by Andy Maslen
She left Johanna’s flat at eleven. The two women embraced and Stella found some comfort in the hug. She wondered if she’d ever hug Jamie again.
18
Chicago
Inside the FBI’s vehicle investigation facility, Roisin was struck again by how much money federal-level law enforcement had at its disposal.
The garage was the size of an aircraft hangar. Marked bays accommodated eighteen-wheelers, family-sized cars, bikes and pickups. Even a couple of speedboats on steel stands. She counted nineteen vehicles sitting dead-centre in spots demarcated by yellow-and-black tape.
Most stood unattended, but a crew of mechanics in FBI-branded overalls were working on a panel van, its bodywork screeching as power tools bit and sliced through the thin metal sheets.
Simone led her to a corner where the black Ford Explorer she’d only seen in photos stood waiting. The experience of having handled its toy-sized plastic stand-in a few minutes earlier made it seem even larger than it really was.
Up close, the first thing she noticed was the smell. A dank, muddy, vegetal stink hung around it. She walked up to the driver’s door and peered in through the open window. Adam Collier died in the seat she was looking at.
She tried to imagine what he must have thought in his final moments. He’d been trapped in a car sinking into freezing cold water, in the middle of nowhere. He was going to drown. He escaped that horrific fate only because someone put a bullet between his eyes.
He’d sunk with the car and then been eaten by the small things that lived in the lake. Fish, eels, crayfish? He’d rotted away in the seat in front of her until only his bones were left.
Simone tapped her on the shoulder, making her jump.
‘I have to attend to a couple of things. Will you be OK here? Mike – he’s the facility manager – has my number. Just get him to call me when you’re done.’
Five minutes later, dressed in FBI navy-blue overalls and equipped with a torch, Roisin opened the driver’s door and climbed up into the seat. She spent some time looking in the footwells, pulling back carpets, opening the glovebox and what felt like dozens of little lidded cubbyholes. At the end of the examination of these obvious places, she had nothing.
She climbed out again and went round to the SUV’s front end. Placing her right foot on the bumper or, what did they call them over here, fender?, she hoisted herself up and clambered onto the bonnet. Hood! She aimed the torch down at the windscreen. The shooter had kneeled up here. Right where she was now. Maybe in this exact position.
She looked down and saw a series of scratches in the paintwork. They were deep enough to have scored through the surface of the paint but not hard enough to reach bare metal. She switched on the torch again and shone it down between her knees, sliding sideways across the expanse of metal to take a closer look.
The scratches were grouped into irregular sets. Each set contained parallel marks that curved, spiralled and overlapped across the black paint. Three, four, five, sometimes more. What had caused them?
The gun, gripped in the shooter’s right hand and scraped across the paint as the shooter got into position? Maybe. But there were so many.
A belt buckle, if the shooter was on his or her belly? Possible. But wait. It was winter. So they surely had to have been wearing a thick coat of some kind. It might have had a zip but that would only have one point of contact at most – the tab. She couldn’t see how a metal zip could cause this kind of patterning.
Boots, then. Perhaps the shooter was wearing those ice grips you could buy that fixed to your shoes with straps. It seemed the most likely explanation, even though in that case Roisin thought the scratches would have been deeper.
Returning to the cabin, she yanked on the hood-release lever. The latch sprang half open with a clonk. She went back to the front and lifted the hood and latched it onto the stay.
A black plastic cover concealed much of the engine. Visible were suspension components and the usual assortment of wires, pipes and random bits of mechanical engineering.
She ignored the engine itself and began at the windscreen. A black plastic gutter ran the width of the glass, where water would run down and away through mesh-covered drain tubes. Starting at the driver’s side, and hoisting herself up to lie on her belly, she scrutinised the intricately moulded plastic, looking for something, anything, that might have been left inadvertently by the shooter.
Even though she was a detective, not a CSI, she knew of Locard’s Exchange Principle, the famous forensic dictum coined by the French father of forensic science: ‘Every contact leaves a trace’.
