“I’m fine,” Lauren had said, hearing the tremor in her own voice, smiling to cover it up. Mrs Gooch had cleared her throat nervously, and although Lauren wanted to ask her about whether she heard the singing, she sensed that any more questions would only make Mrs Gooch more uncomfortable.
So, the creepy woman was sly. She knew how to get past security, how to make sure she wasn’t seen by anyone. Therefore, Lauren should go home, where the woman would not think to look, and wouldn’t be able to come after her. That was the answer.
That’s if it was real. But the drugs, and the daylight, had created a distance, allowed her to look at what happened from both sides. It had seemed real, but really it couldn’t have been, because if it were then someone else would have seen the creepy woman. The singing would have woken Mrs Gooch, before the shouting did. Security was tight on the ward—the woman would have had to get herself buzzed through the locked doors, then walk right past the nurse on the desk. So it couldn’t be. But if it wasn’t real then it was inside her head and it would be there inside her head no matter where she went, wouldn’t it? And, at home, there were no blue pills.
Everything snapped into sharp focus. She gazed into Patrick’s worried face. “What if it happens again?” said Lauren, “What if I start seeing things, or …”
Patrick was shaking his head, making a shh sound, and he said, “Take each day as it comes. You can’t stay here until you’re sane. You won’t ever leave.”
The joke was delivered deadpan, as usual, and took a moment to register. A mischievous smile played on his lips as he waited for her to laugh. But she couldn’t, not this time. It was too close to the truth. Maybe they would keep her here until they thought she was sane. Perhaps she ought to leave now, while she still had the chance.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Harper sank into the swivel chair in her office and flipped her notebook open on the desk.
“Where the bloody hell have you been, Jo?”
She flipped the notebook shut again and turned to smile sweetly at Detective Inspector Thrupp, who filled the doorframe with his grey-suited form. His blue tie was askew, as usual. He tugged at it now, loosening it further—by the end of the day it was usually completely undone and flung over one shoulder like a very thin decorative scarf.
“Sorry, boss, just following up on a lead.”
“Phil Gregson says you came in at seven and left again at twenty past. Now it’s nine forty. I’ve been waiting.”
“That’s right, sir. There was a report overnight of an attempted child abduction at the hospital, so I went down to take a statement from the complainant.”
“What child abduction?”
“Turned out to be nothing really, sir. The woman was having some kind of psychotic episode.”
“Couldn’t the hospital have told you that? Wasn’t it marked as low priority on the system?”
“I thought it sounded odd, sir. Something a bit off, maybe. Worth a visit anyway, just to make sure.”
Thrupp was frowning. “I’ve told you before, Jo. You need to wait for my instructions before you go off interviewing people on a whim. There’s a pile of paperwork to get through, and no time to do it. Plus there’s the training session later on, which I trust you will be fully prepped for. You could have sent a uniform.”
He was right, of course. She should probably have sent a patrol officer to take the statement—then if anything needed to be followed up on, she could have opened an investigation. But so much was lost in the transcription. She liked to be able to look into the faces of complainants, to see the things they chose not to say. The length of pauses. The guilty glances. Lauren Tranter wasn’t guilty of anything, but Harper could have filled a notebook with the things she did not say.
Giving an innocent smile, she tapped the pile of papers in her in-tray. “I’m on it now sir, don’t you worry.”
She swivelled to face her computer monitor, which lit up at a flick of the mouse. From the corner of her eye she observed the senior officer as he stood in the doorway, before sighing deeply, shaking his head and then walking away.
The instant he was out of sight she searched in her satchel, found the disk she’d picked up from security at the hospital and pushed it into the computer. After a few seconds, a grainy image of a hospital corridor appeared. The clock at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen read 03.38. There was the nurse’s station, and there was the midwife, Anthea Mallison, in the exact same pose she’d been in when Harper had met her in person, hunched in front of the monitor. The green and white hue of the CCTV footage showed her face illuminated behind the desk by the glow from the computer screen.
She watched for a while. Nothing happened except the clock slowly marking the minutes.
