Alison said, 'Would you mind telling me what you think you're doing, Mrs Cooper? We have a duty to report this incident immediately.'
'It was you who told me that the Security Services put pressure on the police to shut down their investigation in Nazim and Rafi's disappearances before they wanted to.'
'I told you there was talk, that's all,' Alison said defensively.
'That's not how I remember it . . . Look, I know Pironi's your friend—'
'He did everything he could.'
'He could have resigned.'
'Why are you bringing him into this?'
'Why wouldn't I? He's part of it.'
'He's a decent man.'
'That's not what I'm hearing.'
'Oh, from McAvoy—'
Jenny stopped abruptly next to her car. 'You may trust a man who allowed himself to be silenced. I don't, and I'm the one running this inquiry. So which horse are you going to ride?'
Alison met her with a flinty glare as Sonia's arrival brought their exchange to an unresolved end.
'Your call,' Jenny said.
Jenny drove Sonia the three miles to Mrs Jamal's flat in her Golf, repeatedly checking her mirrors for Alison's Peugeot.
There was no sign of it. She felt an unexpected pang of sadness verging on betrayal. Relations with Alison had always been bumpy, but until this week she had never truly doubted her loyalty. In the space of a few days it appeared to have all but dissolved.
It took three long blasts on the doorbell to rouse the irritable Mr Aldis, the caretaker, who growled over the intercom that he didn't work on weekends so could they kindly get lost. Jenny responded with another extended ring which finally drew the hefty, bulldog-faced Mrs Aldis hobbling to the front door on a single crutch. She shoved a set of keys at Jenny telling her to help herself, then limped back indoors.
Sonia Cane produced a sensitive dosimeter the size of a small cellphone. It was fitted with a Geiger-Muller counter, she explained, and was able to differentiate between different categories of radiation. She held it discreetly in her hand so as not to alarm any passing residents and took a reading in the front hall. There was an electronic crackle - each blip an electron firing through the dosimeter's sensors like a microscopic shotgun pellet. It was a similar reading to that she'd found on Mrs Jamal's body - fifty milliSieverts. It petered out towards the stairs, but spiked alarmingly to eighty when they entered the lift.
'We're going to have to get this building cleared,' Sonia said anxiously.
'Five minutes,' Jenny said. 'Let's just sweep the flat.'
Sonia moved quickly, not wanting to take a fraction more radiation than she had to. The trail cooled to twenty-five milliSieverts along the stretch of landing between the lift and the front door of Mrs Jamal's apartment; once inside the front door the dosimeter erupted like dry twigs on a bonfire.
'Je-sus,' Sonia said, poking the meter around the living- room door. 'Ninety-three.'
Jenny pointed to where Mrs Jamal's clothes and the whisky bottle had been found. 'She was sitting just about there.'
Sonia hastened into the room, pointed the meter at the spot, then swiftly drew it in a circle around her. She stepped towards one of the two armchairs and swept the meter over it.
'A hundred and ten.' She headed for the door. 'That's enough. We're going.'
Sonia was reluctantly persuaded to sweep the remaining four landings of the building before reaching for her phone, but found only slightly higher than background levels. It confirmed that the trail led from the front door directly to Mrs Jamal's flat. The fact that the fabric of an armchair had the highest reading suggested that someone or something contaminated had come into direct contact with it. It was only a matter of a few particles - a faint dusting, Sonia called it - but it screamed to Jenny that in her final hours Mrs Jamal had had a visitor.
Sonia refused to take the lift and hurried ahead down the stairs, making a call to the Health Protection Agency. Within the hour the building would be evacuated and sealed off. A team of operatives in post-apocalyptic white overalls would search for and suck up every last radioactive crumb. The neighbourhood would never have witnessed a more incongruous sight.
Descending the penultimate flight of steps, Jenny heard voices in the lobby below. She turned the corner to see Alison standing on the doorstep of the caretaker's flat talking to Mrs Aldis. Sonia was already outside the building, phone pressed to her ear as, with much gesticulating, she explained the situation to an incredulous official at the Health Protection Agency.
Leaning on her crutch, Mrs Aldis nodded gruffly towards the lift. Jenny heard her say, 'Tall fella, slim.'
'Colour?'
'White. Fiftyish, I'd say. Baseball cap on. Shoved straight past me. No sorry or nothing.'
Alison said, 'Did you tell the police this?'
'I wasn't here, was I? I was on my way to hospital to have my knee seen to.'
'At what time?'
'Must've been about one-ish, maybe a few minutes after.' Mrs Aldis noticed Jenny. 'You remembered to lock up, love? There's no way my husband's going up there today. Lazy sod. It'd take a bomb to get him off that sofa when the football's on.'
Jenny said, 'You might be in luck.'
They sat for a while in Alison's car, a few moments of peace before the air would be split by the scream of sirens. Jenny resisted any temptation to discuss her officer's decision to step away from her friend and fellow churchgoer, DI Pironi. She was simply grateful that she had. She hated to admit it, but it was a childlike gratitude: there was something of the mother substitute in her relationship with Alison. What did that say about her? She heard McAvoy's voice: there's someone who's had the confidence knocked out of her.
'I'll take a statement later,' Alison said quietly. 'The man who came out of the lift sounded rather like the one Dani James saw in the student halls all those years ago.'
'White ... I don't know why, I was expecting her to say he was Asian.'
'We don't know he was connected with Mrs Jamal. He could have been anyone,' Alison said, but with no conviction.
After a moment of silence, Jenny said, 'Anna Rose Crosby worked at Maybury power station. Our missing Jane Doe had a thyroid tumour . . .'
'You can't start building castles in the air, Mrs Cooper. Best start with what we know.'
Then came the first one. A squad car screamed up behind them and screeched to a halt outside the block. Sonia Cane rushed to meet the two constables who scrambled out.
Alison said, 'She may never get another one like this. We'll leave her to enjoy the limelight, shall we?'
'Why not?' Jenny said. 'And talking of which, I think Monday might be a little soon to start taking evidence again, don't you?'
'Whatever you think's best, Mrs Cooper.'
The day had taken on a dreamlike quality, its moods shifting as swiftly as the restless sky. She used the last of her phone's battery dialling Ross's number, only to reach him for a few short seconds in which he announced he was staying at his father's for the rest of the weekend, and could she drop his things off on her way to work on Monday?
Deflated and dejected, Jenny drove home. The roads were eerily quiet as the sun sank towards the hilltops, briefly casting the Wye valley in a light of almost angelic clarity. For a brief moment the whole of life seemed to stop and be held in stark relief. She was a mere onlooker to the series of baffling tableaux which made up her present existence: a son disillusioned by her weakness; a disturbing and erratic man to whom she felt a visceral attraction; a case that, as much as she tried to ignore the fact, touched her darkest fears; and the latest bizarre composition in the city that lay a mere river's span behind her - a trail of radiation that led to the naked corpse of a woman whose final call for help she had ignored. She should have felt guilty, horrified that she'd taken McAvoy's call in preference
