— it was more an indication of hope than intention. But there were others who were more of a nuisance, and Fry couldn’t tell just yet which Rennie was. It was helpful, though, to have the early warning, so that she could decide on her own terms when the time was right to put him down. Affairs with colleagues were not on her agenda. Not at all.
She could see Rennie was not making the effort to appear busy, even though there was a DCI somewhere in the building and liable to appear in the CID room at any moment.
‘Sarge?’ said Fry, when at last he put the phone down.
Rennie looked round, as if surprised that she was still there. Then he smiled, contorting his face until it was almost a wink.
33
His tie was something dark green, with a small gold crest, and his suit was a good cut for his heavy shoulders, but not recently cleaned. He pulled out a bar of his habitual chewing gum, which Fry had guessed might mean he was a reformed smoker.
‘What can I do for you, Diane?’
“This project group looking at the auto crime figures.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I wondered if a check had been done on the computer. Matching up locations and timings. An analysis of MOs. We could set up a computer model.’
‘Ben Cooper usually does that,’ said Rennie. ‘You’d better not mess with the computer until you’ve asked him about it.’
‘A computer model could come up with a set of predictions, suggest target locations. It’s worth a try, Sarge.’
‘I told you, speak to Ben. They’ve got him out at Moorhay, but he should be back in the office later, thank God.’
Fry had already heard Ben Cooper’s name several times during her first week in Edendale. Apparently he was some paragon of all the virtues who knew everything. DC Cooper knew the area like the back of his hand, they said. He knew all the local villains and even their families, they said. He knew how all the systems in the CID office worked, too. He knew exactly how to fill in the vast quantities of paperwork that baffled other detectives. Now, apparently, he was the only one who knew how to use the computers. But Diane Fry had an information technology qualification to her name, and she had done a course on intelligence data analysis at the National Crime Faculty in Bramshill. At the first opportunity, she would show them who knew how to use the computers around here.
For now, though, she decided to try another tack.
‘Someone from the NCIS did a paper on this problem a few months ago. It was mentioned when I was at Bramshill.’
‘Really?’
Rennie sounded uninterested.
‘The National Criminal Intelligence Service.’
o
‘I know what the NCIS is, thanks.’
‘I wondered if someone had researched it. I can’t see any
34
mention in the paperwork. Maybe the project group have followed it through?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘I’ll look it up, if you like, Sarge.’
Ronnie looked sour, pulled at his tie, scrabbled about on his desk for a bit of paper and picked up the phone to dial another number.
‘Shall I, Sarge?’
‘Oh, if you like.’
Fry made a note for herself in her notebook and asterisked it. Then she put the car crime reports aside and picked up that morning’s bulletin on the missing girl, Laura Vernon. She
o o o ‘
had already read it once and had memorized its admittedly sketchy details.
Her memory was excellent for jobs like this. She knew exactly what the girl had been wearing when last seen, down to the blue pants and the size-five slim-fit Reeboks. If she was the first officer to come across any of these items, she knew she would recognize them straightaway. But she would have to be allocated to the search first, of course.
All available hands had alreadv been called to the task of finding
J O
Laura Vernon. All hands, that was, except Detective Constable Diane Fry and Detective Sergeant David Rennie. Fry was new to the division, of course, but what had Rennie done wrong? He was currently in charge of day-to-day crime in E Division, and Fry constituted his staff. It wasn’t a combination that looked likely to crush any crime waves. At this moment, they weren’t even trying.
Fry got up from her desk and walked over to check the action file on the Laura Vernon enquiry. Although the enquiry was less than forty-eight hours old, the file was already getting thick. The apparatus of a major enquiry was beginning to swing into operation, even though it hadn’t yet been designated a murder enquiry — not until a body was found. Teenage girls ran away
from home all the time, of course, and generally turned up a
‘ ‘ o j r
