Blue On Blue

by Dal Maclean

  He wasn’t surprised that Mulligan wanted to do all of the interviews himself with his sergeant. In effect he wanted all of the credit. Will was more than happy to let him have it.

  Mulligan’s arrests though, meant that Will going home, as officer in charge, was out of the question.

  He pulled out his phone and began to type.

  Sorry. Probably stuck here tonight.

  Leaving Tom with Cam again.

  He didn’t have time to worry about it. His phone beeped immediately.

  I’m in Soho. Can you get out to meet at Rocco? I can book for 8?

  He hesitated.

  Should he tell Tom what had happened to Ava, even though it might be a peripheral factor in a live case? He didn’t see how he could fail to. She was Tom’s business even more than she was his. He couldn’t keep Tom in the dark about having spoken to her. And he had to eat.

  Plus, the truth was that he felt only relief that Tom wanted to see him. He knew that the nervous flutter of excitement and apprehension in his stomach was hardly normal for a supposedly stable relationship of nine months’ duration. But the truth was, if he could spend even one easy hour with Tom in the middle of this cluster fuck, he’d feel better.

  He kept working till quarter to eight, then got up to shoulder into his suit jacket. Salt was talking on the office phone, so he scribbled a note, “Dinner with Tom” and shoved it under his nose.

  He expected Salt to wave him off. But instead he looked up with something like desperation and shook his head, frantically miming, “Don’t go!”

  Will had to wait less than a minute as the conversation ended in thanks and pleasantries, though to Will’s eyes, Salt looked wired and anxious. The moment the receiver hit the cradle Salt shot to his feet.

  He led Will to a quiet part of the large open-plan room, just outside Ingham’s darkened office. Away from everyone else.

  Will’s gut was already roiling on instinct.

  Salt said, “Patrick at the lab did a fast turnaround on one of those samples for me.”

  “June’s sample?” Will hadn’t asked for that. Why waste favors?

  “It’s not June’s DNA.”

  Annoyed realization hit hard. Will’s shoulders slumped. “Ha fucking ha. I’m already late Des.”

  Salt’s brown eyes were wide and anxious. “Guv.”

  “I fucking took it myself!”

  “I mean . . . the sample you took from her today . . . doesn’t match the one on file for her. Or the sample at Daria’s murder scene.”

  It took a second to grasp. Will heaved in a breath and held it.

  He looked across the office. Scrivenor was also shouldering into his jacket, grinning as he chatted to DC Sameera Kaur. Omar was typing at his keyboard as if he had two minutes left on an exam.

  And finally, finally it made sense.

  The DNA taken from Daria’s murder scene was the same as the DNA taken from Ricky’s murder scene. It hadn’t been put there deliberately. It had been left very much unintentionally. By the same murderer.

  And neither sample of DNA had come from June, who was securely behind bars, serving a life sentence for a crime she had not committed.

  11

  Rocco was an Italian restaurant on Old Brompton Road that Will and Tom used for quick meets when Will was on duty, because it was close to a tube station on the Piccadilly line—easy for Tom to reach. The room was narrow and deep, filled with tables, and along one long wall, each table was lit by a wall lamp, trained onto it like an anglepoise. Tom always chose to sit there if he could for the light to study by if Will was late.

  Will spotted him near the back of the room, moments after he passed under the red and white striped canopy from the pavement. He wore a navy aran jumper and a dark beanie covered most of his distinctive hair. A book lay open on the table in the beam of the wall light but Tom was frowning at his phone. Will didn’t pause to admire the view, or to bask in the knowledge that Tom was there with him, as he secretly tended to do. He headed straight for the table.

  “Hey,” Will said. “Sorry I’m late.” Busy finding out things I wish I didn’t know.

  Tom looked up, startled. The beanie really suited him. Everything suited him.

  Will sat down. He didn’t think he could eat. What Salt had told him seemed to have closed up his insides. “Have you ordered?”

  “Uh huh. Pizza okay?” Tom pointed to two full glasses on the table. It’d be tonic water, since Tom didn’t drink alcohol when Will couldn’t. “You look . . . worried.”

