The Burning (3 page)

The night air was harsh and I shivered as I hurried down the road, my hair cold against my neck. I was glad of the coat Ian had bought me, full-length and caramel-coloured in fine wool that was really too nice for hacking about crime scenes, but he had insisted on it. Generosity was not one of his shortcomings – he was open-handed to a fault. Even allowing for the extra overtime cash, there was no way I could compete. We weren’t equals, couldn’t pretend to be. It was no way to live.

When I got to my car, parked where I could find a space the night before, which was not particularly close to the flat, I stopped for a second to fill my lungs with sharp-edged air and centre myself, letting the silence fill my mind. That was the idea, anyway. Somewhere an engine revved as a neighbour drove away; traffic noise was building already, even at that early hour. And I needed to be elsewhere. Enough of the Zen contemplation. I got into the car and got going.

My heels were loud on the tiled floor and Rob saw me coming a long way off. He was sitting on an upright chair with his legs stretched out in front of him, taking up most of the corridor outside the intensive care unit.

‘Morning.’

‘Is it?’ he said interestedly, handing me a cardboard cup with a plastic lid. ‘I thought it was still Thursday night.’

‘Nope. It’s Friday. The twenty-seventh of November. All day, if that helps.’

He grinned up at me, dark stubble bristling on his face, halfway to a decent beard already. Welsh forebears had given him black hair, blue eyes, pale skin and charm to burn, but he needed to shave twice a day to keep his five o’clock shadow in check. Rob never quite made it to groomed, but he was looking particularly rumpled, and I recognised his shirt as being the one he’d worn the day before.

‘You didn’t make it home.’

‘Nope.’

‘You’ve been sitting there for hours.’

‘Yep.’

‘How?’

‘That,’ he said, wagging a finger at me, ‘would be telling.’

I sat down on the chair beside him and took the lid off the cup, smelling the hot-metal steam of machine-brewed coffee. ‘How many of these have you had?’

Instead of answering, he held his hand out so I could see the tremors that made it quiver.

‘God. No more caffeine for you.’

‘Aw, Mum …’

I sipped coffee, smiling against the edge of the cup, as Rob leaned his head back against the wall and yawned.

‘You made good time. I expected it to take the full hour to get you from bed to here.’

It should have taken me longer, but I had driven comfortably over the speed limit most of the way, and had thrown the car into a space in the hospital car park, leaving it without bothering to straighten up.

‘You know me. Full of get up and go.’

‘Yeah, right. How’s Ian?’

I hesitated slightly before I answered; I really didn’t want to share the details of my domestic squabbles with my colleagues, but there was no point in pretending. Rob had met Ian a couple of times and formed his own opinion of him.

‘He was just delighted about being woken up.’

‘Sorry about that. I’m sure he understood it was important.’

I let one eyebrow rise up slowly, expressively, as I took another sip of coffee.

Rob snorted. ‘Like that, is it?’

‘What we should actually be discussing,’ I said quickly, ‘is what’s going on with the case. Where’s the boss?’

He jerked his head towards the double doors behind him. ‘In there, somewhere. He’s doctor-bothering.’

‘They still won’t let us speak to the victim?’

‘Not much of a victim. I feel more sorry for poor old Vic. He’s in recovery. Three hours of surgery, and apparently it was touch and go.’

‘My heart bleeds for him.’

‘Yeah, well, he could use the extra blood if you’re offering. He nearly died on the way to hospital. She really did a number on him.’

‘Which is why she’s alive to tell us about it,’ I pointed out.

Rob grinned at me. ‘Getting into the right frame of mind, Maeve? Starting to identify with her? Best mates by ten o’clock, is that the plan?’

‘So what?’ My coffee had cooled down enough so that I could gulp it. The caffeine was beginning to kick in. I wanted to be ready when they let us talk to the girl. I wanted to be on my toes. I wanted to get the answers we needed and bring them to my boss, Charles Godley, like a cat bringing in a dead bird as a loving present for its owner. I didn’t mind the long hours, the total commitment that he demanded from his team. I knew how lucky I was to be in the inner circle. Sixty officers on Operation Mandrake, and most of them would never get to speak to Godley face-to-face. He had his system: orders cascaded down from the top, delivered by the police he trusted to their fellow officers who were allocated tasks and the manpower to achieve them and turned loose, not to return until they’d done it. He was running the investigation that had become the media story of the year, if not the decade, and he spent far too much of his time dealing with reporters to be able to manage every aspect of the case himself. He’d picked me out of the borough and added me to his squad, and I still didn’t know why, but I was determined not to let him down.