Harper forwarded the video to 04.15. There. Something ran across the floor, taking the same route that Harper herself had taken earlier in the day, towards the bay where Mrs Tranter and Mrs Gooch were installed, bay three. She backed up the video and ran it again. A flash of something, rodent-like, blink and you’d miss it. The midwife kept her eyes on the screen and didn’t flinch. There seemed to be a streak of them, whatever they were—more than one, anyway, flowing past the nurse’s station. They’d have been right in her eye line. On the screen, Mallison made no reaction whatsoever.
Harper examined the section frame by frame, stopping it where three blurred smudges swam across the floor. The way they flickered, caught between two frames, they looked like big black fish. Shadows of fish. Maybe they were shadows, something flying across the light above rather than on the floor—that might also explain why Mallison didn’t react. They might have been moths, or big flies or something. Harper watched it again, in real time. She shook her head, watched it once more. It could easily have been a blip; a digital anomaly, nothing at all. So why did she feel the hair rise on the back of her neck?
Mallison had said she was in the staff loo just before Lauren’s crisis, which is why she didn’t notice anything unusual happening in the bay—Mrs Tranter would have made quite a bit of noise when she panicked and pulled the babies with her into the bathroom. Sure enough, on the tape, the midwife left her post to go to the loo at 04.21, and was still absent from the frame at 04.29, when Lauren’s 999 call was made. Harper stared hard at the screen and wished she could hear what was happening, but there was no audio. The midwife did not return to her post for another six minutes, when she sat down and started typing again. One minute after that, at 04.37, Dave appeared in his security guard’s uniform, using the desk to brake as if he’d been running—so he did in fact make it there in about five minutes, if you allowed him a minute or two to be on the phone with dispatch. Dave almost head-butted Mallison as the momentum carried his top half forward, and then the two of them rushed towards bay three, disappearing out of the camera’s view, to get Lauren out of the bathroom where she’d locked herself before dialling for help. Harper was frustrated that the camera didn’t cover the bay. If it had, she could have seen exactly what happened in there between 04.15 and 04.29. That poor woman had seemed deeply traumatised by whatever it was.
But why was she so curious about what couldn’t be seen by the camera? After all, according to the nurse, Lauren’s real trauma had happened in the two days before: the birth, the haemorrhage, the lack of sleep. If Harper could have seen what was happening in the bay it would have been a film of a woman losing her mind. No one needed to see that.
But those shadows. She shivered. Something about this case didn’t feel right.
She took an investigative materials envelope and filled in the details on the front, before burning a copy of the CCTV footage and slipping the disk inside. She had to know what the shadows were, and Forensics would be able to tell her. Hesitating over the funding authorisation box, Harper looked over her shoulder to check no one was coming before she signed an expertly practised facsimile of DI Thrupp’s signature, adding his officer number.
Turning back to her screen she opened the email from Records with the
mp3 recording of the 999 call Lauren had made from inside the bathroom. Harper hadn’t been able to get much out of Mrs Tranter at the hospital, and it wasn’t just because the woman had been medicated up to her eyeballs. Mrs Tranter was holding back, certainly. Maybe there was something Harper could learn from hearing exactly what Lauren had said to the emergency operator. Maybe the mp3 would stop the internal detector from twitching.
She didn’t like to call it a hunch. Hunch sounded clichéd, like something out of a bad detective novel. What she had was a keenly developed sense of intuition, one that wasn’t always based on hard evidence, but that she’d learned to trust over the years. Her bosses didn’t trust it, however: Harper’s intuition, while it sometimes resulted in arrests, never seemed to have a warrant, or a decent evidential paper trail. DI Thrupp was particularly sore about a recent case in which some evidence had been gathered in a less than orthodox fashion.