  Will picked up a glass and wished intensely for a scotch to take the edge off the whirling energy in his head.

  Too many theories. Too many realizations. Too many possibilities he didn’t want to look at head-on.

  The pizzas arrived at once.

  “You were brilliant on telly,” Tom said when the waitress left. “Very stern. Sexy as hell.”

  Will gave a wan smile. “We actually got a lead from it.”

  “Yeah?” Tom looked surprised. “So . . . will you be doing it again?”

  Will shook his head. “In the unlikely event the unit has to do another stint, Jamie’s welcome to it. Or Mulligan.”

  He took a bite of his pizza. It was excellent; no-nonsense, like his mum made.

  “The presenter fancied you,” Tom said, tone casual.

  Will sighed. “She didn’t.”

  And that was another reason why he’d hated the stuff on Twitter so much. He had a strong suspicion Tom had never really got his head around Will’s bisexuality. Attractive women around Will seemed to make him uneasy in a way that men didn’t appear to. Yet even so, Will found to his shame that any signs of jealousy from Tom felt pathetically encouraging.

  “Twitter agrees with me,” Tom said lightly.

  “Pez,” Will indicted. Pez was the one who monitored social media like a spy paid to do it. “Twitter is talking out of its arse. As it nearly always does.”

  “She’s engaged to the eldest son of the second richest aristocrat in the UK. I looked her up. She has a big Instagram account.” Tom looked momentarily sheepish. A piece of pepperoni dropped sadly to his plate from the pizza slice dangling, ignored, in his hand. Well . . . Will had looked up Cam, so they were even. But he didn’t admit that out loud.

  “Then we agree,” Will said evenly. “She’s not pining to give it all up for a DI in the Met.”

  “I did,” Tom pointed out.

  Will opened his mouth then closed it again as all kinds of emotions crammed into his mind—shame, worry, pride. Did Tom think he didn’t understand or appreciate what he’d sacrificed? How much did Tom regret all he’d given up?

  “But we all know you have no taste,” Will said. “Remember that light blue suit? The one with the enormous trousers?”

  Tom’s careful expression dissolved into laughter. “Fuck yeah.” Then his smile faded. “Jena got me that sample.”

  And that was like a cosmic cue. So Will told Tom about his meeting with Ava Burchill, who’d been Jena Haining, Tom’s manipulative, murderous false friend. The news certainly distracted Tom from worrying about the intentions of Emily from Witness.

  “Carved into her face?” Tom said, appalled. “Jesus. How bad was it? And it was Max’s name?”

  “I didn’t speak to a doctor,” Will said. “But I got the feeling it wasn’t superficial.”

  “So I assume Eddie Butts was behind it?”

  Will shifted in his seat. “It was . . . prison politics,” he evaded. Then, “Can I . . . ask you something? Hypothetically.”

  Tom pursed his mouth into an unimpressed pout at the clumsy diversion, but he nodded.

  “How’s it possible to have the wrong DNA sample on file for a convicted criminal?”

  Tom’s brows knotted together. “The . . . wrong . . . ?”

  “A current DNA sample that doesn’t match the one that was taken . . . before conviction.”

  Tom didn’t take his eyes off Will. “Could the old sample be flawed?”
>
  Will grimaced. “It was a blood sample. Taken in a police station.”

  Tom sat back. Will could almost see cogs whirring in his brain. “If it preceded a conviction . . . I’m assuming the blood sample must have matched a crime scene sample?”

  Will nodded, swallowing round the aching lump in his throat.

  Tom leaned closer. “An error with a complete sample would be far more likely to be deliberate. It’s not that usual for the police to take a blood sample is it?”

  Will swallowed again. “It needs the permission of a senior officer. Usually only when a routine non-intimate sample fails.”

  “And . . . did it fail?” Tom asked. But Will could tell he already knew the answer.

  “There’s no record one was taken,” Will said.

  It hadn’t felt that strange to him when he’d read it the first time he went through the Desmond case files. He couldn’t believe he’d ignored the implications.