Somewhere on, or in, this SUV, was a trace of the killer. She just needed to find it.
The gutter was full of dried-out lake scum. A compacted, grey-brown mixture of silt and fragments of vegetation, presumably disturbed when the two-ton vehicle had settled into the mud.
She picked at it with her fingernail, rubbing it to a fine powder between her fingertips. Nothing. More damn nothing! She managed to make it halfway across then slithered down and went round to the passenger side.
Here she repeated the process. Inch by inch, she scraped and prodded the dried gunk from the gutter. And inch by inch she realised there was nothing there. Finally she had a two-inch section left, right in the centre.
Sighing, she prodded the muck with a fingertip. And, instantly, she felt something hard. For a second she thought of leaving it in situ while she went to find an evidence bag. Then she realised something.
This wasn’t an FBI case anymore. They might call it ‘extending assistance’ but she knew they wanted shot of it. She didn’t have to follow FBI evidence-gathering protocols. Or, come to that, Met ones either. Plenty of time to tidy up the chain of evidence later.
She pushed her thumbnail into the dirt and got it underneath the object. Gently, she levered it up and out of its cocoon of dried mud. What was it? She frowned as she rubbed it clean.
Lying in her palm was a pointed metal cone about the size of the eraser on the top of a pencil. It had once been shiny, but now its surface was dull and pitted by the water. At its base, three tabs stood proud.
She knew what it was. A decorative stud. The shooter was wearing a studded jacket. Or a belt. But then, how had this come loose? Much more likely to be a boot stud that got pulled out of the leather when the shooter was clambering onto the bonnet.
An image came to her. A biker with long, greasy black hair held back by a stars-and-stripes bandanna, grimy from working on a Harley Davidson. The biker had climbed up onto the bonnet, shot Adam Collier between the eyes and, in the process, lost a stud.
She let herself slide down to the ground and rolled the piece of metal around in her palm. Something about it felt familiar, but she couldn’t place it. She wrapped it in a paper tissue and stuffed it into a pocket, then went to find Mike.
After lunch with Simone in the first-floor cafeteria, Roisin moved on to the next phase of her evidence review. CCTV. Another corridor, another swipe-card-protected office and she found herself in a familiar setup. A plain wooden table bearing a PC already loaded with a program for video review.
‘How come you have this footage?’ Roisin asked.
‘We investigated their disappearance at the time and collected the CCTV then. But we hit a brick wall and had to park it. We kept the footage on file. Standard procedure.’
‘Why didn’t you request a liaison officer back then?’
‘We talked to our counterparts in London, but with no bodies and no leads they said there was nothing they could add to our investigation.’
Roisin nodded. It made a kind of sense.
‘You’ll see we picked up an unidentified driver outside the Colliers’ house,’ Simone said. ‘Couple of the neighbours had security cameras at the front of their properties. Thank god for Neighbourhood Watch!’
At the mention of the driver, Roisin’s pulse kicked up a notch. Could this be the killer? She dismissed the thought. If it were, the FBI would surely have don
e something about it.
‘Male or female?’
‘It could be either. Have a look yourself and maybe we can put our heads together.’
Giving Roisin instructions how to find her cubicle from the video review room, Simone left with a cheery, ‘See ya!’
Roisin jiggled the mouse to wake up the screen and then began the tedious process of watching CCTV footage. Which turned out not to be tedious at all. Someone had cut together the relevant sequences. Roisin found herself watching a condensed series of shots that would lead, ultimately, to the deaths of Adam and Lynne Collier.
Adam appeared in shot first, behind the wheel of the black Ford Explorer. She stared at the dark eyes and clean jawline, the mouth set in a line. Who wouldn’t look tense if they were on their way to murder their spouse?
Seeing him like this, Roisin finally got a handle on the question that had been eating away at her since she first read the dossier the FBI had emailed to her in London.
