and left rotting like rubbish. Anna reflected on this sad end to a sad life. It had taken weeks before anyone claimed her body for burial. The only reason she had been identified in the first place was because her fingerprints had been on file. Anna wrote a memo, reminding herself to check if all the other victims had police records too. It was the last thing she did before she collapsed exhausted into bed.
However, none of this weariness was evident in her face or demeanour the next morning when, just before nine o’clock, she arrived at work in her brand new Mini Cooper. A uniformed officer directed her to a car park round the back of the station, which was completely full with patrol cars. Obviously there had been no space allocated for her, so it took a few tours around the car park before she wedged her car in beside a battered old Volvo. As she locked her car, she prayed that whoever drove the Volvo wouldn’t scratch her baby on their way out.
The incident room was quiet that morning and, with some relief, she noted that the used food cartons had been removed from the desks.
‘Good morning, Jean,’ she said, brightly. ‘Nobody here yet?’
Jean, the only other occupant, returned her greeting with a lukewarm smile.
‘You must be joking. They’ve been in the briefing room for an hour. There’s a big strategy meeting.’
‘Nobody mentioned it last night,’ Anna protested, taking off her coat. She quickly returned the files to the filing cabinet before heading to the door.
‘Did you get permission to take those away? They are supposed to stay here, you know.’
‘I am aware of that, Jean,’ Anna replied, trying to curb her irritation, ‘but I asked DCI Langton if I could take them, to catch up. I signed them out in the logbook and desk diary. Who’s down there at the meeting?’
‘The commander. If DCI Langton can prove our murders are linked to the Melissa Stephens case and we have in-depth knowledge of all the linked offences, we’ll have all the help we need.’
Anna waited for her to explain.
Jean did so carefully, as if dealing with a half-wit: ‘The Department of Public Affairs will liaise with the D-SIO and the SIO and will provide press statements and organize briefings. It’s all political now. Drives me nuts. There’s more and more paperwork required on every investigation.’
‘Has any conclusive evidence come up since last night that links Melissa Stephens to this enquiry?’
‘I don’t know, but the gov was in before the cleaners this morning, so I’d say he’s found something.’
Jean looked smug as she resumed typing on her computer. Anna walked out of the room.
There wasn’t a soul in the corridor or on the stairs; in fact, it seemed almost ominously quiet as Anna made her way to the briefing room on the lower floor. Since this was the headquarters of the day-to-day operations of the station, on a typical morning phones could be expected to be ringing constantly, with the sound of voices wafting up the stone steps to the next level.
Not today, however. The double doors to the briefing room were closed and, unlike the interview rooms, there were no glass panels in them. Anna leaned against the doors, hoping she could hear something, anything. Apart from a low murmur of voices, she heard nothing. She couldn’t bear to barge into the room, so she turned round, planning to head back to the incident room, and almost collided with DC Barolli as he came out of the gents, wiping his hands on a paper towel.
‘How’s it going?’ she said, in a low voice.
‘I couldn’t tell you. The commander’s not one to give anything away.’ He lobbed the paper at a bin, missing it.
‘Did we get anything from forensic?’
‘You must be joking. They take their time.’
‘So, no other details came in?’
‘Not that I know. Those pricks over at Clapham wouldn’t give you a pot to piss in.’
He continued down the corridor, so Anna returned to the incident room, where she read the third case history. This victim’s name was Kathleen Keegan. She was aged fifty, of below average intelligence and illiterate. She had been beaten down by depression and ill health. There had been numerous arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct and, as with the others, arrests for prostitution and street-walking. She had once been a redhead, but the hair in the photographs was badly dyed blonde and in texture resembled frizzy door-matting. The mortuary pictures of her sagging, overweight body and her flattened breasts were depressing. Six babies had gone to care homes, or been fostered, due to her inability to care for them.
When her decomposing corpse was found, it was lying in a public park, hidden under stinging nettles. Her body was tied in exactly the same way as the other victims’, but these pictures were particularly gruesome. The victim’s false teeth were protruding from her mouth, almost as if she was laughing: a hideous horror clown with red lipstick smudged over her face.
It was a repellent, tragic pattern, thought Anna, and even though Kathleen had already been brutalized by life, her death was still a wretched and undeserved end.
It was after twelve when the meeting broke up and Langton and his team returned. Anna noticed he was smiling. While everyone in the incident room grouped around him to hear what had happened, she remained at her desk.
‘Right. We have the case of Melissa Stephens. The commander will instigate bringing in fifteen detectives. We’re still short of legs, but we can’t argue with that. We will also get another office manager, two more admin staff and Holmes Two. The Home Office will back us up and place us now on a major-enquiry system. This will give us greater input to the enquiry.’
Langton hushed the ensuing applause. ‘I want someone over to Clapham to get all the details they have on the Melissa case. While we wait for anything to come in from the lab, we start work.’
He pinned up Melissa Stephens’s photograph. Then he picked up a black marker-pen and ringed the number ‘7’ twice.
‘We know she left her boyfriend at half past eleven and headed towards Oxford Circus tube station.’
Langton instructed his team to cover every route from Covent Garden to Oxford Circus. They were to hound the strip-club joints; often they were kitted out with hidden cameras for their own security.
‘Check out any CCTV footage used in clubs, pubs, car parks, in all the various routes. Get what you can. After four weeks, I suspect most of it will have been destroyed. I want to know the exact route Melissa Stephens walked that night. A witness has come forward, a waiter. He was sure he saw Melissa talking to someone in a car, the make he can’t remember, or the colour ? in fact he can’t even be sure it was her — but I want that tape of the reconstruction, I want that driver, I want that car. Because — ‘ Langton gestured to his wall of death — ‘we have a serial killer. I am hoping to Christ that Melissa’s death was his first and last big mistake. Let’s get moving.’
While the officers grouped to divide up the orders, Anna remained sitting at her desk, feeling like a spare part. No one had acknowledged her, or spoken to her yet. As the room thinned out, she stood up and approached Langton.
‘Am I still attached to the case, sir?’
For a moment Langton looked as if he couldn’t recall who she was, then he tapped his desk with his finger. ‘Go out with DS Lewis, he’s picking up the TV reconstruction.’
‘I think he’s already gone,’ she said, looking around nervously.
‘Then stay with me. I’ve asked for Melissa’s boyfriend to be brought in. You can come to the interview. You had lunch?’
‘No.’
‘Go and get some in the canteen. Be back at quarter past one.’
‘Thank you.’ She headed back to her desk, then turned. ‘I didn’t think forensic had brought in a report yet. Did we get evidence in last night that tied Melissa to our case?’
Langton gave her a strange, cold stare. ‘No.’
Anna couldn’t hold his piercing gaze; she went to her desk, where she didn’t look up, afraid she might find he was still glaring. She walked over to the filing cabinets to replace the Kathleen Keegan file. She was certain he was watching her, which turned her cheeks vermilion red. It made her angry, to feel so inadequate. She couldn’t wait to get out of the incident room.
The canteen on the top floor was small in comparison to the Met stations she’d worked in before. Almost every table in the room had been taken.
Balancing a tray in one hand and her briefcase in the other, she headed towards the far side of the canteen, where some uniformed officers were leaving a table. She pushed the dirty plates aside and opened her yogurt,
