Get update from Peter Bell re key card

“      “      “Gareth

Brief Suzanne

Get Mervyn Hammond in

Find out name of girl Shawn attacked – MH should know

Check on Gill

Chicken fillets/washing powder/binliners

Winkler – what’s he up to??

He paused after this last one and underlined Winkler’s name again. Although they were meant to be working together on this case, it occurred to Pat that he hadn’t seen anything of his ‘colleague’ – how that word stuck in his craw – since the last team briefing. During the Child Catcher case, Winkler had gone off on his own and almost screwed up the whole operation. He was pretty sure Winkler’s apparent lack of interest in this case would prevent that happening again, but he couldn’t help but feel a tickle of anxiety.

Even though the list needed to be four times longer, Pat decided it was enough to be going on with. Most of those things were doable that afternoon. He toyed with the idea of ringing Gill first, having just had a sudden grim vision of her and Bonnie, stuck in front of the TV on this cold wintery day, Bonnie chatting to her Barbies and Gill ignoring her, staring with unseeing eyes at the screen . . . He shuddered. No, it wouldn’t be like that. Gill wasn’t like that anymore.

Yet he could never quite shake the worry that she might be, that she was just hiding it well when he was around.

He got out of the car and pulled out his phone to call her, but then saw Peter Bell heading towards his own car, remote key in his hand.

‘Cyber-Crime office only open mornings these days?’ Patrick enquired. He hadn’t meant to sound snippy, but it came out that way, and Bell’s fleshy face folded into a brief scowl that he immediately covered up with an obsequious smile.

‘Ha ha, Guv, no, far from it, actually. I’m back off to the Travel Inn to check out something I’ve unearthed about their room key system. Just a theory I’m going to test. If it works, I think we’ll have our answer as to how the perp managed to get in.’

Patrick nodded with surprise and pleasure. ‘That’s excellent! I was about to come and ask if you were getting anywhere. Nice work, Bell.’

The man’s smile was genuine this time, displaying yellowy teeth crossed slightly at the front. He wasn’t a looker, poor guy, thought Patrick.

‘Well, as I said, it’s just a theory at the moment, but I’m reasonably confident . . .’

‘Keep me posted. That would be a big step forwards.’

Bell gave Patrick a mock salute, almost poking himself in the eye with his car key in the process, and Patrick swallowed a grin.

By the time he’d got into the incident room he decided he’d ring Gill later. Suzanne was standing by the water cooler with her back to him, and he couldn’t help but take a moment to let his gaze sweep up and down her body. Her long blonde hair was in a loose, glossy sheet almost to her waist, emphasising her trim hourglass figure in a pencil skirt and tight white shirt . . .

Suddenly aware of someone hovering behind him, Patrick snapped out of his reverie and turned to find Gareth Batey by his right shoulder. The man did have a habit of lurking anxiously. He needed to be far more assertive, thought Patrick. He was a good solid cop, bright and efficient, but this slightly weird diffidence didn’t do him any favours.

‘Gareth,’ he said. ‘I was about to come and find you. Did you hear we’ve got a potential lead on the key card?’

Batey nodded. ‘I was coming to tell you the same thing,’ he said in his soft Scottish accent. He was wearing a fuzzy sort of woollen tie in heathery colours and Patrick wondered if it was a statement or a reminder of his Highland origins. ‘I’ll go with Bell back to the Travel Inn, if that’s OK with you.’

‘Good idea. Report back to me later,’ Patrick replied, slightly distractedly, as Suzanne was walking back to her office, draining a paper cone of water on the way. She lobbed the empty cone with perfect accuracy into a waste paper bin five feet away. When she saw Patrick, he thought he saw her eyes light up. But perhaps he was deluded.

‘I’m just back from interviewing Hattie Parsons from OnTarget’s record company,’ he said, catching up and falling in step with her. ‘Very interesting. But potentially tricky – can I fill you in?’

She gestured him into her office. ‘Tricky why?’

He explained what Hattie had said about Shawn Barrett and the underage girl in Dublin, and that Mervyn Hammond had gone to great lengths to cover up her complaint. ‘Hattie says she can’t remember the girl’s name, but I reckon she could find it if Mervy-boy won’t tell us. He definitely knows it.’

‘Let’s get him in, then,’ Suzanne said. Patrick noticed she had slipped off her high shoes under the desk, and the sight of her stockinged toes had the usual effect on his groin.

‘Who – Barrett or Hammond?’

‘Hammond first, get the lie of the land.’

Patrick groaned. ‘He’s as slippery as a barrel of eels, but yes, I think you’re right. I’ll lean on him. Can you imagine the media shit storm we’ll have on our hands if we have to haul in the singer from the world’s biggest boy band?’

‘Never a dull minute,’ said Suzanne, smiling at him. ‘But better we expose this now, if it’s true, than have another Operation Yewtree in thirty years.’

Patrick agreed. Every day seemed to bring a new story about historic cases of rape or sexual assault by some former TV favourite or pop star.

‘But don’t go in on Hammond with all guns blazing – he’s the sort who’d set his lawyers on us if you even look at him funny.’

‘Credit me with some sensitivity!’ Patrick pretended to be offended. ‘I’m not a bull in a china shop . . . well, not usually . . .’

There was that smile again.

‘I know you’re not, Pat,’ she said, holding his eyes for just a second too long.

Chapter 21

Day 6 – Wendy

The queue for the signing stretched all the way from the Waterstones bookshop on Piccadilly to the Costa Coffee on the corner of Church Place. Wendy had a friend from back home who was an obscure crime novelist. Wendy had been to one of his book signings once – three people had turned up, including her.

Now here was a boy band who probably hadn’t read their own book, let alone written it, with hundreds of people desperate to get in to see them. Not that this had anything to do with the book itself, of course. It was a chance to actually meet OnTarget, to be a foot away from them, breathing the same air. Even Wendy felt a little excited at that prospect. The allure of celebrity. Wendy’s mum had been almost overcome when she’d bumped into Dave from Slade in the supermarket, forty years after they were properly famous. In this secular society, celebs were the new gods.

She walked along the line, mostly made up of teen girls, and wondered if she was walking past Jade, F-U-Cancer or any of her other contacts – she wouldn’t allow herself to call them friends – on the forum. Over the last couple of days she had spent every spare minute chatting, tweeting and posting on Tumblr, barely sleeping, her eyes scratchy from staring at screens. She had been friendly and bubbly, uncontroversial but witty and, she believed, had made quite an impression. Even the initially stand-offish Jade had responded to some of her posts and retweeted her a couple of times. This was partly because Wendy had written the most over-the-top gushing review of one of Jade’s shipping stories on StoryPad, laughing to herself as she bashed out superlatives to praise what was actually the most appallingly written erotic dream sequence in the history of literature.

After she’d been doing this for a day, DI Lennon had asked Wendy how she was getting on. She had responded with a torrent of enthusiasm and a plea that she should be allowed to continue. And the lovely man had said yes, which had made her want to give him a hug.