Critical Threat hc-10

by Nick Oldham

  Two members of the SPMS were waiting for him when he bustled, red faced, back into the Special Projects office. Graeme Walling and Jenny Fisher sat there patiently and he knew they knew. Everybody knew. He had just had amazing sex with the deputy chief constable in one of the rooms in student accommodation at the training centre. It was bound to be common knowledge. Not that it was unusual for cops to have sex in those rooms — they even sold condoms in the training centre shop, for God’s sake — but it was usually confined to young, horny probationers going wild or macho detectives on their initial CID course proving how manly they were. Not two high-ranking, experienced officers and in the middle of the day.

  ‘Hi guys,’ he said, flushed. ‘What news?’ Each waited for the other, until Henry said, ‘Jenny?’

  Her task had been to liaise with the Telephone Unit to get details of the phone bills from Eddie Daley’s office. Simple enough on the face of it, and something the police did in a lot of cases, but it was usually a slow, bureaucratic process. Getting it done quickly was hard.

  She held up a few sheets of paper. ‘Success,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Oh, well done,’ Henry said genuinely. He saw her blush with pleasure and he guessed she probably hadn’t had many pats on the back before, that very simple motivational tool, rarely used by managers.

  ‘Eddie had a BT account from that office … and you were right,’ she said. Henry crossed to her and looked over her shoulder. Her finger pointed to a frequently dialled ‘0845’ number. ‘That’s the number for Orange pay as you go internet service. It used to be Freeserve.’

  ‘So he did have a computer in that office?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  Which confirmed Henry’s brainwave he’d had whilst looking through Jackie Kippax’s flat in the early hours. He noticed Jackie had a computer and it had suddenly clicked with him that a computer wasn’t something he had seen in Eddie’s office, yet he recalled Jackie telling him how much Eddie used one. It stood to reason, therefore, that someone carrying on the dubious profession of a gumshoe would have one in his office. Who the hell didn’t these days?

  Henry had seized Jackie’s computer and then, with Bill, had driven the short distance to Eddie’s office over the shop and entered what was still a crime scene.

  No computer.

  But Eddie, being such a slob, never dusted and it did not take a mastermind to look at his desk and see the faint outline in the dust of a circular stand on which the monitor had rested. But there was no monitor, no keyboard, no computer, no wires and no printer.

  Hindsight, being such a powerful tool, made Henry wish he had spotted this gap before; made him wish he had asked different questions of Jackie; made him realize, or at least guess in an educated way, that whoever had killed Eddie had also stolen his computer. Which begged the question, why? What was on the computer that was so precious? Was it something that pointed to the killer? And this was why he had tasked two of his team to find out if Darren Langmead had a computer, or if he had got Eddie’s computer stashed away somewhere.

  Henry looked at Graeme Walling. He knew that Walling was a bit of a computer nerd and had given him Jackie’s computer and asked him to go plug it in somewhere and see what was on it. After all, it wasn’t such a long shot to imagine that Eddie also used Jackie’s computer. ‘What’ve you got?’

  Before he could answer, the office door opened and Angela Cranlow came in, slid into a seat at an unused desk. She smiled encouragingly at everyone. ‘Don’t mind me.’

  Her hair had been pulled back into a ponytail because she’d been unable to tame it back into a smooth bob after Henry had finished with her. She still looked the business, he thought.

  ‘I’ve been through her computer, as you asked.’ Walling indicated the computer on the desk at which he sat. ‘There’s some interesting stuff on it. Lots of visits to porn sites, some white supremacist stuff, BNP.’ Walling’s face creased with distaste. He beckoned Henry to stand behind him. He, Jenny and Angela took up a position behind him and Henry twitched as Angela tweaked his rear. ‘Let me just log in … there’s no security on this, by the way, no passwords, nothing … but that’s pretty usual for home computers.’

  The computer was already switched on. Walling selected an icon from the desktop and double-clicked the mouse. The Orange Internet screen came up and he pressed ‘Connect’. The computer began to make the horrible screechy connection noises as the modem found the server and the Orange homepage appeared. Walling then went to the Google homepage and clicked the history button and allowed the cursor to hover over a website address.