How, exactly, had Lynne got to the lake in Minnesota?
If she went of her own volition, then Adam, or somebody else – the killer, maybe – must have given her a really, really good reason. What could he possibly have said? Oh, hi, darling, it’s me. Listen I thought I’d take the day off and drive all the way up to the frozen middle of nowhere. Join me for a picnic? She shook her head. It didn’t make sense.
So Lynne went under duress. Either Adam took her, or the mystery shooter did. If Adam took her, how did the mystery shooter know where to find them? Convinced Lynne was already a prisoner when Adam left the FBI building, she pressed play again.
Five more minutes passed during which Adam tracked northwest from Chicago towards Minnesota. And it became obvious that Roisin’s supposition was correct. In every shot, he was alone in the Explorer.
The footage ran out at a town called Sparta in Wisconsin. A superimposed line of text at the bottom of the screen read:
Last sighting of A Collier: 5.47 a.m.
The video jumped from Adam in the black Explorer to a suburban residential street, devoid of cars except for a stationary black Ford Taurus.
A figure slouched behind the wheel, a dark baseball cap over their eyes. Visible beneath the sides of the cap was short blonde hair. The video resolution wasn’t great and Roisin couldn’t make out the features: a generic nose-mouth-chin combo that could belong to a person of either sex. But at least she had a nickname for the driver: Blondie.
Another jump-cut, and Blondie, minus the cap, walked up to a front door. It opened and there stood Lynne Collier. Even from across the street it was unmistakably her. She beckoned Blondie inside and closed the door.
Roisin felt a surge of adrenaline race outwards from the pit of her stomach to flood her system. Hand shaking, she rewound the video and pressed play again, slowing the playback to half-speed.
Blondie slow-walked up to the Colliers’ front door. Her face – because, yes, it was a woman, wasn’t it! – was in three-quarter view. Even with the blonde crop, Roisin thought she knew who she was looking at. But the walk was the giveaway. She knew someone who walked exactly like that. A slight roll to the hips. A way of thrusting them ahead of the rest of her. Aggressive.
She hit pause.
She stared and stared, and stared at the woman stepping onto the porch of the Colliers’ house.
A lawyer might doubt Blondie’s identity. CCTV evidence was always open to interpretation. Especially when hairstyles had been changed.
But Roisin wasn’t a lawyer. She was a detective.
And she knew who she was looking at.
What the hell was Stella Cole doing knocking on Adam and Lynne Collier’s front door?
19
Stockholm
The following day, Stella arrived at SPA headquarters at 8.00 a.m. Oskar greeted her when she arrived in the Murder Squad’s area of the cavernous second floor.
‘I’m glad you’re here early,’ he said. ‘Press conference in twenty minutes.’
‘Really? You want me there?’
He grinned. ‘No need to pull a face. Swedish journalists are very polite. You’ll be fine.’
The media centre occupied a corner of the ground floor of the building. Together with Oskar and Malin, Stella sat at the usual top table, its blue baize surface bristling with microphones, their multicoloured cables snaking off the front edge. Behind them, a blue-and- yellow Swedish Police Authority banner hung from a pop-up arrangement of slender aluminium poles.
She estimated the number of journalists at fifty. The TV crews stood at the back, their professional cameras supported on robust-looking black tripods. Sound recordists held their boom mics over the heads of their seated colleagues.
Malin patted the air for silence. At once the noise level fell from a loud hubbub to complete silence. Impressive, Stella thought.
‘God morgon,’ Malin said, then switched to English. ‘Sitting to my left is Detective Chief Inspector Cole of Scotland Yard. She will now update you on the investigation into the murder of former Ambassador Brömly.’
A volley of flashes went off, momentarily blinding Stella and leaving orange afterimages dancing across her eyes.
She cleared her throat. Inwardly she was cursing Malin for dropping her in it like this, and Oskar for not warning her they’d want her to speak.