‘So nothing.’ Rob had lost interest in teasing me. He took out his phone and started scrolling through messages, yawning as he did so. I left him to it, happy to sit in silence for a minute or two. Waiting for a break in the case had been agonising, heart-scalding. Now that it was here, I could afford to be patient.

But I couldn’t help fidgeting, all the same.

I didn’t have to wait too long, because after a couple of minutes, one of the big double doors that led to the ICU opened. Rob and I both turned to see a nurse leaning out. She was young, with honey-coloured highlights through her hair and fake-tanned skin. I had to admire her commitment to glamour at that hour of the morning. She ignored me after one quick, assessing look that took in my damp hair and make-up-free face, then smiled warmly at Rob.
Here’s one you charmed earlier
…

‘Your boss wants you.’

We both stood at the same time. Rob was a shade above average height and I was tall in my heels; we were eye-to-eye. Rob frowned.

‘He wants to talk to me, not you.’

‘He doesn’t know I’m here,’ I said sweetly. ‘He’d want to speak to me if he did.’

‘I’ll tell him you’re waiting.’

‘I’ll tell him myself.’

There it was. No matter how much I liked Rob, no matter how well we got on, when it came to competing for the attention of our boss, we were as mature and reasonable as children fighting over a favourite toy.

‘Suit yourself.’ He slung his jacket over his shoulder and walked past me, pushing through the swing doors with a bang. He didn’t wait to see if I was following him or hold the door open for me; not that I expected special treatment – it wasn’t as if I made a fuss about needing to be treated like a lady – but I didn’t expect outright rudeness. I abandoned my coffee cup on the chair and hurried through the door after him, practically clipping his heels. It wasn’t my imagination that he sped up, determined to get there first. If I’d known where ‘there’ was, I might have been tempted to compete, but as I didn’t, I contented myself with being one step behind as he threaded his way through the ICU.

I somehow wasn’t surprised to find that Chief Superintendent Godley had taken over one of the waiting rooms and made it his own. There were files open on the table, and a laptop that hummed quietly. Hunched over the screen was a thin, dark man with glasses and a pinched expression: DI Thomas Judd. That was no surprise: where Charlie Godley went, Tom Judd followed, and if I didn’t like him much, I had to respect the way he’d organised the admin for the investigation so far. Godley was leaning back in a low chair, his arms behind his head, shirtsleeves rolled up, looking tired but focused. He had gone grey early – his hair was almost white – but it didn’t make him look old: quite the opposite. The combination of silver hair and blue eyes was a bit of a winner, especially when Godley was also tall and broad-shouldered and altogether too photogenic for the media to be able to resist him. He was pale, though, and his eyes looked red and tired. I had to resist the urge to cluck sympathetically. Worship of the boss was not encouraged. He had no interest in commanding a cult following.

Rob tapped on the doorframe. ‘You wanted me, sir?’

Godley looked up, his eyes unfocused. ‘Yes. Good. And Maeve, you’re here too. Excellent.’

‘Rob phoned me,’ I said from over his shoulder. I knew it would make him happy to get the credit. It might even take the sting out of the fact that Godley had smiled at me. But Rob didn’t really need any help from me. He was carving out a reputation for himself quite competently.

Godley had snapped back to alertness by now. ‘Did you fill her in?’

Rob nodded.

‘So you know we’ve got a suspect. And a witness.’

There wasn’t a chance in hell that I’d get within sniffing distance of the suspect. I had schooled myself not to want what I couldn’t have. It would be the bigwigs who spoke to him, when he could talk to them. But the witness was mine. Smoothly, I said, ‘I’d like to interview her. The girl, I mean. Probably easier for me to gain her trust.’

‘We’ve been waiting for her to be willing to provide a statement, and to sober up. I’m sure you’ll have a great rapport with her.’ Judd was still bent over his screen, tapping furiously, but he was never likely to miss an opportunity to put someone down. Particularly me. And just like that, the slight nerviness I always felt in the presence of the boss changed to outright anger directed at the inspector. I hadn’t inherited my father’s red hair, but there was no question that I’d got the temper that was popularly supposed to go with it.

‘What’s that supposed to mean, sir?’

