Beneath the Bleeding (33 page)

‘You thought of me how? As somebody you could bully? Somebody you could intimidate?’

Johnny gave a harsh sigh. ‘No. I thought of you as somebody who had impressed me with her smarts. Somebody who had a rep in the Met…’

‘What do you mean, a rep in the Met?’ Carol demanded defensively.

Johnny looked disbelieving. ‘A rep as a bloody good cop,’ he said. ‘What do you think? People I respect think you’re the dog’s bollocks. So I thought you were the one who could persuade DC Evans to co-operate with this investigation.’

‘Where is he?’

Johnny considered for a long moment. ‘Come on, I’ll take you to him.’

She followed him back down the hall to another interview room. Sam Evans was sitting on a chair tipped back against the wall, hands clasped behind his head in an attitude of relaxation. When Carol walked in, he jerked forward and stood up. ‘Sorry you got dragged into this,’ he said.

Carol turned to Johnny. ‘Could you leave us, please?’

Johnny bowed his head and retreated. Sam watched him go, shaking his head with ill-disguised contempt. ‘What have they said I’ve done?’

They say they found you interviewing a young Asian male wearing overalls at Victoria Park. That the pair of you clammed up and refused to say anything. That you won’t hand over the product of your interview.’ Carol leaned against the wall, her arms folded across her chest.

Sam gave an incredulous little laugh. ‘That’s one spin you could put on it. Try it from another angle. For a start, he’s wearing overalls because he’s a cleaner at the stadium. Nothing suspicious about that, is there? For another thing, he’s clearly not a suspect. His name is Vijay Gupta. He’s a Hindu, not a Muslim. So it seems to me that the CTC guys are getting their knickers in a twist over somebody who is in no sense a potential suspect. I don’t have any product to hand over, ma’am. We’d barely started talking.’

Carol didn’t know whether to believe him. He was, she knew, the perfect dissembler. What mattered was getting him out of there. Then she could find out whether he was telling the truth. ‘Give me a minute,’ she said.

She went back outside, where Johnny was waiting. ‘There’s nothing to tell. The man he had just begun questioning isn’t even a Muslim. Now, if you’re sincere about building bridges, you shouldn’t stop me leaving here right now, with my officer. And I suggest you let Mr Gupta go home, since the only thing he’s done to warrant your suspicion is to talk to a police officer.’ She turned round, opened the door and said, ‘DC Evans? Time we were on our way.’

Head high, Carol led the way through familiar corridors to the back entrance of Scargill Street. Nobody tried to stop them. Once they were in the car and out of the car park, Sam said, ‘Working on the principle that we were being recorded, I wasn’t strictly accurate in there, ma’am.’

Carol flashed a quick glance at his rueful face and sighed. ‘That’s what I was afraid of, Sam. That funny smell? It’s bridges burning.’

Carol’s plans to follow up Sam’s disclosure were thwarted by the unexpected presence of John Brandon in her squad room, forbidding in his dress uniform, cap under his arm. Her heart sank. Had her latest run-in with CTC made it back ahead of her? He looked as serious as she’d ever seen him. She’d barely made it through the door when he spoke. ‘DCI Jordan, I was looking for you. I need a word.’ He gestured towards her office and she led the way in.

‘Carol, I have some difficult news,’ he said, settling into one of the visitors’ chairs and tossing his cap carelessly on to the other.

‘Sir?’

‘You remember Tom Cross? Ex-Detective…’

She nodded, caught off-balance by the direction of the conversation. ‘I saw him this afternoon at Victoria Park. A paramedic was helping him to an ambulance. He’d apparently been helping the injured, but he’d taken too much out of himself.’ Understanding dawned. ‘He didn’t make it,’ she said, surprised at the stab of sorrow she felt.

‘No, he didn’t make it. His heart gave out.’

‘That’s tragic,’ Carol said. ‘Who’d have thought that
helping other people would be the death of him? Did he have heart problems?’

Brandon shook his head. ‘No. And it would appear that it wasn’t helping with the rescue attempts that killed him.’ He looked troubled; Carol suddenly saw how he had aged in the past few years and it gave her a disturbing glimpse of her own mortality.

‘What do you mean, sir?’

‘One of the doctors on the civil emergency team down at Bradfield Cross is Elinor Blessing.’

Carol nodded. ‘She’s the one who spotted the ricin poisoning.’

‘Exactly. And she says herself that’s probably the only reason poison occurred to her in this case. But occur to her it did. Sadly, before they could get enough of the antidote into his system, his heart failed. They tried to keep him going till they could finish the treatment, but it didn’t work out.’

