Jason breathed deeply a few times, gathering his strength, then blurted the words out. “’Er dad’s a copper,” he informed us.
“A copper?” I echoed. “What sort of a copper?”
“A detective. He’s a detective. At ’Eckley nick.”
It wasn’t what I expected, or what I wanted to hear. Images of him having it away with his kid sister, or his probation officer, or some other unlikely person, were swirling around in my mind, but not this. “Are you sure?” I asked, my voice a whisper.
“Yeah. She said ’er dad was a detective, in the CID at ’Eckley. I didn’t ask ’er, she just told me.”
“But…you can’t remember her name?”
“No.”
“Good,” I mumbled. “Good. I think that will do for now.”
Chapter Eleven
I went into a sandwich shop, but when I saw them all lying there like shrink-wrapped museum exhibits waiting to be catalogued I decided I wasn’t hungry. I bought a bottle of flavoured water, that’s all, and sipped at it sitting on a bench in the town centre, because I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. It must have been a cold day because people were hurrying about with their collars upturned and I had the seats all to myself. I don’t feel the cold.
O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of murder because his legal team declared that the DNA evidence was flawed. The jury accepted their claim because the police were a bunch of racists, and it was a glitch in the procedures for processing the DNA evidence that gave them the excuse to do so.
Blood samples from accused and victims were taken to the same laboratory, and O.J.’s thousand-dollars-an- hour attorney convinced the court that DNA could have floated about in the atmosphere and transferred itself from one sample dish to another. It’s not as crazy as it seems. They’d used something called PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, to amplify a tiny stretch of DNA, too small to be useful, into a big sample. It’s a procedure that a California scientist called Kary Mullis thought of while driving his car through the desert at night. It’s a magical experience for anyone, but Mullis wove some real magic that night, enough to win himself a share in the Nobel prize.
He knew that if you took one single shred of a DNA molecule and gently heated it in a test tube, with an exotic brew of the right proteins and enzymes, the two strands would untwine, and as you cooled it down again each would create a copy of the partner it had just lost. In other words, you would now have two pieces of the DNA. How you knew that there was only one molecule in the tube to start with, and how you kept track of it, wasn’t explained in the book I read. The heating and cooling process only took a few minutes, so do it again and you’d now have four pieces of DNA. It’s a fiendishly complicated process — this was strictly the Ladybird version, intended for under-sevens and police officers.
Mullis stopped the car and did some sums. He calculated that in twenty heating and cooling cycles, which would only take until coffee break, you’d have over a million copies of your original sample. Still not enough to be visible on the head of a pin, but you were getting there. Keep going, and by the end of the week you’d be bringing in the enzymes by specially laid road and rail connections, and moving the DNA out by the barge-load. In a month you could fill the Grand Canyon and make a start on the Marianas Trench.
You don’t need that much in a criminal case. O.J.’s lawyers said that with all the DNA being made, who could say that a spare flake hadn’t floated into the wrong test tube or Petri dish or whatever they use, and nobody had enough clout to argue with a thousand-dollars-an-hour attorney. This DNA swirling about in the atmosphere could just as easily have belonged to Thomas Jefferson or Christopher Columbus, but nobody mentioned it. As the newspapers put it: money talked, O.J. walked.
Black spots were breaking out on the pavement in front of my feet, like some deadly infection, and a raindrop scored a direct hit on my neck. Jason Lee Gelder’s solicitor was on the basic rate for the job, we had enough semen to do all the tests we needed and different samples are always processed in different labs. There was no comfort for him there. I took a sip of water and looked at the pigeons that had joined me, expecting to catch a few crumbs. They were all exactly alike, each a replicant of some distant ancestor, their lives preprogrammed in the genetic code. I wish I’d been a scientist. I screwed the top back on the bottle and went to find the car.
A solitary detective, David Rose, was at work in the office when I arrived back. He was in his shirtsleeves, surrounded by paperwork as he peered at the VDU screen on his desk, pencil behind his ear. He turned as I closed the door and said: “Hi, Charlie.”
“No.” I replied.
“No what?”
“No, whatever it was.”
I went straight into my little office and gathered up all the papers put there to attract my attention. They could wait. I picked up the phone, dialled the HQ number and put the phone down again. Scenes of crime would have gone over Jason’s car with the proverbial, in the faint hope of finding evidence that Marie-Claire had been in it and was therefore known to him. They’d failed, I knew that, but they must have found some evidence, like fingerprints, of other people who’d ridden with him. Like the girl he took to the brickyard. The detective’s daughter.
I drummed my fingers on the phone, indecisive. I needed to know who he’d been with, not sure if I could face the truth. There are sixteen detectives at Heckley, and I knew all their families, had visited all their houses. I brought out a staff list and took the top off my pen, with the intention of writing their kids’ names in the margin. The pen hovered next to the first name but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t sully them by giving substance to Gelder’s accusations. There was only one name that fitted, and I felt ashamed at even considering what was going through my mind. I tore the list into shreds and dropped them in the bin. But, I argued, someone was with him, somebody’s daughter, and these were promiscuous times. Or at least, we were constantly being told they were. Myself, I wasn’t too sure. Times had changed, of course they had, but people, including kids, made their own moralities and sometimes they were surprisingly high. I stood up and strode over to the window. It only took two.
I’d beaten the rain back, but it was catching up. Rooftops were glistening across the road, but this side was still clear. Even as that fact registered the first flurry dashed against the window and the street lights flickered on. We were in for a downpour. Black clouds were banked like pit heaps behind St Mary’s Church, at the other side of town, blotting out the hills. A straggle of people was going in when I’d driven past, for afternoon mass or, perhaps, an organ recital. They’d get wet when they came out, but I don’t suppose they’d mind. Not the faithful ones.
A report on the news had said that church attendance on Sundays was down by seven percent over the last ten years. A couple of spokesmen, Bishop Inevitable and Archbishop Complacent, said that it wasn’t all bad news because attendance through the week was on the increase. I wasn’t sure if going in to listen to a Bach fugue or buy mince pies from the WI stall counted, but it was good for the statistics and the offering.
Trouble is, nobody has any faith anymore. I’d never had any. Doubt, not blind belief in something I couldn’t comprehend, was always my driving force. I wish it were otherwise, but it isn’t. I returned to my desk and picked the top document off the pile I’d made. Would I like to contribute to Mr Pritchard’s leaving present? I fished a ten- pound note from my wallet, placed it in an envelope with the letter and sealed it.
It wasn’t true, I told myself. I did have faith. It might not be in a god, but it was there. I believed in the people around me, colleagues and friends, like I’d believed in my parents. Had faith in them. “So prove it,” I told myself, picking up the telephone and dialling the custody sergeant at HQ. “Sorry, Sophie,” I whispered as I waited for him to answer. “Forgive me for doubting you.”
“This is DI Priest at Heckley,” I told him. “I came in this morning and interviewed Jason Gelder, and I’d like to talk to him again, as soon as possible. Will it be alright if I come over?”
“You’ll be lucky, Mr Priest,” he replied. “We’ve just sent him to Bentley. You’ll find him in the remand wing.”
“Damn,” I said. “OK, thanks.” It would have to be tomorrow.
Gwen Rhodes wasn’t there, so I had to use the proper channels, just like everybody else. The visits office