‘Exactly what I said.’ His tone was bland but there was a glint behind the glasses; he knew as well as I did – as well as everyone in the room did – that he had pretty much just called me a drunk. The same old rubbish all over again: of course I was a drinker, I was Irish. ‘Mine’s a pint of Guinness – no, make that two pints with a whiskey chaser.’ Never mind the fact that my parents were both teetotal, that I hadn’t tasted alcohol until I was twenty and that when I drank, I preferred red wine.

‘You’ll do fine,’ Godley said, ignoring the tension that was crackling through the stifling little room. ‘You can take Rob with you when you speak to her. I want to know what happened up to the point where she stabbed him. I want to know how he picked her up and how he got her into the car. What he did that made her panic. I’m working on the assumption that he did or said something that made her sure she was sitting in the car with our murderer, but I don’t know what it was, and I don’t want to talk to him without having her side of the story.’

‘Right.’ It wasn’t rocket science. It should be straightforward.

Should be.

‘This is an important witness,’ Godley said. ‘I don’t want anyone putting her back up. Treat her with respect.’

I was fairly sure this last comment wasn’t directed at me. I didn’t need to be told that and I hoped Godley knew it. Judd was a different story.

‘When can we see her?’

‘Straightaway. She’s keen to leave. She’s agreed to give us a statement, but my guess is she’s halfway out the door. Don’t hang about.’

I turned to go, but stopped when Rob spoke. ‘Any news on the car, sir? Did they find anything?’

Judd answered, his lips thin. ‘Not so far.’

‘What?’ I was genuinely confused.

‘The car is clean. No evidence of any of the things we might have expected. No knife or weapon of any kind. No accelerant.’

‘Could he have dumped it? Done a Sutcliffe and hid the evidence when he knew he was going to be arrested? He was there for a while before they found him.’ It wasn’t the first time the Yorkshire Ripper had been invoked in connection with our killer, but I was surprised at Rob for mentioning him. If there was one thing that annoyed Godley more than anything else, it was the comparisons between his investigation and the unwieldy, disorganised and ultimately futile hunt for Peter Sutcliffe, who was caught more or less by chance. And here was another parallel. It wasn’t police work that had brought us Vic Blackstaff, and the media would be all over it. Godley’s nostrils flared, but he didn’t speak, letting Judd do the talking.

‘We’ve been searching the alley and surrounding areas. But the doctors don’t think he would have been able to move easily. He was unconscious when the paramedics arrived.’

‘So …’ I said slowly.

‘So you need to find out what really happened,’ Judd finished for me. ‘Because at the moment, we don’t have the first idea.’

It was the pretty nurse who showed us to Kelly Staples’ room, or rather showed Rob, who was flirting pretty much non-stop. I followed along behind, mind whirling. This was a big moment for me. Ask the right questions. Get the right answers. Don’t irritate her. Gain her trust. Don’t assume you know what she’s going to tell you. Listen. And listen to the things she
doesn’t
say too.

Easy.

I pulled Rob to one side when the nurse had brought us to the door of the hospital room and wiggled off. ‘You’re taking notes, OK? No hijacking. I want to do the talking.’

‘She’s all yours, love. Like Judd said, I’m sure you’ll have a lot in common.’

‘That’s not what he said.’ I couldn’t help sounding defensive.
Not you too, Rob
…

‘What’s he got against you?’

‘He’s a racist, misogynist pig – didn’t you realise? He’s always making snide remarks about me.’

‘Seems like a good bloke to me.’

I thumped him, then took a second to shake my head, as if that would clear my mind, rearrange the thoughts that were swirling in my mind into some sort of coherent pattern. ‘Got your notebook?’

‘Always,’ he said, holding it up. ‘And a pen. And a spare pen, in case that one runs out.’

‘That’s my little boy scout.’ Time to go. I rearranged my face into what I hoped was a calm and non-threatening expression, then pushed open the door.

The first thing I noticed about Kelly Staples was that she had been crying, the second that she was very young. She was sitting by the bed, wearing a patterned hospital gown. Her feet were bare, plump and pale, with scarlet marks where her boots had rubbed her toes and heels. She looked washed-out, her fair hair lank around her face. Her eyes were red and piggy with tiredness. She was overweight and uneasy in her flimsy hospital gown, pulling the hem down over her knees to try to make it longer. Her mouth looked raw, as if she had been chewing her lips.