Shocked, Carol clutched at a straw. ‘You sure she’s not just seeing poison everywhere because of Robbie?’

‘I suppose it’s possible. But she says this wasn’t ricin. She thinks it was another plant derivative, though. Foxgloves or something. The bottom line is that she says she can’t write this up as natural causes or accident.’

‘So, murder, then?’ Carol said.

‘It looks that way. At least to Dr Blessing it does. I want your team on this. He was one of us, no matter what happened at the end of his career. You should look at possible links to Robbie Bishop too. Maybe ask Tony what he thinks, if he’s up to it.’ Brandon picked at a piece of lint on his black trousers. ‘I know it’s a bit of an irony, given what Tom thought
about Tony and his ilk. But we throw everything at this. Leave his widow till tomorrow, but somebody should talk to the doctor this evening. She should be in A&E till late.’ He stood up and retrieved his cap.

‘We’ll do our best,’ Carol said. ‘But there were another thirty-five murders in Bradfield today. We’re trying to give them our best attention too.’

Brandon turned back, his face stony. ‘Leave them to CTC. Concentrate on Tom Cross.’

‘With respect, sir…’

‘That’s an order, Chief Inspector. I’ll expect a preliminary report on Monday.’ He marched out of the room, erect as if on parade.

That is just so wrong,’ Carol muttered under her breath. ‘So bloody wrong.’ She leaned back in her chair and sat for five minutes staring at the ceiling. Then she jumped to her feet and stood in the doorway. ‘Everybody-in here, now,’ she called.

They jammed themselves in, Kevin and Chris claiming the chairs on the grounds of seniority. ‘Sorry about this,’ Carol said. ‘But I don’t want anybody barging in on us. Sam, keep an eye on the main door. OK. Here’s how it is. I know you are all as angry and upset as I am about the attack on Victoria Park this afternoon. It was a horrific experience for everyone concerned. But it’s our job to get beyond our emotional response and to do what’s necessary.’ She pushed her hands through her shaggy blonde hair and jiggled her head. ‘And I believe you’re all as determined to do that as I am.

‘Only problem is, we’ve been told not to investigate the thirty-five murders that happened in our
force area this afternoon. Or at least, not unless we’re invited to carry out certain tasks on behalf of the CTC. Now, I don’t know about you, but that’s just not good enough for me. It’s my intention to pursue such lines of inquiry as come our way. We have a unique perspective here-this is our patch and we know it. We’ll pass on outcomes to CTC, but in the first instance, what comes to us stays with us. It’s probably not going to do our careers any good, but I’m not in this for the sake of the glory. If there’s any one of you who isn’t happy about that, say so now. I won’t hold it against you, and there’s plenty of other work to be going on with.’ She looked around expectantly. Nobody moved.

‘OK. In that case, we’re in this together. Now…’ She saw Stacey raise one finger. ‘Stacey?’

‘We’ve already got Yousef Aziz’s laptop,’ she said. ‘Kevin and Paula brought it back from his house.’

Carol frowned. ‘Who’s Yousef Aziz?’

‘The bomber,’ Kevin said. He brought her up to speed on what he and Paula had uncovered. ‘We didn’t want to phone you when you were with CTC,’ he added apologetically.

‘Not a problem. Great work, guys. How are you doing with it, Stacey?’

‘He tried to cover his tracks, but it’s all over his hard disk. Recipes for TATP, how to build a bomb, how to make a detonator. Deleted emails inquiring about the availability of chemicals. I’m copying it all right now, before we hand it over to CTC. What’s interesting…’ she tailed off, unsure of her ground when she wasn’t talking about her speciality.

‘Yes?’ Carol said. ‘What’s interesting is…?’

‘Well, it’s a bit of a dog that didn’t bark,’ Stacey said. ‘Apart from the deleted emails about the chemicals, there are no emails at all on this laptop. Nothing to indicate any co-conspirators. It’s clean. Either there’s another computer somewhere, or they communicated face to face and via texts, or he did this by himself.’

‘There must be a computer at work. It’s a family firm, he’ll have had access,’ Chris said.

‘Too late,’ Stacey said. ‘CTC have already got that.’

‘How do you know that?’ Chris said.

‘News footage on Sky. They just showed the men in black raiding First Fabrics and walking out with armfuls of hardware,’ Stacey said. ‘That’s the advantage of having two screens.’

‘Thanks, Stacey. That’s given us something to think about Carol said. ‘And we do have something else which we think we have to ourselves at this point. Sam?’

