glancing down at some scribbled notes. ‘It’s a Lexus LS 460, Tuscan Olive in colour, retails at upwards of sixty grand. We can only make out the last couple of letters on the registration so it’ll take time to track it down, but it’s definitely of interest.’

‘It’s the sort of car she would have driven,’ I said.

Barrett agreed with me and we got back to work. By three o’clock I was ready to slit my own wrists. There had been nothing, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary and I wasn’t sure quite what we’d expected. A wild-eyed madman, perhaps dripping with blood, staggering down Camberwell New Road?

At ten past four we watched the last recording and I had a sense of freedom looming. I’d go home, draw the blinds, put on a film and curl up on the sofa. If I was lucky, I wouldn’t wake till morning.

It wasn’t to be. We hadn’t even switched the machine off when the door opened to reveal Tulloch, a blue cotton trench coat loose around her shoulders. This time, she was alone. She nodded at Barrett and then turned to me. ‘Looks like I’m stuck with you, Flint,’ she said. ‘You’re based here until further notice and you’ll bring your ongoing projects from Southwark with you. Come on, I’ll give you a lift home. We can talk on the way.’