by Jane Casey
She was probably right but I didn’t want to agree too heartily. ‘Better not to think about what might have happened, Mrs Driscoll. I’m glad it didn’t turn out that way.’ I hesitated before asking her a question that was potentially committing me to spend the rest of the day in her sauna of a sitting room. ‘Is there anything else you think we should know about Father Fintan or what happened today? Anything we haven’t asked you? Anything that’s bothering you? Anything else you noticed?’
‘Well, there was just one thing. It’s probably nothing. But when I was getting the milk in this morning – that would have been at twenty to seven, and I’m sure of that because I had the television on in the kitchen – I saw that there was a Royal Mail van outside the flat, and a postman going up to the door with a package in brown paper. A big thing. Rectangular, about that big.’ She sketched out a shape that was roughly eighteen inches long and a foot wide.
‘Are you sure it was Father Fintan’s door?’
She nodded. ‘I looked to see. I was going to ask him what it was when I saw him.’
‘I didn’t see a parcel in the flat,’ I said slowly, thinking about the sparsely furnished rooms I’d looked around.
‘No more did I.’ She blinked rapidly. ‘I had a good look, too. While I was waiting for the police. I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anyone hiding behind a door, you know. I couldn’t do anything for Father Fintan so I just said a few prayers for him while I was looking. No parcel at all.’
‘And no wrappings.’
‘Nothing.’ She sat back in her armchair, triumphant. ‘Not a bit of paper or anything.’
‘And you’re sure it was his flat?’
‘Positive. I saw the door open.’ She sounded definite, an ideal witness.
‘Are you sure it was an official Royal Mail van? Did it have the company livery on the side?’
‘It was red anyway.’ We were on shakier territory, I could tell immediately. She sounded suddenly vague. ‘It was the right size. I think it was. I didn’t really look at it, to be honest with you. I wouldn’t have known what sort of van it was, what make or whatever. I saw him get out, and I saw the colour of it. He was in the uniform – the jacket and so on – so I just assumed it was a proper post van. I didn’t think anything else of it.’
‘You didn’t see the number plate.’ It wasn’t a question.
She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t worry. This is really helpful. You did see the postman, which is more important anyway. Could you tell me what he looked like?’ I was trying not to sound too excited but my heart was doing its best imitation of a runaway horse at a full gallop.
‘I was looking at the package, not at him. I didn’t know he would be important.’ She sounded as desolate as I felt. ‘He was white. Brown hair, maybe?’
‘Old? Young?’
‘Not old. About the same age as Brian.’ I looked baffled and she shook her head, irritated with herself, then pointed at one of the pictures. ‘My middle son. He’s thirty-four.’
‘Height?’
The best she could do was that he was neither especially tall nor particularly small. Average, in fact. And average build. She had helped to narrow it down to about a quarter of the population of London. And that was assuming she was right about the hair colour, his age, and his race.
I thanked her anyway, genuinely grateful for some suggestion of a lead, and extracted myself from the flat at the cost of recounting, as briefly as I could, all I knew of both sides of my family. I only went back three generations, covering a span of years that she gave me to understand was woefully short and inadequate, but we parted on good terms nonetheless.
I collected Colin, who had managed to cover the rest of the street in the time it had taken me to do one interview, and we went back to the station together. As soon as we walked through the door, Superintendent Godley came to the door of his office.
‘I gather Josh is tied up elsewhere. Come and tell me what happened this morning.’
With Colin’s help I filled him in, describing how the priest had been killed and what Mrs Driscoll had seen. He listened intently, making an occasional note.
‘So we’re now looking at a very active serial killer.’
‘Or killers.’ I trotted out my theory about multiple murderers, feeling that it fell a little flat. Perhaps it was the dismaying realisation that we had hardly any leads on one killer, let alone several. Perhaps it was the sketchiness of Mrs Driscoll’s description of our one and only suspect. Perhaps it was a general lack of enthusiasm for a serious, complicated, headline-grabbing enquiry. Any or all would have been entirely reasonable.
Godley sighed. ‘Right. Well, let’s start with what we know. We need to trace a red van that may or may not have been an official Royal Mail vehicle. Colin, check with the local sorting office and see if there was anyone making parcel deliveries in that location around that time this morning, just so we can rule it out. Also, we’d better check with the occupants of the flats on either side of the priest’s, to see if they were the recipients of the parcel. There’s a chance that Mrs Driscoll got it wrong, even if she won’t admit it.’
‘Right. And then if it looks suspicious, I’ll get on with finding the van.’
‘Check the area for ANPR cameras – that’ll be your quickest route to finding it. Otherwise, call in local CCTV.’
‘There won’t be anything from the street itself,’ I said. ‘It’s all residential, no businesses. I didn’t see any private CCTV cameras on any of the flats.’
‘Nor did I,’ Colin said. ‘We’re not going to get the van outside the house. Best I can do is put it in the borough heading in the right direction, always assuming I can find it. We don’t have a make, anything on the plate or a year of manufacture. And I guarantee you, red vans will be surprisingly popular in that neck of the woods.’
‘Think positive, Colin.’ Godley’s expression lightened briefly. ‘If it can be identified, you’re the one to do it.’