  ‘Google is the main search engine used,’ Walling said. ‘Obviously it’s impossible to tell whether these searches were done by Jackie or Eddie,’ he explained. ‘I trawled through loads of stuff to see what had been visited and one thing sort of stood out. I mean, it was mostly rubbish, but when I started looking at the history pages I saw there had been a series of searches for doctors’ surgeries and health centres in London, which I found interesting.’

  ‘Why interesting?’ Angela asked.

  Walling shrugged. ‘Anything a bit odd interests me,’ he said. Henry glanced at him and thought, A jack speaking, and knew that Walling should have been better looked after, should still have been a detective somewhere. Henry waited. Although curious, he knew there was nothing more annoying for a cop than to be interrupted in full flow, especially when the cop thought he was going to reveal something vital. Walling was on a little stage, the centre of attention, and needed his few moments of fame.

  ‘I went into every site visited and then dug into the sites as well. Just curiosity, really, but, like I said, it just struck me as odd and I assumed this was because of something maybe Eddie had been investigating. These searches, by the way, are about six months old. The history pages have never been wiped, so there was a lot of crap on it, if you’ll pardon my French. Most of the recent stuff doesn’t have any sort of pattern to it. People look at such rubbish.’

  A yawn tried to break from Henry’s mouth. He held it back, his face rippling with the effort. He caught Angela’s eyes and she opened them wider, seductively. A quick memory of her straddling him on the single bed flitted in and out, her lovely boobs hanging just above his face. Hell, a deputy chief constable. What a coup! Not that there were many like Angela Cranlow. Mostly they were gnarled, angry looking blokes and the idea of sex with them, even from a female or gay perspective, was pretty bleak.

  ‘… So, I went on every site visited,’ Walling said, and in true dramatic fashion, revealed the best last, ‘and this is the one that’s the key.’

  He clicked on it. The computer thought for a moment and then the connection was made, revealing the site of the Empress Medical Centre, Earl’s Court, London. The homepage showed a photograph of a newly built, single storey building which could have been any health centre anywhere in the country.

  There was a menu on the right side of the page: general practitioners, the practice team; how to use the surgery: repeat prescriptions; services available to patients; well baby clinic; zero tolerance — violent patients; self treatment of common illnesses; useful telephone numbers; locums.

  He moved the cursor over each one and most of them expanded into a sub-menu.

  ‘Mostly uninteresting stuff until we get to this one,’ Walling said. He clicked on the ‘locums’ icon. This produced a further list of names and he clicked on one, which opened into a photograph of an Asian woman by the name of Dr Sabera Ismat. ‘Ring any bells?’

  All three observers peered closely at the photo.

  Henry’s brow creased. The woman looked familiar and somewhere deep in his subconscious he believed he should know why, but he could not drag it up. She was a very attractive woman with sparkling eyes and an infectious smile, useful qualities for a doctor.

  ‘No.’ Henry looked at the other two. They shook their heads.

  ‘OK,’ Walling said, clearly relishing this. ‘What about this then?’

&n
bsp; He clicked on the ‘minimize screen’ button and the photograph disappeared and the blue background of the desktop reappeared. He clicked through a number of programmes. ‘This is a programme that is used to download digital photos from a camera on to a computer to store them, view them, mess around with them, print them off — whatever. The photos I’m about to show you were put on about six months ago, according to the properties.’

  ‘I’ve got one on my computer I use for my holiday piccies,’ Jenny chirped up.

  ‘Yeah, they’re pretty common. There’s a lot of photos in this file, mainly of Eddie Daley and Jackie Kippax on holiday, by the looks of them. But this is the interesting one, filed under “Work”.’ He clicked on a file icon and a series of small photographs unfolded which focused in on a woman sitting at a table outside a restaurant, with some other people. Walling selected one and expanded it to full screen size. In it, the woman was laughing at something, her head thrown back, revealing her long, slender, dark neck. An Asian man was sitting next to her, smiling.