Harper had been driving home from the office when something suspicious caught her eye. The disused warehouse could be seen from the road and she drove past it every day, but on this occasion the car parked in the usually empty lot stood out: the distinctive yellow Mercedes belonged to a suspect in a fraud case she was working. Harper had parked out of sight and approached covertly—alone and without back-up. When she got close enough, she overheard a conversation within the warehouse, which she had recorded, despite not having the correct permission to do so. Then, without shouting the standard police warning, Harper had kicked down the door, discovering two men who had just been discussing how much to pay for the huge container of counterfeit cigarettes they were standing in front of. Harper was acutely aware that the growing tobacco black market had links to organised crime and helped to fund terrorism. The people involved in it—the men she had caught—didn’t care that the product was often contaminated with asbestos, rat droppings and mould, or that the smokes were frequently made in overseas factories that used forced child labour. It was easy money; often easier than smuggling drugs, as even if the lorries were stopped, the dogs at the ports weren’t looking for tobacco.
One of the men, the fraud suspect, they’d been tracking for almost a year. The other one was a local businessman, very well connected, with no police record despite several extremely close calls and an intelligence file back at the station nearly an inch thick. The arrest was a huge bonus for the force, more so when they examined the truck and found that several of the cartons right at the centre of the stack didn’t contain cigarettes but raw cocaine—more than ten kilos of the stuff. But. There was no previous evidence trail, no warrant. The conversation, however damning, had been recorded without the go-ahead from any senior officer.
With both men cuffed in the back of her car, Harper had rung Thrupp.
“I need verbal authorisation for a surveillance operation,” she’d said.
“You’ll need to speak to Hetherington. I don’t have the rank for that.”
“I think you might, in extreme circumstances, if a superintendent isn’t available, if authorisation is needed urgently, sir.”
“How urgent is it?”
“How can I put this. It’s kind of … retrospective.”
The bollocking she’d got was immense. At first, he’d outright refused to help her, was prepared to let both the case and Harper’s career suffer the consequences. But eventually she’d talked him round. Hetherington would certainly have given the go-ahead, she’d said, only there hadn’t been time to contact him. There were literally one or two seconds between discovering the crime and her decision to act. The authorisation issue was only a case of delayed admin, if he could just see it that way. If she’d left it any longer, the shipment would have been shipped, they’d have lost the ringleader for another six months, and maybe never have caught the other guy at all.
So, through gritted teeth, Thrupp had logged a written authorisation for the surveillance, citing that Hetherington had been temporarily uncontactable. He had tweaked the timecode in the report to make it look legit so it could be used as evidence in the court case, where both of the suspects received custodials. Harper was sure that the DI would be pleased after that. But no. He could barely look her in the eye. During the process for submitting evidence, the super had questioned the report, but had signed it off because it was Thrupp, his old pal and golf buddy. It was embarrassing, though, for both men, and Thrupp was still angry about having to ask a favour in a way that made him look unprofessional. She reckoned he planned to stay angry until the end of time. Once everyone had stopped congratulating Harper, she’d been punished, restricted to desk duties for eleven weeks, and only escaped a disciplinary by a whisker.
She wasn’t sorry, though. Even after all of that, she knew she’d been right to do what she did, and what’s more she knew she’d do it again, or something similar, if her intuition was strong enough.
The babies, though. The babies muddied the waters, and she knew it. So much so, that she wasn’t certain she could read the signals properly. She couldn’t tell if she felt so strongly about this case because a criminal needed to be apprehended, or because there were babies in potential danger.
“Jo, get your stuff.” It was Thrupp.
“What's up, sir?”
“There’s an incident down at Kelham Island. Uniform have been dealing with it but they need our input. You can drive.”
“What’s going on?” It was unusual for a DI to be summoned to an incident. It only happened when there was something high level, like a hostage situation, or something to do with organised crime, where strategic leads were required on the ground.
“Some kiddie on the roof of one of the disused factories. Reported initially as a suicide attempt. Apparently it’s escalated.”
“Escalated how?” said Harper.
“It’s not enough to kill yourself, is it? Not when you can take out a building and a whole load of members of the public, too. Couple of police officers, maybe, for extra points. He says he’s got a bomb, and he wants a bloody helicopter.”
“What’s the helicopter for, sir?”
“I don’t know, do I? Sounds to me like he wants to blow one up. Jesus. I don’t have time for this.”
Harper pocketed her notebook and swung her bag over a shoulder before jumping up and heading for the door.