The DC did not seem to be particularly cheered by the superintendent’s confidence, but then I too would have been somewhat soured by the prospect of spending many hours watching CCTV of variable quality, looking for something that might never appear.
‘It’s obvious that this one is a major enquiry. We can expect the media to be interested from now on, so I’ll let the press office know.’ Godley was back to looking grave. ‘As far as manpower goes I’ll talk to Josh about his requirements when he gets back, but in the meantime I’ll allocate officers as needed. Maeve, what are you doing next?’
‘Checking with IT to find out if anyone accessed the PNC records for both Kinsella and Palmer, or the sex offenders’ register for the area. It’s definitely worth considering that there might be someone on the inside helping the killer or killers.’
‘It is,’ Godley agreed. ‘That’s why I asked Peter Belcott to get in touch with them as soon as he got in this morning. It was before we got word of the latest murder, so he’s waiting for them to get back to him with an updated list at the moment.’
I made a fair attempt at looking pleased even though I wanted to lie on the floor and whimper at the prospect of working with my least favourite colleague, the ever-irritating DC Belcott, whose presence on the team was a constant source of bemusement to me. About the only silver lining was the thought that he had had to spend the morning on the phone to the techies, a thankless task at the best of times.
Godley had moved on. ‘Have a chat with local CID as well. See if there’s any information coming back to them from their informers about this. Have you made contact with them?’
‘I met one of their DCs yesterday.’ It felt like a lifetime ago.
‘They should be inclined to help. They’ll be glad this one isn’t on them.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Do bear in mind that if we do find someone on the force who has been helping the killer, we’re going to have to tread carefully. I want to know straightaway if anything comes of that line of enquiry.’
‘Understood.’
I took what he said to mean he didn’t want to be bothered if we didn’t get anywhere, and left him to his thoughts. Whatever they were, they seemed to be stopping him from sleeping at night, if the bags under his eyes were anything to go by. None of my business, I assured myself as I crossed the office, heading reluctantly for Belcott’s desk. He was on the phone. I was just the right height to appreciate the brutal haircut he had had recently, so his hair was too short to obscure the weirdly squared-off shape of his skull. I stared down at his scalp gleaming through the dark bristles, the queasy white of a cave-dwelling thing that’s never seen the sun, and felt my stomach turn over.
He glanced up and I rearranged my face into a smile, almost certainly not quite quickly enough. Raising one finger to tell me to wait, he returned to his conversation without seeming to be in a hurry to wind it up. As his side mostly consisted of grunts, I wasn’t entirely clear on whether it was work or personal. But then, as far as I was aware, Belcott didn’t actually have a personal life. I found a spare desk and sat on the edge of it, feet swinging. I could be patient if I needed to be.
Long after my patience had worn out, long after I had given up sitting and started pacing, he finally hung up and swivelled around to face me.
‘Still here?’
‘Obviously. What have you found out?’
Instead of replying, he stood up, pulling the waistband of his trousers up and puffing out his chest. ‘I think this one needs to go straight to the boss.’
My interest sharpened. ‘Did you get a result? Really?’
‘Might have done.’ He leaned over so he could see into Godley’s office. ‘Might have a single name, as it happens. He doesn’t look busy. Are you coming?’
I followed him, nonplussed. I hadn’t really been expecting to find a trail of electronic breadcrumbs that would lead to whoever had been helping the murderer – or maybe the murderer himself. It was a good idea, but nine times out of ten a good idea comes to nothing. It was something of a shock to discover that yes, there was one registered user of the PNC database who had consulted the records of all three victims in the days before they were murdered, and only one.
It took Belcott a very long time to explain to the superintendent, and, by extension, me, how very clever he had been in narrowing down the list that IT had supplied. I saw Godley’s eyelids flicker, as if he had finally lost his grip on his patience, and his voice was sharp when he interrupted.
‘Right, Peter. Can we get to the end of this sooner rather than later? I’d like to know who was responsible for this today, if possible.’
‘Of course.’ Belcott sounded surprised and not a little wounded. I didn’t dare look in his direction. ‘The only person to have consulted those records in the past two weeks is a civilian clerical assistant in Brixton, one Caroline Banner. She’s been working there for eleven years, so it’s probably worth checking back to see if she’s been up to no good all along. Nothing in her file to suggest it, I have to admit. She’s a model employee, and her background checks have all been fine – no close relations with criminal records, no associations with known villains.’ He shrugged. ‘No accounting for who’ll turn bad if they get offered enough to do it. Everyone has their price, I suppose.’
‘It needn’t be money,’ I pointed out. ‘Not everyone is motivated by cold hard cash.’
‘What else would it be?’
‘Intimidation, perhaps. Or, considering the victims, she might have been persuaded that what she was doing was just and proper.’
‘Hard to argue with that. Sounds as if the killer is doing the world a favour, if you ask me.’
‘Thank you, Peter.’ Godley was probably the only person alive who could quell Belcott completely in just three words. His repressive tone was probably also designed to discourage me from tackling Belcott myself, but I wouldn’t have bothered to argue with him anyway. I was more interested in finding out what he knew.