She leaned forward a few degrees. But not because she needed extra amplification from the mics. She’d found early on in her career that the movement suggested to journalists a copper serious in her mission to solve the crime. Body language was half the battle in winning them over.
She summarised the working hypothesis in a few brief sentences. Then found a video camera and looked directly into its black eye. Imagined she was speaking to a single witness.
‘We are looking at a period of Mr Brömly’s life from 1971 to 1976. If you knew him at or around this time, perhaps through work, or a personal connection, I would ask you to get in touch with Stockholm Police.’
She turned to Oskar.
‘There’ll be a number displayed on screen and at the bottom of all articles for you to call,’ he added, mirroring Stella’s posture by leaning closer to the bank of microphones.
‘I would like to reassure the public that we are doing everything in our power to identify and apprehend the murderer,’ Malin said. ‘Now, questions.’
Malin fielded the questions skillfully, selecting the journalists one at a time while cueing up the next, so people gradually stopped shouting to be heard and contented themselves with putting their hands up. Those writing for online outlets tended to keep their hands up anyway, as they all brandished smartphones.
‘Rolf Tomsson, Aftonbladet. Why do you think the killer is Swedish?’
‘We have forensics evidence plus witness statements from London that point in that direction.’
‘Lydia Stenson, Expressen. Was Mr Brömly being investigated by the police?’
‘No.’
‘Susanna Bengtson, Kanal 5. What about suspects?’
‘I’m afraid I cannot comment on operational matters.’
A woman in the front row, who had been silent so far, shot up her hand. Stella looked at her. Early-sixties. Grey hair cut short. Pale-blue eyes set close together, giving her the intense gaze of a bird of prey.
‘Yes,’ Malin said, pointing at her.
‘Do you think Brömly’s murder was related to his politics?’
Malin frowned. ‘I don’t know why it would be. He was not an extremist. I believe he was a lifelong member of the Social Democratic Party.’
The woman made a note in her pad and Stella caught a hint of a smile on her downturned face. She’d called the victim ‘Brömly’, too. That was interesting. Everyone else referred to the dead ambassador as ‘Mr Brömly’. She looked up and stared back at Stella, holding her in that hawk-like gaze.
After a few more questions, Malin rang down the curtain on the conference, promising further updates as and when…blah blah…something new to report…working
night and day…the usual senior officer’s brush-off to the press pack.
After the press conference, Oskar took Stella to one side.
‘Now we’re getting to the active part of the investigation I need you to fill out one of these,’ he said, producing a folded form from his jacket pocket.
‘What is it?’
‘Officially, a Tillfällig Skjutvapenlicens och Ackreditering, although we just call it a TSA,’ he said. ‘It means Temporary Firearms Licence and Accreditation.’
Stella shook her head. ‘No thank you. If there’s any shooting to be done, I’ll leave that to you.’
Oskar smiled. ‘Oh well. I guess that’s fine. As you’re unfamiliar with firearms, you probably wouldn’t be any good with a gun anyway.’
He went to refold the form and replace it in his pocket.
Stella couldn’t help herself. She shot her hand out. How dare he make assumptions? Oskar Norgrim was about to get a lesson in what female British cops were capable of with a pistol in their hand.
‘Wait! Tell me what’s involved.’
‘I assume your Met firearms accreditation is still up to date? I checked with Chief Superintendent McDonald while I was in London. She told me it was.’
She looked at him. He had a nerve. Going behind her back to check up on her basic competence.
‘Yes, it’s current.’
‘Good. So, you sign the form, we go down to the range, issue a pistol and you run through a magazine to show you’re competent to handle a firearm.’
She scribbled her name and followed Oskar to the lifts.
Like a lot of police stations, Stockholm Central housed its armoury and firing range in the basement. Pretty sensible really, not letting the general public overhear gunfire while they came to report their lost dog or burgled apartment. And nowhere for stray bullets to fly except into walls backed with millions of tons of earth.