“Wait,” said Thrupp.
“What is it?”
“Change those ridiculous bloody shoes. Now.”
“Sorry, guv.”
“Did you go out in those this morning?”
“Um,” said Harper, slipping the rubbery five-toes trainers off and her sensible shoes on. “No?”
Thrupp shook his head almost all the way to the lift. She started to jog to keep up with him, his enormously long legs giving him an advantage when it came to striding.
As Harper and Thrupp buzzed across town, down into the valley to quell disaster and keep the peace, the computer in Harper’s office blinked and went to sleep. The email from Records containing Lauren’s 999 call shuffled unnoticed into the “read” section of her inbox, pressed down by the weight of the unread, soon to be consigned to the oblivion of Page Two.
CHAPTER NINE
The man lay half on the pavement, limbs twisted, head smashed. Blood pooled darkly, forming tendrils that crawled towards a drain. Harper started walking towards the body but was stopped by a uniformed officer.
“Sorry, Jo. We need to wait for bomb disposal to finish.”
The jacket the dead man wore was made of black nylon, and clung to what was left of him like a second skin. However, procedures were important. It was a further fifteen minutes before the bomb squad could safely confirm what could be plainly seen: there was no explosive device in the man’s jacket. There never had been. At the all-clear she stepped forward to close the staring eyes, then helped to cover the body before it was bagged and transported to the morgue.
* * *
The first journalist on the scene was also a friend, Amy Larsen, veteran of a great many of Harper’s crime
scenes over the last three years and chief reporter for the big local weekly, the Sheffield Mail. Amy, who as usual was fully made up, chic and elegant in a pencil skirt and heels, held her recording device in front of Harper’s mouth. The sergeant frowned at it and tried to move away but Amy followed her.
“Tell me about the kid. What brought him to this?”
Harper said, “We don’t know much about him at the moment. He’s young, probably in his early twenties. That’s all we’ve got.”
“A tragic suicide? Nothing more ominous than that?” Her ironic tone implied she didn’t believe that line for a second.
“We’re investigating the circumstances, the identity of the victim and so on. But at this moment we don’t think there’s anyone else involved.”
“So why did the police decide to bring in the armed response team?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”
Amy rolled her eyes and huffed. “What can you tell me?”
“Only that we are treating the death as unexplained, but not suspicious.”
Harper would have said more, but she was trained to minimise potentially inflammatory lines of questioning when dealing with the press. She was supposed only to release the very blandest of information. Amy knew this. It was a game they played: a gentle volley of questions and responses, the journalist trying for the topspin, the police officer stoically returning straight lobs.
“Come on, Harper. This wasn’t just a suicide, was it? The police don’t behave like that, shutting the roads, evacuating buildings—not for a jumper. I’m sure I saw a bomb-disposal unit. Did you think he had a bomb?”
Harper put her hand over the top of the recording device. “I can’t tell you anything more about the incident. We don’t even know his name yet. I’m sorry.”
Amy rolled her eyes, turned off the recorder and put it in her handbag. She placed her fists on her hips.
A car drove past, the passenger staring, fishlike, at Harper and Amy. The fire service had cleared off an hour ago, and most of the patrol cars had gone too. Once the ambulances had driven away, there wasn’t much to look at. Of course, the fact that there was nothing to see didn’t stop people’s natural curiosity; they wanted the full story, with details, the juicier the better. That was where Amy came in, to dig out the facts and relay them to the public via the Mail. Unfortunately for her, this time Harper wouldn’t be the one to tell. That alone wouldn’t stop her, though: Amy was resourceful. Harper had learned that much, since the journalist had first appeared, notebook in hand, at the scene of a suspected murder up in Attercliffe, brandishing her Mail ID and picking through the debris-strewn back alley in a pair of unsuitable shoes. The dead woman in that case, a heroin user, turned out to have taken an accidental overdose, but the police couldn’t identify her. All they found on the body was a silver heart necklace, probably left behind by whoever took her wallet and phone because of its unusual engraving, which would have made it tricky to shift on the black market. On the back of the heart was a date, and the name Holly-May.
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