‘Did you get a list of every other search she’s conducted in the last couple of weeks?’
‘Amazingly enough, I did think of that.’ He waved a sheaf of pages at me, not giving me time to read anything that was on them. ‘But it’s part of her job, legitimately, to access the PNC database about convicted criminals living in the local area. It’s going to take me a while to separate out the ones who fit into the victim profile you’ve been seeing. By which I mean nonces.’
Godley frowned. ‘You’d better list the sex offenders of all kinds – not just paedophiles. We don’t know what the parameters are for our killer. Just because we have three victims with convictions of that nature, we can’t expect him to stick to cats of one colour.’
‘It’s still going to take me a while.’
‘As soon as you’ve got the list, circulate it to DI Derwent, to Colin and Maeve, and to me. That’s your priority.’
‘What’s mine?’ I knew what I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure if Godley would allow it. ‘Caroline Banner needs to be interviewed, but should I wait for DI Derwent to get back?’
‘Is he still at the morgue?’
‘So it seems.’
Godley tapped the end of his pen on his desk, thinking. ‘Right. You’re absolutely correct: we do need to talk to this woman, right now. I want to know what she’s been saying and to whom. But I don’t want to spook her either, so I’m not letting the boys from the DPS arrest her for misconduct in public office – yet. Nor do I want to have personnel breathing down my neck, telling me I can’t ask her any questions because of pending disciplinary proceedings. Maeve, go and find her. Interview her, but gently. Don’t tell her she’s not in trouble, because she certainly will be, but play it down. Go for the sympathy angle – tell her about Ivan Tremlett’s kids. We don’t know why she’s helping the killer, but we do know that these victims don’t cause many people to shed tears. So make them real for her. We need her to want to help us. If she feels guilty, so much the better.’
I nodded.
‘Peter, thanks for helping on this one.’ There was a definite note of dismissal in the superintendent’s voice and I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed it.
‘Don’t you want me to speak to the Banner woman too?’
The answer to that was evidently no. Godley leaned back, looking indefinably authoritative all of a sudden. ‘There’ll be more useful things for you to do here. Like working on that list.’
‘I’m happy to talk to her on my own,’ I said, and subsided at a glare from the superintendent.
‘There’s no question of that. You’ll need someone with you because this is going to be a criminal case eventually, and you need to be protected from the defence. They’ll go for you if they find out you spoke to her informally before she was arrested. What are you going to say if she suggests you said anything inappropriate?’
‘But I wouldn’t.’
‘I’m sure you wouldn’t. That doesn’t mean she won’t claim you did.’ He looked past me, scanning the office and I knew what he was going to say before he said it. ‘Why don’t you take Rob with you? He’s sensible on these occasions.’
Why not take Rob with me? Because it would be hellishly awkward, actually, Superintendent Godley.
‘I think he’s busy. He’s out tying up the loose ends on the Tancredi case.’
‘At a guess, the ends are loose no more. He’s sitting at his desk.’
Of course he was. And I had run out of reasons why he shouldn’t be the one to come with me. I trailed a tetchy Belcott out of the office, almost wishing that he had been told to accompany me. Almost. No matter how great the potential for embarrassment if I worked with Rob, it was still likely to be better than the short, sweaty alternative represented by Peter Belcott.
Rob being Rob, of course, he made things easy for me. He was back to his usual self-possession, that amused reserve that had deserted him so comprehensively the previous evening and had still been subdued during our conversation at the Old Bailey. In fact, if it hadn’t been
for the bruising across the back of his hand, I might have doubted that he had lost his temper at all. He listened courteously to my floundering explanation of where I was going and why I needed him to come too, or rather, why Godley had said he should come along when I definitely hadn’t asked for him, although I was glad he was free to join me. When I had finally wound down to silence, he picked up his keys and stood up.
‘As long as I get to drive, we can go where you like.’
‘Fine by me.’
‘Do we know she’s definitely at work today?’
‘Godley rang them. They’ve got her sitting in an interview room waiting for us.’
‘Does she know why?’
‘Doubt it. Although you never know, she might have a guilty conscience. If you’d been passing confidential information to someone who shouldn’t have it, you might suspect that’s why you’re being interviewed, I suppose.’
‘You might at that.’
Walking out to the car with him felt more or less like the old days, although much like someone with dormant toothache I couldn’t help poking at the source of the pain to see if it was really gone, and discovered with one look at him that no, it was not. I was exceedingly aware of him sitting in the car beside me – aware too of taking care to avoid physical contact with him, of taking care to choose the right words as we talked. But from him there was no sign of awkwardness and I did my best to match his composure.
On the way to Brixton I told him about my morning’s work, describing the priest’s house and his body – more specifically, what remained of it after the shotgun blast that had ended his life.
‘That does sound a bit odd in the context of the other murders. What did Derwent say when you suggested multiple killers?’
I let my silence answer for me and he laughed. ‘Like that, is it?’
‘I hadn’t thought it out before he left. I only put it all together before I went in to talk to the boss.’
‘A likely story.’ He glanced at me. ‘Seriously, Maeve, watch it. Twisting Derwent’s tail is not the way to deal with him.’