  Henry’s mouth opened slowly.

  It was a photograph of the woman doctor, Sabera Ismat.

  But there was something on the photograph that had caught his eye, which made him go quite weak.

  ‘There’s about ten photos in this file,’ Walling said, ‘mainly of this woman sitting having a meal.’ He minimized the photo and clicked on a few more of them to prove his point. ‘It’s the locum.’ Walling did a bit of rearranging of the size of the frames and put two photos side by side, one from the health centre website and one of the digital photos. ‘Dr Sabera Ismat.’

  He fiddled about a bit more and then worked his way back through the health centre website and clicked open the list of GPs, clicked on a name and opened one of the files. ‘Dr Sanjay Khan. Dr Ismat was sitting with this guy at the restaurant.’ He again minimized the screen and went back to the file with the downloaded digital photographs, picked one and enlarged it. It was a fairly grainy image of two people embracing. ‘The two doctors, I’d say.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Angela Cranlow said, quickly checking her watch. She was obviously short of time. ‘Why are you showing us these?’ She looked at Henry, puzzled.

  Henry already knew why, but he still let Walling have the floor.

  ‘Aha,’ Walling said, sounding like a second-rate magician. He tabbed back to a better photograph of the couple at the restaurant. In the background was another pretty Asian lady. ‘One of Eddie Daley’s locate/trace jobs, don’t you think?’

  ‘What has this to do with Darren Langmead?’ Angela asked. ‘Like you said, these are six months old?’

  ‘Nothing at all, I’d say,’ Walling said. ‘Just hang on …’ Using the zoom tool on the programme, he focused in on the Ismat woman, bringing her closer and closer, moving down away from her face to her neck. ‘Now what do you see?’

  Henry kept quiet.

  Jenny said, ‘A necklace.’

  ‘Yep.’ Walling glanced over his shoulder, smiling at his audience. He reached for a piece of paper on the desk and flipped it over. It was a copy of Lancashire Constabulary’s latest intelligence bulletin, solely devoted to an update of the murder of the female found six months earlier near Blackpool, her body having been burned to a crisp. There was a photograph of the facial reconstruction and also of the unusual necklace, believed to have been worn by the woman, which had turned up when the conscience of the man who had found the body got the better of him.

  The two women gasped.

  Henry had already done his gasping internally.

  The necklace on the bulletin was exactly the same one as around the neck of the woman in the photograph, an image, Henry assumed, that had been taken by Eddie Daley. Henry picked up the bulletin and held it alongside the computer screen, comparing the facial reconstruction to the actual face of the woman in the photo.

  ‘Pretty bloody good match,’ Walling said. He raised his eyebrows.

  The implications of this sank in immediately. Henry placed a hand on Walling’s bulky shoulder, realizing that if he could get him a job as an operational detective again, he would have to lose some weight.

  ‘Brilliant,’ he said.

  ‘My office, now, Henry,’ Angela Cranlow said.

  ‘What’ve we got then?’ She was sitting on the business side of her wide desk, dwarfed by its size. Her back was to the window, which overlooked the playing fields at the front of HQ.

  ‘You know as much as I do,’ Henry pointed out. ‘Photos on a computer of a woman wearing a necklace similar to one found on the body of a woman who was murdered. I’m sure there’s more than one woman with a necklace like that.’

  ‘I don’t believe in coincidence, Henry.’

  ‘Me neither. And the necklace is supposed to be unique.’

  ‘So go on, hypothesize — or guess.’

  He had been standing by the window, watching the rain that had started to lash mercilessly down. He moved to sit on the public side of the desk.

  ‘First assumption is that they are photos Eddie took and downloaded and that they were from a job he was working on.’

  ‘And the woman was subsequently murdered?’

  Before following Angela to her office, Henry had taken a minute to jot down the dates on the computer. ‘According to the details on the PC, the website of the health centre was initially accessed three days before the dates the digital photos were taken — bearing in mind the dates on the photos could be manipulated.’ Angela nodded. ‘And the date that the body was discovered was one day after those photos were taken.’ Angela gave a twitchy gesture of her shoulders and hands, urging him to carry on. ‘So, if we suppose those computer dates are right, then it looks like Eddie may have had something to do with, or knew something about, her murder.’