  The team investigating the Ricky Desmond murder had ignored normal procedure, and gone straight to a blood test which had to be okayed from above, and which June herself had to permit. Had permitted.

  “If you wanted to switch a DNA sample in a police station,” Will slogged on. “What would you do?”

  Tom put both his hands on top of his beanie. He looked as unnerved as Will felt—he could see what was coming.

  “I’d do that,” he said. “I’d organize an intimate sample, to control the situation.”

  Will nodded miserably.

  It was as potentially damning as this: the collection of a non-intimate sample like a cheek swab, would be public, casual, harder to know who’d be present. But for an intimate sample, there had to be one medical professional and one police officer, who would then take the sample to the Storage Room.

  An intimate sample would provide a predictable setup and allow for planning; the placement of a suitable police officer.

  Plus, an intimate sample would be viewed as game, set and match—a gold standard of guilt.

  Will had checked the paper trail in the case file with lead in his gut. It had taken only a couple of minutes to find the name he needed; inevitably, the one he didn’t want to find. The taking of an intimate sample as opposed to a cheek swab, had been ordered by then DI Jo Ingham.

  The typed name in the file, the familiar signature, had made Will feel like throwing up on his desk.

  It felt like a personal betrayal. Like she’d done it to him, not to June.

  The officer who attended the taking of the sample, was a name neither Will nor Salt knew. DC Jeremy Masson. Salt had pulled up his record, to find he’d left the service shortly afterward. Also attached to his record: the fact that he’d died in an accident on his brand-new yacht at St. Katharine Docks a few months later. At first sight, he should never have been able to afford the boat or the mooring.

  Tom looked chastened and sad, and he didn’t even know about Ingham. But he didn’t ask anything else.

  What officer wanted to uncover police corruption? What officer ever wanted to find out their own much-admired boss just might be at the heart of it? Might be bent?

  Will pushed away his plate. The little appetite he’d had, disappearing in the renewed roil of distress in his stomach.

  No wonder Eve had been so sure she held a winning hand. She’d withheld and then handed over June’s DNA sample knowing that June was innocent of the Desmond murder, and that the killer had gone on to kill again.

  And now Eve was going to dangle the possibility of further knowledge for the price of her son and another chance to ogle Will up close. It was chilling in its narcissism, its conscience-free psychopathy, and at the same time, pathetic.

  What more did Eve know? The identity of the killer? Or nothing more than the fact June had been framed, banged up for thirteen years for nothing?

  “Just . . . be careful,” Tom said. He put his hand over Will’s on the table.

  Will’s phone, lying near his plate, beeped with an incoming message. He glanced at it with dread.

  But it wasn’t what he’d expected—a message from Salt. Instead he saw, with a burst of wild irritation, that it held a now familiar thumbprint photo, though the number was a U.K. rather than a U.S. one. And there was a white arrow on the image. A video.

  His stomach gave another gnawing roll. He really really didn’t need this juvenile bullshit now.

  But still he picked up the phone with his free hand and clicked the arrow.

  He recognized the setting at once as Pez’s agency party, presumably after Will had come and gone. The sound was low-level background party chatter with the odd shriek of laughter, and the focus of the video was clearly zoomed in.

  Tom, standing close to a wall, eyes down, with no discernible expression on his face—that model blankness—as Cam talked urgently into his ear. Just as they’d stood when Will had seen them. But this was later on. Tom’s jacket was off. The video had been taken between the heads and shoulders of people standing between the lens and its subjects, giving the camera cover. But Will could see both Tom and Cam’s expressions clearly. Cam put his arm round Tom’s shoulders.

  They were so close together that when Tom reacted to something Cam said and turned his head to look at him, their faces were only inches apart and the electricity between them was impossible to hide. Will could see Tom’s eyes drop to Cam’s mouth, his own mouth opening slightly; Cam’s eyes dropping to it. Cam’s face moving closer. Tom didn’t move, waiting, as if he was hypnotized. And then one of the people in front of the camera moved, concealing the two of them, as if the timing had been choreographed. Like a director fading to black on a closed bedroom door.