Sam squared his shoulders, ready to strut a little. ‘I got a lovely break at Victoria Park. When Chris texted us to say the suspect was a young Asian man wearing overalls and a baseball cap, I was walking along the back of the stand when what do I see but an Asian male wearing overalls and a baseball cap. So I get alongside him double quick. Turns out he’s not even Muslim. His name’s Vijay Gupta and he’s a cleaner at the ground. I run the bomber’s description past him and when I get to the A1 Electricals van, I see him reacting. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but when I push him, he says he saw a van like that on Thursday evening. He and his brother were visiting
a cousin who lives in a bedsit in Colton and he noticed the van because it was parked round the back, out of the way, where him and his cousin usually park so they don’t piss off the residents, and he’d never seen it there before.’ Sam couldn’t keep the self-satisfied grin off his face.

‘You did get an address before they huckled you off to Scargill Street?’ Kevin said stiffly.

‘Oh yeah, I got an address.’ Sam reached for a piece of paper and a marker pen off Carol’s desk. He wrote something down, then displayed it for all to see. ‘You could say I got an address.’

‘No, Sam, you didn’t get an address. We got an anonymous phone tip,’ Carol said firmly. ‘Things are already difficult enough with CTC without us going out of our way to make things worse. We got a phone tip and we decided to check it out before we wasted CTC’s time with it. That’s the line. Now, before we all get stuck into that, there are a couple of other matters. Paula, I know it feels like a lifetime ago, but did you get any further with tracking down Jack Anderson?’

Paula looked at Stacey, who shook her head. ‘No, chief. No progress.’

‘And I got nowhere with Robbie’s parents. They’d never heard the name. So we’ve got no active leads to pursue on Robbie?’ They all exchanged glances, disappointment obvious. ‘I’d prefer it if that wasn’t the case, but it does mean we’re not being derelict by looking at other things. And there is one very big other thing that has just landed in our laps. Seven years ago, a detective superintendent left Bradfield Police under something of a cloud,’ Carol said, an
image of her old boss as he had been slipping unwanted into her mind.

‘Popeye Cross,’ Kevin said.

Carol inclined her head towards him. ‘That’s right. Well, Tom Cross redeemed himself this afternoon. He was one of the heroes who dragged the injured to safety after the bomb. He ended up being taken to hospital himself. He died there earlier this evening. But not because of anything he did in the wake of the bombing. According to the doctor who treated him, he was poisoned.’

‘Poisoned?’ Paula interrupted. ‘Like Robbie? With ricin?’

‘No, not with ricin. Though the doctor who treated Tom Cross is the same one who diagnosed the ricin in Robbie,’ Carol said.

‘Sounds like she’s either one smart cookie or else Munchausen’s by Proxy,’ Chris said. Carol thought she was only half-joking.

‘Well, that’s what we’re going to have to figure out. Paula, I want you to go down to Bradfield Cross A&E and talk to Dr Blessing.’

Paula’s face said it all. They were chasing the big game, she was consigned to the small fry. ‘But, chief…’

‘Paula, you’re the best interviewer we have. Besides, you know her already. I need you to do this because we need everything we can get from her. What poison it was. When it was likely to have been administered. Make arrangements for samples to go to toxicology, and get the results from any lab work they did at Bradfield Cross. Stacey, get what you can from Aziz’s hard drive, then be very polite and hand
it in to the CTC people in the HOLMES suite. The rest of you, with me. It’s time to do what we’re paid for.’

‘It’s a bit freaky, this Tom Cross murder,’ Kevin said as Chris eased the car through the heavy traffic towards Yousef Aziz’s address.

‘What? Because you knew the geezer?’

‘Well yeah, that. But the poison thing. If Danny Wade and Robbie Bishop are connected, that’s two guys who went to Harriestown High and ended up poisoned, right?’

‘Right. But I don’t think where they went to school is a big deal.’

‘No? Would it surprise you if I told you that Tom Cross is another former pupil of Harriestown High?’ Kevin was drumming his fingers on his knees. ‘Another one who started off with nothing and ended up loaded. He won the pools, you know.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Chris said. ‘You’re right, it is a bit freaky. But I think that’s all it is.’

Kevin shook his head. ‘No. Three’s the charm. It’s more than just a bizarre coincidence.’

Chris swore at a white van cutting in front of her. ‘How can it be? You think somebody’s killing people from your old school because they’ve made a bob or two? I tell you, even Tony Hill would balk at that one.’