  ‘Aren’t we jumping ahead of ourselves, slightly?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We don’t yet know if the woman in the photo is one and the same as the dead woman.’

  ‘True, and that needs to be established first, I’d say.’

  ‘How do you propose to do that?’

  ‘The Smoke.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘Wouldn’t a phone call suffice?’

  ‘I like the personal touch.’

  ‘Damn!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t go — Police Authority meeting. Can’t get out of it.’

  ‘I’ll go alone,’ he said, never having even considered that she would have gone down to London with him. ‘I’ll get Graeme to cover the post-mortems of Jackie and Langmead. He’ll be fine with that.’

  ‘You think this could be connected with Eddie’s death?’

  ‘Who knows? What I need to do is capture all this and start making some policy decisions … the first one being to establish whether or not this Dr Ismat is alive and kicking. If she is, then it’s going nowhere and it all means nothing and everything swivels back to Darren Langmead, I guess.’

  Angela leaned her chin on a hand and gazed at Henry. ‘You’re the first man I’ve been with since my divorce … it was lovely, and risky. Hell of a combination.’

  She leaned back, reverting to business, not giving Henry a chance to respond. ‘If this woman in the photos turns out to be the dead one, Dave Anger will have to be informed, you know.’

  ‘Let’s establish facts, first. It would be quite nice to hand it on a platter to him.’

  ‘Last laugh?’

  ‘I’m morally above that sort of thing.’

  ‘But morally bankrupt in all other areas?’

  ‘Probably,’ he said dubiously, and the thought rocked him.

  6.15 p.m.: Preston railway station, about halfway down the west coast line between Glasgow and London Euston. A bitter wind blew down the tracks and swept along platform 4, making Henry shudder. He checked his watch, then the departure screen — his train was due to leave at 6.45 p.m. and was expected to be on time — then looked towards the station e
ntrance.

  ‘Come on, love,’ he urged. ‘Ahh!’

  He had spotted Kate hurrying across the footbridge spanning the platforms at the northern side of the station. He dashed up the pedestrian incline to greet her. She was loaded down with luggage. He pecked her cheek.

  Over her left arm she had a zip-up suit carrier and she was pulling along a wheeled holdall, which Henry recognized as belonging to his youngest daughter, Leanne. Perched on top of the holdall, resting against the retractable handle, was a plastic carrier bag.

  ‘Hiya, sweetheart. Traffic was horrendous,’ Kate said, clearly flustered. She had been put under pressure by Henry’s request to get him some gear together and get across from Blackpool to Preston in time for his train. She took a deep breath and handed him the suit carrier. ‘Fresh suit, shirt and tie.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He took it and the holdall.

  ‘In there is a change of clothes for now — or whenever: jeans, T-shirt, socks, trainers and undies. Obviously I had difficulty packing the undies cos they’re so huge.’ She laughed and then gave him the carrier bag. ‘In here is your leather jacket, wash bag and the book you’ve been reading, which I thought you might want for the train.’

  ‘Great,’ he said, swallowing back a bitter taste of guilt.

  ‘I’ve only got twenty mins on the car park for free,’ she told him.

  ‘In that case, I’ll get changed on the train. Fancy a quick coffee?’

  He was travelling business class at the expense of the firm, guaranteeing him a decent seat, waiter service and a bit of comfort as the Pendolino train whistled through the countryside, leaning on the curves. He sat back and tried to enjoy the journey, but his mind was awash with thoughts and feelings.

  His stupid escapade with Angela Cranlow was high on the agenda. Then the barefaced cheek at having phoned Kate to ask her to rush and bring his stuff over to Preston and realizing that she did it without a moment of hesitation, murmur of dissent or a moan. She just did it because she loved him and nothing was too much trouble. She would have travelled to the ends of the earth for him. Just because she loved him.