  Will had no idea what had happened next. If Tom at the last second had turned away, though he hadn’t looked reluctant; he’d looked mesmerized. Or if they’d kissed, in front of everyone. Pez. Mark. He’d have hoped Mark would have told him but maybe not, since his new loyalty lay with Pez.

  “Will?” Tom sounded curious.

  Somehow, on automatic pilot, Will had managed to hide his reactions, but not the stiffening of his hand under Tom’s.

  He wanted to hurl the phone at the wall. Instead he pulled his hand back and slid the phone on the table to play the video again for Tom.

  He could see that Tom recognized the setting and the moment almost immediately. His face drained of color. Even when it had finished, he didn’t take his eyes off the screen. Then he looked up. His expression was bleak and it reminded Will precisely of the sheepish guilt on Tom’s face each time Will met him in the aftermath of sleeping with another of his lovers, the previous summer.

  Or perhaps he was projecting. Perhaps it was the familiarity of his own feelings—sickening disappointment and jealousy. Pain and loss.

  “Nothing happened,” Tom said.

  Will looked down at the phone again, now set back to the home screen, because he couldn’t stand any longer to look at that stunning face. He had to remind himself that Tom would tell him it was over. Except . . . maybe it would take awhile to get up the courage to admit it had all been a mistake. Given that Tom had all but begged Will to take him back.

  “But you wanted it to,” Will said. He forced his gaze back. Tom was looking at him with anxious eyes. “And even after that, you moved him into the house.”

  Tom swallowed. Now he looked almost panicked. “It’s not like that. Cam’s . . . a friend. I was . . . I was just a bit . . . down that night.”

  Will looked at the table. He felt gutted alive. And he realized that, for all he’d worried about the worst happening since the day Tom had come back to him, deep down he must have actually thought that it never would. Not again. That must be why he felt so stunned.

  He made himself say, “You need to be careful. Both of you. His . . . Schuler must have followed you here or he’s hired someone. We both know how far some people can go . . . for love. Or whatever it is.”

  Tom began, “Will . . . this is . . . .”

  “He’s jealous and angry
and clearly not prepared to let it go.” Somehow Will’s voice was steady. “His lover’s moved on to someone else’s lover. So he’s giving that Someone Else a heads-up. To try to make him angry too.” Tom opened his mouth. His face was a picture of distress, but Will barreled on. He sounded distant and professional and unaffected, and it reminded him again implacably of the previous summer, when he’d hid his pain and loss behind precisely this facade. Déjà vu indeed. He stood up. “Either way, I don’t have time for this. There isn’t enough here to get the police involved, but if you want to find out if he’s in the country you can search when he entered and get his temporary residence from his port entry details. I suggest you try Pixie.” Pixie had been his colleague through his short career as a private investigator, and she could find anything and anyone. “But I’d recommend neither of you try to talk to him without precautions in place. You can see he’s unstable.”

  “Will—” Tom stared up at him. He looked pale, subdued, almost afraid. “Please. Don’t.”

  This was too self-indulgent to give anymore emotional energy to. Will had to focus on what was happening to real people, people like June.

  “I’ll send you everything he’s sent me,” he said. “So Pixie can look at it.”

  He paid the bill on the way out.

  Hansen’s flat wasn’t the same as the one Will used to visit when he was her lover.

  This one was in a newish development of glass and pale stone called “The Courthouse” on Horseferry Road, situated in the former Westminster Magistrates’ Court and within easy walking distance of New Scotland Yard. It wasn’t as discreet as her old flat; he had to check in with a concierge in a massive gray marble lobby. But Will didn’t meet anyone in the lift or when he emerged onto the seventh floor.

  Before he’d left the station to go to Rocco, Will had phoned Hansen and asked for a meet. He’d assumed she’d been able to tell from his tone that it was important and required discretion because she hadn’t asked questions. The fact was, she was the only senior officer left he could trust to put doing the right thing above procedure. He hoped he could depend on her to put it above career too.